An essential DS game, and an important addition to the GTA series
The game takes place in the same liberty city as in GTA IV, and it's pretty amazing how the city size (although condensed slightly) fits in the palm on your hand. You play Huang Lee, the son of a murdered Triad boss. Whilst you arrive in Liberty City to delivery an invaluable sword to the next Triad boss, you get ambushed and the sword taken. The story pretty much kicks in from there with you trying to gain ranks in the Traid gangs whilst avenging your Fathers death. You soon begin to realise corruption within the Traids with numerous people fighting for the rank of Boss.
The story is shown in a slideshow on the bottom screen with text, whilst in real- time on the stop screen in a top down view. There's no speech in this game which slightly loses the GTA humour we've come to expect; but there's definately a lot of humour to hold it's own.
As i mentioned, the top screen shows you the game in real-time whilst the bottom shows either the story slides or is your GPS and menu in the game. Whilst i am correct in saying the game is in top down view, it certainly is a revolution compared with GTA 1 & 2. The game is in 3D, with a VERY impressive frame rate, damage mechanics and animations. Think of the game more of the likes with GTA 3. The bottom is equally as impressive. The screen not only is a GPS, but acts as your own in-game and VERY developed PDA. With this PDA you can scroll through your emails and plot points on your GPS, you can access the online store to purchase guns which are delivered to your house. You can even check how the exchange rates with drug prices are doing. These features are just to name a few on a very impressive game mechanic.
Now, the gameplay... the gameplay is fricking AMAZING! This is definately the craziness of the old skool GTA'S 1-3. The game runs at a very fast pace with parts making you cause absolute mayhem and destruction on police and civilians; something that was severly lacking in GTA 4. A new implementation in this game is the fact that to get rid of police, you actually have to take them out! This causes some really memorable car chases with you ramming police straight into walls or other cars, and then your star has dropped. This is seriously something that Rockstar need to implement in future GTA's. There's so many features in GTA that i'll be spending all night typing them on here (such as the in-depth drug trading) but there's another impressive feature that i'd like to mention. When breaking into a parked car, the game brings you into a quick minigame on the stylus screen that has you using the stylus to fiddle a screwdriver in the keyhole, hotwiring the car or even hacking into the alarm system. These are quick minigames that build tension if you have police on your tail, and they never seem to get boring. This game has impressed me on many levels and completely suprised me.
The graphics look amazing also, probably the best i've seen on the DS. The art style is a cartoon, cell shaded look which suits the game suprisingly well and all runs at a constant and fast paced rate. The audio equally is a good. There's a few choices of stations to pick from, and the sound effects implement the gunshots and explosions in the game very well.
In a nutshell, this game ranks with the best games in the GTA series; it's that good! And it's a DS game! Rockstar really went out of their way to make a large, lengthy and incredibly fun GTA that implements the best of the old and brings in a lot of the new in the palm of your hand. I hope we'll see on future console releases. Get this game now!