Chinatown Wars

There are lots of people that obviously want to play Chinatown Wars and who can blame them. It is one of the most exciting releases for the DS and Nintendo DSi this year. The game pushes the console to its graphical limits as well as taking the genre in a new direction with the inclusion of minigames which involve the touch screen.

Chinatown Wars makes the most of the console’s unique controls and features to give the game more variety than ever before. Some of the mini-games involve you making money by buying and selling drugs in different parts of the city and attempting to make a profit. This is done by travelling to one part of the city where a particular drug is high in supply and therefore it is being sold at a low price. After making a large purchase you can take your supply to a part of the city where the drug is more of a scarce resource and therefore has a higher street value as demand outweighs supply and sell for a profit. This is just one of the many minigames featured which make the overall game very deep.

On top of this of course there is the usual style of missions where you’ll be given jobs involving making deliveries, killings or playing taxi driver. While doing this you can take many enjoyable detours to find lots of hidden and interesting secrets of Liberty City. While touring the city you can pick up prostitutes to build up your health points (of course they’ll charge you for it) or use your phone to call up for some new missions.

GTA Chinatown Wars in Liberty City

There is a new and much better system for getting your police wanted rating down. Rather than avoiding the police as much as possible which could be all too easy in other games, you are now given a more exciting task of having to take out a number of them so they can’t hunt any more. Since GTA Chinatown Wars is set in the same city as the PS3 and Xbo360 edition of the series you can visit lots of familiar locations but with new twists.

The graphic style on the DS game has been given a trendy cell-shaded look rather than the realism of the games on more powerful consoles. This works extremely well and you would not know that the series wasn’t designed to be like that in the first place.

One final piece of good, no great news it that the game is not going to be toned down or censored. There were fears that to fit in with the style of the majority of games on the DS, Chinatown Wars was going to have some of the content we come to expect from the series taken out. The developers however have stated they had no intention of making a GTA Kids game as this would completely take away from what has been one of the most compelling aspects of the series. Click the links if you would like more information on the game.