Review: GTA: Chinatown Wars

written on Thursday, April 30, 2009

GTA: Chinatown Wars is a well made game. The driving works. The fighting works. The camera controls basically work. :P The drug trading is addictive (durr hurr). The story is terrible but occasionally funny. The touch screen activities (dumpster diving, lotto ticket scratching, planting / disarming bombs, etc.) add to the experience. The missions are generally kept short. They have checkpoints. And the feature to automatically warp back to the start of a failed mission is very handy. Being able to shake the cops by forcing them into walls and trees gives me something more interesting to do than just run away.

I pile all those things up together, and they look great. But the game's getting a three. I know it's getting a three. Why doesn't the experience coalesce for me? (I don't know why I'm using (misusing?) big words and fancy grammar lately. Let me know if it's annoying.)

For one thing, most of the game is driving from place to place. Driving is route planning and execution.

Route planning is tedious. The GPS always plans a terrible route, so I always have to do it myself which means scrolling around the mini map, looking for the closest main roads, and memorizing the route.

The execution is also not fun. I get the car onto the center line and hold on the gas, occasionally side swiping other cars, but mostly just taking a straight line down a main street, turning onto another main street, and riding down the new center line for a while. I could have taken more taxis to skip the driving. You can even whistle into the DS microphone to hail one. But then I wouldn't find new drug dealers, happen across drug vans to hijack, or know the city well enough to evade the cops later on.

GTA: Chinatown Wars has a lot of well implemented bells and whistles. It's probably an important game that will show a lot of other developers how to better use the DS. But the core activities, driving and fighting, are still clunky enough that my overall experience was less than the sum of the parts.

3 of 5