The notes I’ve taken on my Chinatown Wars experience are already long enough to count as a whole review, and they’re written in short form. I’m about eight hours into the game now, and my saved game only shows around 21% completion. That’s because GTA Chinatown Wars packs so many jacked cars, digital drug deals, flying kicks, and horrible lines about your mother into a $9.99 package that it’s almost ludicrous to try and write about it without taking up your whole day. That said, let me take a crack at it, anyway.
Srs Bsnz
First off, this GTA title, like all of the other hot-coffee, news-making, generation-ruining games of the same name, is rated mature because of how immature it is. We’re talking coke deals, jokes about people who are shorter than average height, and a lot of very fiendish killing. There will be lots of roadkill in your GTA travels, but also a lot of gunkill, flying kick kill, and a few rare instances where people die and you had nothing to do with it (very rare). The game is broken down into bite-sized chunks, with briefings and missions averaging about 5-10 minutes apiece. The game auto-saves after you complete a mission, so you can always quit right after you finish one.
Old school GTA perspective
As I’m sure you’ve noticed in the screenshots, Chinatown Wars is not a 3D game like its modern console counterparts. It features a top-down isometric view of Liberty City that changes a little bit when you move (so you can see where you’re going). This takes quite a bit of getting used to (especially when driving), but it works — you just have to train yourself to check the radar on-the-fly to make sure that low railing isn’t actually a six-foot tall car-stopping wall.
Great touchscreen usage
This game was originally a DS title, and that’s actually a good thing: it means that Rockstar really thought about how to bring some intuitive touchscreen usage to the game, and not just tack on some sort of “tap to skip dialogue” option and say “hey, it’s touch-based gameplay now!”. Actually, you can skip the dialogue with a touch-and-hold, but you’ll also use various swipes and taps to break the glass on car windows, hot-wire vehicles, rev up speedboat engines, and cut open hidden compartments to look for drugs and guns, and your family sword.
Fall on your sword
The protagonist of the game is Huang Lee, a spoiled brat who is sent to America to deliver his family’s sword, Yu Jian, to his uncle in Chinatown. This all goes wrong within 30 seconds of first loading the game up, but much of the plot revolves around the successful retrieval of Yu Jian.
None of the cutscenes or dialogue are voice-acted like on the next-gen console versions of GTA, but there are subtitles and character-specific music. The characters are fleshed out well enough, but once I’d spent enough time in-game I wanted some sort of dialogue option (there are none) to let me kick whoever I was talking to right in the mouth. Unlike in GTA IV, most of the guys you’ll work for in Chinatown Wars are complete jerks who treat you like crap and send you on all sorts of missions, ranging from silly little errands to red-carpet-creating killing sprees.
Missions
The mission variety in Chinatown Wars is pretty decent: most involve heading to a location and killing or chasing someone down, but there are also races, escort missions, and trips to the gas station to create molotov cocktails. Completing missions nets you cash and advances the story, and if you should fail, you’re almost always provided with a quick button to retry the whole thing (unless you die). In classic GTA fashion, the missions also have hilarious titles — Jackin’ Chan was probably my favourite.
Missions are probably the best way to get to know the city (there is in-game GPS, but it’s almost an ironic rendition of the service, because you’re often better off without it), but they can also get on your nerves after a while. A few of the missions start at point A, order you to point B, and then require you to return to point A. The next mission will then require you to drive all the way back to point B to complete the next objective, and you have to wonder why Haung never bothers phoning home to find out what to do next, given that he uses his smartphone for most everything else.
Smartphone
Just like in GTA IV, your cellphone is really your portal to all sorts of in-game features. It’s how you map your GPS, browse for weapons at Ammu-Nation (for free home delivery), and receive e-mails about great drug deals and new missions. Your cellphone is also where the game’s menu resides, so you never feel like you’ve left the game, even when you’re just trying to switch control schemes or set a new default radio station.
Liberty City
The game takes place in Liberty City, which is really just a Rockstar way of saying New York City. The place is bustling with life and activity: trains rattle on the overpasses above street level, cars speed by and run red lights (and sometimes over random civilians), and even the weather and time of day can change. Civilians will open umbrellas when it rains, and your vehicle headlights will come on at night. The game is certainly cartoonier looking than modern GTA titles, but it still looks great on the iPhone.
Chinatown Wars rewards you handily for exploring the city. Random civilians will have side quests for you, trash bins can reveal weapons upon closer inspection, lotto stores provide the chance to win cash and new hideouts, and hidden drug dealers can offer some incredible prices on Ecstacy or Coke (drug dealing is very similar to the popular title “Dope Wars”). All of this variety goes a long way towards making Liberty City a living, breathing, entity — granted, it’s an entity that probably smells bad and has a very long police record, but at least it has character.
Police Presence
It isn’t a GTA game if you don’t have the police breathing down your neck, but the behaviour of the LCPD in Chinatown Wars might surprise GTA veterans. To match the more frantic gameplay of this mobile title, your wanted level — which scales from one to five stars, depending on how badly you’re behaving — is actually lowered by aggressively discouraging police pursuit. This means that slamming a police car viciously into a wall will actually help you lower your wanted level, although injuring or killing cops will still raise it.
The police seem to be dumbed down in this game, but that’s really a good thing overall. It’s a much cheaper mistake to get mad and throw your Xbox controller at the ground after a police chase gone bad than it is to throw your iPhone into the wall…
Freedom On Foot
Traversing the city on foot is actually surprisingly easy, given that you can actually catch up to most vehicles in the game with just your sneakers. Movement is controlled with an analog stick, and there are a couple of buttons on the bottom-right of the screen to fire a weapon, initiate a melee attack, and launch into a flying kick.
Hand-to-hand combat is surprisingly effective, and very useful for stunning enemies before you gun them down mercilessly with one of the many weapons in your arsenal (flamethrowers, SMG’s, miniguns, molotovs — you name it). The game isn’t a dual stick shooter, though, so you’ll have to rely heavily on the auto-lock system and hope it picks the right targets for you, which can be difficult in big firefights.
Grand Theft Auto
Driving in this GTA title takes quite a bit of getting used to. Some parked cars will require some special mini-games to break into, but most cars on the road just demand that you relieve them of their drivers before you go zoom-zooming off into the sunset.
There are two sets of controls: one is an analog steering wheel that just never felt right for me, and the other is what I like to call nudge-based driving. The latter is actually a set of two arrows to steer left and right, and an auto-correction system that straightens your car out when you’re on the road. It can take a while to get used to, but after an hour or so you’ll be accelerating with your right thumb and simply tapping (nudging) your car out of the way of incoming or pathetically slow traffic, and then leaving the controls alone while your car auto-aligns itself with the road.
There’s plenty to do while driving a car, and when you’re not involved in street racing, running from the cops, or doing insane stunt jumps, you can participate in vigilante, cab, or various EMS missions to earn a little bit of extra cash.
Conclusion
GTA Chinatown Wars isn’t just an amazing action game with a sprawling story, it also happens to be an incredible iPhone app as well. The game can load your music as a playlist (which must be labeled “GTA”) over the in-game radio, and the touch controls never feel too crowded or convoluted. What’s more, the action actually starts up in about six seconds on my iPhone 3GS. That’s six seconds from tapping on the Springboard icon to loading up in one of my many hideouts throughout Liberty City, which is really an amazing feat.
Chinatown Wars makes it its business to set you loose in an urban sandbox just to see how much sand you’ll kick in all other other kid’s eyes, and business is good! This Grand Theft Auto title is also a real steal at $9.99 (hah, steal) — especially when you compare it to the price that DS and PSP owners had to pay for the original version — and I highly recommend picking it up.
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GTA Chinatown Wars is available for $9.99 in the App Store.
The game was bought by JAiB for review on the site. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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