Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, true to fashion, throws your character straight into the gritty underworld of Liberty City. The player is quickly hastened into an avalanche of murder, theft, and all-out war with the Triad underbosses. Your character is the son of a Chinese Triad Boss. Your father is murdered, and a priceless family heirloom is stolen in the process. Your mission? Avenge your father’s murder, and retrieve the artifact by any means necessary, all while climbing the ladder of criminal-success. It’s kill or be-killed in the crime riddled Liberty City, and while playing this game, you will experience plenty of both.

Here’s the skinny. GTA:CW is graphically excellent in most regards, with only a few exceptions. First, the cut-scenes are all 2D, but this isn’t a bad thing. During the cut-scenes, all dialogue is presented in subtitles, with no voice track. The text (when I played anyways) would show up, but only partially disappear when the next line of dialogue was presented. After about 3 lines of dialogue, this created a stacking, jumbled, crackling mess of blinking and jittering text and characters that I couldn’t decipher. This was one of the few graphical negatives I experienced during my review. The rest of the game is brilliantly rendered, with surprisingly well-designed 3D buildings, streets, and over-passes. Interactive items like the loot drops, mission waypoints, and your controls interface are all 2D, and easy to distinguish.

The controls are simple, and intuitive, but not as sensitive as I would have liked. You have a 2D analog stick on screen for controlling your character, with a few action buttons to attack, steal cars, use weapons, etc. The analog control used when walking was okay, but seemed to be poorly connected to the camera angle. I spent several seconds trying to see when I walked around a 90 degree corner around a building and the camera would follow in the opposite direction, blocking my view. A few places when this happened, the buildings surrounding would go transparent, and give me plenty of vision, but other times it would not. You can double-tap the analog to re-center the game-camera from behind your character, but during a gunfight, you hardly have time to mess with camera angles. The controls for driving automatically switch to a left and right control for steering, with separate accelerator and brake/reverse buttons. You also retain the ability to do drive-bys with a weapon control while driving as well. You can also switch your driving control back to the analog stick in the options menu, but I found that either way, the controls were never tight enough to really drive like you can in the PSP and DS versions.

The story is brilliant, as is expected from RockStar’s long pedigree. The gameplay is very good as well, with the expected immersion into any criminal enterprise you could possibly want to commit. This game is an obvious top-down 2D game, with some features ported in from the DS and PSP versions, but with some features disappointingly absent. The touch-based events like lock-picking, and dumpster diving will be very familiar to the DS players, while the PSP users will notice the higher visual quality with improved textures, and less-cartoony/cell-shaded look to the game. It’s got a lot more graphical polish than the DS version, but still lacks the audible vocal tracks and tight controls of the others. The multiplayer functionality from both the DS and PSP versions is surprisingly absent in this release as well. Really, a simple patch could fix all of my complaints with the graphics glitches, and add the multiplayer function as well. Overall, RockStar made a great effort with this offering, and really pushed Apple’s hardware out to the limits. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for iPhone dumps you straight into the Liberty City underworld. Populated by thugs, criminals, and murderers, and ruled by the Triad bosses. With a few minor glitches here and there, it’s still an amazingly great game. At $9.99, it won’t be the cheapest purchase in your iPhone gaming library, but it’s definitely worth it for even casual fans of the series.

[A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.]