Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, final thoughts

Well, I've finished GTA: Chinatown Wars, and I have to say that despite being fun, it still hasn't sold me on open-world gameplay. After the main story is over I don't feel much need to explore the city seeking 100% completion. Spider-Man 3 had this same problem, the only good thing about it was the web-swinging and acrobatics, and in this the only memorable thing is the driving and the hi-jacking of cars. The combat is annoying, and I'm still convinced that the busted mechanics are broken, police should not be able to yank you out of your car, or bust you when you're on foot, shooting at them. One time I was busted after jumping out of the car and killing the cops around me, while I was on my feet! One of the missions requires you to raise $5000 and give it to your uncle, and I did that, but since your safe is just decoration, I was left running around the city with it. Unfortunately I got busted for some reason along the way a few too many times and had to raise the money all over again. You see, I got pretty bored waiting for the next mission to appear so I decided to run around the city doing stuff, but I wound up getting busted just as I was about to triple my money selling drugs and got $6000 of narcotics seized. If I'm bribing the cops to get out of jail why don't they let me keep my guns and drugs when I leave? Anyways, this is probably the last GTA game I'm going to play, since they're all pretty much the same as far as I know. Aside from that since the DS doesn't have analog anything accelerate and reverse are assigned to the face buttons and brake to R. That's fine for the brake (Except when you're trying to target a specific thing when driving and you wind up stopping instead), but for the gas it means that if you're going across the city trying not to attract attention you might accidentally ram into a police-car and gain a wanted-level, which is especially annoying if you are on a mission that requires you to not have a wanted-level to finish it. Also, the default settings only have bottom-screen displays for body-armor and radar, so I had to go into the settings and change it so I could compare where I actually was to where the radar said I needed to be. I can't help but feel that the game would have benefited from not using the touchscreen as much as it did, you can't just press A to select something, you need to touch it. Same goes for hijacking cars, most of the time I just got into a car, got out of it, and got back in, wanted-lever be damned because I didn't want to have to deal with the touchscreen. I'm typically the first to promote motion-control and portable gaming but the DS works best when using either the touchscreen or the buttons, not both, and not both at the same time, like this game does. weapons like molotovs, grenades, and flash-grenades require you to touch the screen and aim them. It takes a lot of getting used to and this would work on the iPhone, but not on the DS where the touchscreen isn't displaying the game and functioning as the controller as well. On top of that the aiming is pretty bad, but that's made up for by enemy AI being pretty badly programmed and sometimes practically walking into your line of fire. This doesn't mean that the AI is totally dumb, a lot of missions where you fight mobs of enemies wind up being tough as nails since they use flanking tactics. After beating the game I restarted and made it up to a weapons-training mission where you are given a pistol with unlimited ammo. After leaving the site and jacking a car I went around the city with attack and accelerate held down. Unfortunately I wasn't able to gain a wanted-level because despite there being a load of crime in Liberty City there are very few cops around it at the beginning of the game. Speaking of hard to find stuff, I never even went to the Liberty City Gun Club, despite them telling me that they had new weapons all the time. All in all GTA:CW is fine, it's not too replayable and doesn't interest me after I finish it. I give it a 6.2* rating.