Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

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Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

From the days when GTA honed a 2D top-down visage to its current 3D third-person avatar, the series has seen its share of both - evolution as well as devolution. After regressing back into its top-down womb, the series makes its debut on the Nintendo DS with 'Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars'.

Chinatown Wars takes place in the series' fictional hub populated with the most GTA tales to date - Liberty City. To keep things fresh, the storyline doesn't intersect those in previous iterations, and the game hosts a cast that's new to boot. You step into the expensive shoes of 'Huang Lee', the spoiled son of a recently murdered Triad Boss. He's given a pretty simple task - to deliver his family heirloom, which is a sword named 'Yu Jian', to his gangster uncle Wu "Kenny" Lee. As soon as he hits the airport, Huang's crew's hit by a group of thugs who kill his escorts and leave him for dead. What follows is a series of missions to help uncle Kenny recover the sword, trace your father's killers (since you're hell bent on avenging his death) and help him in all the shady operations he has running.

The playground offered is incredibly reminiscent of the first two GTA games (owed to the top-down view), but with the detail and scale of GTA 3 and 4 (to an extent). The game manages juice all it can from the DS where both visuals and the game's scale's concerned. The little beast gives you access to two of four islands of Liberty City, each brimming with more life around any corner than you could hope for. The game world's beautifully designed, rendered and littered with details

source:tech2