Tapping locations on a map to set a course is intuitive and makes finding your way around town easy. If you want to make money, you have to juggle this resource management game-within-a-game where you buy low, sell high, and watch out for busts.Īnother Chinatown Wars high point: the GPS system. I’m not just shocked that Apple was cool with heroin (other games have been rejected for drug- and alcohol-related content), but just how vital it is to the overall game.
And on top of the main story, there is a plethora of side jobs and races, including the extra content that was included with the PSP port. You perform in a parade, hijack fuel tankers to turn into giant bombs, run interference during a race, and put out fires. You are not just driving to a location, shooting somebody, and then returning to home base. The mission variety in Chinatown Wars is one of its strongest features. The menus have also been cleaned up a little for the iPad. In the middle of a big fight or a high-speed pursuit, this is troublesome until you are 100-percent comfortable with the controls. (They were too small on the iPhone.) However, until you get the hang of things, you often must look at the buttons to make sure you are hitting the right one. All of the virtual buttons (gas, shoot, kick, carjack) are also now just the right size. When driving, though, you default to a pair of arrows for turning left and right, which you use in conjunction with gas and brake pedal buttons. Combat controls would benefit from some sort of targeting system, but I experienced few problems with digging into a violent crew and trading bullets or putting shoe prints on their faces. It’s great to see one of the few problems with the iPhone edition solved by making smart use of the benefits of the iPad.Ĭhinatown Wars uses a virtual stick for on-foot movement that is just about as good as you’ll find on the iDevices. The camera gives you a good view of the city around you, and unlike the iPhone version which allowed you to get too far ahead of yourself if you started going really fast, the iPad provides ample space around Lee. The art style is cartoonish and looks fantastic. Instead of a 3D behind-the-shoulder view, Chinatown Wars returns to the top-down roots of the pre-PlayStation 2 GTA games.
The Chinatown Wars narrative is strong, full of both humor and real drama, and benefits from excellent writing. But what starts out as a simple revenge tale grows in scope, with a criminal world about to explode as gangs (and cops) square off for control. Ambushed at the Liberty City airport and left to die, you now find yourself drawn into the underworld with thoughts of vengeance. After your father was murdered, you must deliver an ancient sword to your uncle so as to keep the empire in your family’s name. You are Huang Lee, the spoiled son of a Triad ganglord.
A port of the PlayStation Portable edition of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (which was in turn a port of a Nintendo DS game), the iPad version is a phenomenal play.
Grand Theft Auto, one of the biggest franchises in videogames, now rides shotgun on iPad.