It is a really great game except for the fact that you can only view the game from above your character.
I thought Chinatown Wars looked impressive, though that's mostly because of the platform it's on.
Chinatown Wars' central character is Huang Lee, one of the younger members of the Hong Kong Triads. After his father dies, he comes to Liberty City to deliver the Yu Jian, a sword and token family heirloom, to his uncle "Kenny" Lee. Long story short, the sword is stolen, Huang is left to die, and after surviving, he sets out to reclaim the sword while using Liberty City's dark underbelly to find out more about his father's death.
The game uses the DS touch screen often and ably, which is its most highly-touted feature. At the start of the game, Huang is locked in a car that's subsequently thrown into the water, and you're taught how to use the touch screen to crack the rear window and escape. The approach is clever and practical, as are the times when you need to hotwire a car, fill a bottle with gas to make a Molotov, or set a bomb detonation code by matching button patterns (like a game of Simon Says).
But the intuitive gameplay mechanic occasionally suffers from overkill. If you're feeling generous and want to pay the bridge toll, you have to tap the screen to toss a handful of coins into the booth. And that's one thing that was better as a canned animation. Selecting and changing weapons becomes a hassle, too, since you're forced to tap the associated icons on the lower screen; there's no button for quickly swapping to the next best weapon. And having to hold and drag to toss grenades requires far more time to set up than the enemy needs to shoot you.
One of the key elements in Chinatown Wars is drug trafficking, which got a bit of heat from the usual "concerned parent groups." But in practice, it's far tamer than you'd think...unless tiny drug icons offend you. The whole process is merely a menu: Approach a dealer, choose from their selection, and trade products. Depending on the dealer and what part of town you're in, some narcotics will fetch more money than others (or vice-versa), but in general, the prices are fairly, er, realistic: marijuana's relatively cheap, while cocaine brings in the big bucks. But it's just another way to extra make money on top of the vigilante missions, lottery tickets, warehouse raids, and myriad other "odd jobs."
The game's pace slows, though, when you can only get a job from someone if you give them a certain amount of drugs or money. If you're short, then you're out of luck, unless you start hitting up the city for odd jobs or jacking gang vans. It's not so bad early on when you can just dip into the drug stash at your safehouse, but it's still a lot of back-and-forth just to push the progression percentage a little bit further.