Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

After many months of waiting, owners of Nintendo's dual-screen handhelds can finally play the latest installment of the Grand Theft Auto series . The event is quite big, because Chinatown Wars does n't suit the console itself, as well as its users. After all, we associate the device mainly with light, simple productions for casual players, and not with vulgar, violent action games in which blood spills profusely and curses appear as commas. Apparently, Rockstar Games did not mind, and therefore, after a long period of efforts, culminating in the blessing of Nintendo, we can finally enjoy the pocket version of the big hit, intended for adult players.

The action of each game in the Grand Theft Auto series revolves around its main character, who, as a result of a turn of fate, takes the winding and dangerous path of criminal career. It's no different in Chinatown Wars . The player takes on the role of a young man who appears in Liberty City after the death of his father - the head of the New York triad. The old man was killed in an attack, and his son, in line with family tradition, must hand over the symbol of power - an extremely valuable sword - to the new head of the underground organization. Huang's problems begin at the airport, where he is attacked by mysterious attackers. The man hit by the bullet lands in the back seat of the car and the blade goes to the torturers. A moment later, a speeding car with our hero on board lands in the river. Injured Huang quickly gets out of the trap and swims to the shore, starting a whole new chapter in his life. His (and, of course, the player's) main goal is to avenge his deceased father and regain a valuable relic.

After just a few minutes of fun, Chinatown Wars will convince all doubters that the Nintendo portable console has been able to easily create a bustling metropolis in which the player can easily get lost. Even though only four of the five Liberty City districts from Grand Theft Auto IV are left in the new game (Dukes, Broker, Bohan and Algonquin), the city is simply huge. You can practically forget about remembering the street layout at the beginning of the game - the area is covered with such a dense network of roads that you cannot move without a map. Fortunately, the authors made it possible for players to easily set a trail that shows the way to the destination, e.g. by selecting the character or object that interests us from the pop-up list. The solution known from the fourth installment of the series works perfectly in Chinatown Wars , although the route marked in this way is not always the shortest and fastest.

The greatest advantage of the game, however, is not the size of the terrain on which our player moves, but the generally understood freedom of action. In this respect, Chinatown Wars is in no way inferior to other installments of this series and, as befits a classic "sandbox", it allows you to simply do what you want. When several gangsters are interested in our services, we choose the partner with whom we want to cooperate at the moment. If, on the other hand, we get bored of carrying out traditional orders, we can do something completely different, including not only completing side missions or drug dealing, but also driving around the city without a clear goal, from one end of the metropolis to the other. Does it sound familiar?

There are several dozen main and side quests in Chinatown Wars . The missions are entrusted to us by both the NPCs we visit in their private quarters, and some passersby on the streets of the city, if we manage to locate them earlier. Bounties aren't much different from what we've seen in previous Grand Theft Auto games. So we will carry out killings, rob trucks, kidnap people, take part in illegal races, follow the victim's unconscious observations and, of course, steal cars, as required by the title of the game. In order not to get bored during the several-hour-long struggle, the authors tried to colorize some tasks with various mini-games. Examples? Here you are. In one of the missions, Huang Lee hijacks an ambulance from the airport in which a dying patient lies. When running away from the police, with three police cars on the tail, the player has to revive the passenger from time to time by tapping his finger on the console's touchscreen several times. If he fails to do so, the culprit will die and the quest will not be completed. Another time, our hero starts disarming the trap cars. Explosives are neutralized by cutting one of the wires, but to find the correct wire, first check the voltage of all wires with a voltmeter. We also carry out this operation on the touch screen of the console, while praying for enough time to disarm the vehicles waiting for the collections.

In addition to standard tasks, there are other attractions in the game . Do you remember missions where you can play the role of an ambulance driver, police car, taxi and fire truck? In Chinatown Wars you will also find them. In addition, there are challenges called Rampage, during which you must score as many points as possible by eliminating enemy gangsters. Are you not enough? For lovers of thorough exploration of the city, the authors have prepared a task consisting in destroying special Liberty City monitoring cameras. There are quite a lot of them, as many as a hundred, and you can take my word for it - searching for them takes a lot of time.

A completely different type of entertainment in Chinatown Wars is drug trafficking, which (for a change) we have not seen in the Grand Theft Auto series before. We can start "Dealer" after completing the first few missions of the main storyline and successfully continue it until the end of the game. Trading is worth paying a lot of attention to as it is a quick and effective method of earning money.

There are several dozen traffickers in Liberty City who distribute six types of drugs. The dealer's assortment varies depending on the faction to which he belongs, e.g. the Russian mafia has a lot of ecstasy pills on offer, but suffers from cocaine deficiency. The opposite is true of the Angels of Death - a motorcycle gang that distributes drugs in another part of the city. The point is, of course, to buy cheap and sell more expensive, so in the above case we get the tablets from the Russians, and then we exchange them for cash from one of the bikers. By taking advantage of the existing price differences, we will quickly make quite a lot of money. You can also hunt opportunities from time to time. We are informed about it by the traders themselves, who sell or buy goods for a short time at an extremely favorable price. It is worth hunting for these offers, because the raise here is several times higher than in the case of traditional transactions.

Drug trafficking is a profitable but very dangerous business. Our meetings with dealers are watched by the police, who sometimes step into action right after the purchase. In this case, you need to get out of the manhunt and take the hot goods to one of your hiding places. The constant risk significantly increases the attractiveness of the entire process and makes the distribution of herb or heroin a distraction for fans of strong emotions.

The police themselves are much more onerous in Chinatown Wars than in other games in the series. After breaking the law to action, police cars immediately enter and as soon as we are within their range, the chase begins. The number of vehicles used in the pursuit depends on the scale of the crime - above three stars, we are already chased by three cars and it gets nervous, and the situation starts to be really troublesome when special units and the army join the action.

There are three ways to get rid of the keepers of order. The first one is the most difficult and consists in eliminating the police cars taking part in the chase. Vehicles that are chasing us should be pushed back in such a way that they can collide with any obstacle. When we manage to eliminate all the cars, just leave the main road and wait patiently in a place not frequented by the police until the stars disappear. The second method is to take refuge in one of the hiding places, and the third one is to visit the paint shop. In the latter case, you have to pay for the service, but after repainting the vehicle, the pursuit is no longer a problem.

In addition to paying the painting fee, money is needed for many other things, such as taking over new hideouts scattered throughout the city or buying weapons in Ammu-Nation. Interestingly, Chinatown Wars does not have traditional extermination stores - new guns are ordered only online. The authors of the game have provided users with a special application that resembles an actual online store. We put the selected assortment into a virtual basket, and then execute the transaction by paying the appropriate amount. The parcel with the weapon can be picked up a moment later at any of the hiding places, because the order is carried out at an express pace.

The Internet in Chinatown Wars plays a very important role, and not only because of the possibility of buying weapons. The principals contact us via the network with information about a new task, as well as dealers who want to notify us about a promotion for a given type of drug. Every week, the player's mailbox also ends up with an email rich in statistics, summarizing efforts to trade in illegal goods, and sometimes spam messages can be found among the messages.

The above description of the individual elements of the game should convince you that there is a lot to do in Chinatown Wars . Performing missions, earning money on drug dealing, reading emails, buying weapons, sneaking out the police - there are many attractions, and these are only more important features, because there are also a whole lot of smaller extras, such as searching trash bins, getting tattoos, creating Molotov cocktails at gas stations, buying lottery tickets, etc. If we put it all together, Rockstar Leeds' product offers much more in terms of gameplay than some of the older games in the series on larger platforms.

In Chinatown Wars we can play not only alone, but also with a friend or colleague, in six interesting game modes. Most of them focus on mutual competition in various tasks, but there is also one module that allows you to play in cooperation - users have to defend the targets from destruction. Although the multiplayer missions are not particularly complicated, they are certainly an interesting addition to a very extensive single-player campaign and it is worth trying your hand at them. It is a pity that the work of Rockstar Leeds allows two people to have fun at the same time only via a local connection. It is true that Chinatown Wars uses the Internet, but only to publish statistics on the Rockstar Games Social Club and exchange information between console users regarding the location of various objects or characters.

Chinatown Wars has two screens of the Nintendo DS console and uses both very efficiently. During normal gameplay, the appropriate action is displayed on the upper panel, while the city minimap and icons on the lower panel allow you to quickly get to the most important options.

The touch screen of the console is also used to play mini-games, of which there are many in the Rockstar Leeds product. We will encounter simple but pleasant challenges at every turn, even with such trivial activities as car theft. In previous Grand Theft Auto games, it was enough to approach the parked vehicle, press the appropriate button and wait for the hero to politely sit behind the wheel. In Chinatown Wars it is rare for a key to wait for a thief inside, so other tools, such as a screwdriver, are required to start the engine. Sometimes it is enough to stick the skewer into the ignition and turn it left or right, other times you need to get to the wires first, then touch them together and tie them together - all operations are of course performed using the stylus attached to the console. Minigames appear at the most unexpected moments and are an interesting variety to the struggle, as I mentioned a few paragraphs earlier, writing about various surprises available while playing some missions.

Using the touch panel, we can also use thrown weapons. The strength and direction of throwing a grenade or Molotov cocktail is set with a finger or a stylus by moving it on the lower screen in the desired direction. However, this solution is not as convenient as it may seem at first, because precision is required, which is difficult in situations when there is a fight in the street and it is really hot. As a result, when exchanging fire with opponents, it is better to use ordinary guns than to play with troublesome throws.

Hidden weapons can be found in trash cans.
But first you have to get rid of the bags.

From the visual side, Chinatown Wars looks great. We observe the action from a bird's eye view, there are two camera settings to choose from. Despite the fact that in terms of the setting, the product resembles the first and second installments of the Grand Theft Auto series , it looks graphically nicer than its famous predecessors. The streets of the city are full of interactive items (garbage cans, newspaper stands, boxes, mailboxes, lanterns, railings, etc.), and the cars traveling on the roads are not flat sprites, but three-dimensional models. It is worth mentioning that the authors used a fashionable cel-shading, thanks to which the objects look like hand-drawn. The end result could be even better if the Nintendo DS console had more computing power. At times, the game loses a bit of fluidity, and although the frame drops are not too large, the noticeable slowdowns of the action can be annoying for some users.

Due to the small volume, Chinatown Wars cannot boast of such a rich sound setting as the games from the Grand Theft Auto series for other hardware platforms. It is true that you can listen to a few radio stations while driving, but there are no programs or licensed songs. The available songs did not captivate me, but also did not irritate me, so I have no major reservations about them. It is very good in terms of sound effects. The game uses most of the well-known samples that still remember the first installment of the Grand Theft Auto series , so we immediately feel at home after we start the struggle.

Chinatown Wars is a surprising product. From the very first moments with this game, it's hard not to admire its authors that they were able to stuff so many interesting things into it. Rockstar Leeds has once again proved that handhelds are not worse than stationary consoles, and they too can get a very extensive product, giving way to other games from the Grand Theft Auto series only in terms of audiovisual setting. A few days ago I did not think that I would end this text in this way, but I have to write it: Chinatown Wars is without a doubt the best game I have seen this year and it is certainly a great opportunity to rethink the purchase of a Nintendo console DS, if you have not already done so. I highly recommend this product, it's really worth it!

Krystian "UV Impaler" Smoszna

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