Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

DS

Rockstar

Nyeeowmm! That's the noise made by the whizzy little cars in Grand Theft Auto's latest and greatest handheld excursion, Chinatown Wars. They go nyeeowmm, your little man goes whee-blam and the tunes go tinkle and blip. Where its big bad brother, GTAIV, prefers to moodily eyeball the screen and smother its wry crime capers with brown-tinged, stylised realism, Chinatown Wars turns that frown upside down. It might feature drug dealing, gleeful blood splats and enough F-bombs to sustain Al'Qaeda for a year, but it's just so damn cute!

Rockstar Leeds has a feisty track record with baby GTAs, storming the PSP sales charts with Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories. Those games were remixes of their PS2 namesakes, fresh tales told within their eponymous cities, triumphantly squeezed onto Sony's handheld. Try that trick with GTAIV on the DS and you'd barely be able to translate the loading screen, so Chinatown Wars is different, a ground-up rebuild of a big chunk of GTAIV's metropolis with gameplay miniaturised, simplified and joyfully squelched onto the little screen.

And Rockstar Leeds has pulled off a belter. Chinatown Wars is GTA through and through, stuffed with humour, narrative, great characters and superb missions. The soundtrack is stellar, especially given the space restrictions on the tiny DS cartridge. The graphics are pretty remarkable, full 3D delivered with plenty of flourish thanks to a smart viewpoint which restricts how much the machine needs to render without hampering gameplay. And the driving, that vital core around which GTA is built, is knockabout, carefree and fun.

Amongst the game's many achievements, one that stands proud is its thoughtful use of its host machine. Developers are so often flummoxed by Nintendo's hardware, shoehorning remote-waggling minigames into Wii titles and paying little more than lip service to the dual-screen, touch sensitive DS. But here there is nothing but polish. The stylus spends plenty of time out of its holster, unscrewing panels, cutting holes, revealing scratchcards and, best of all, navigating a PDA which trumps GTAIV's mobile phone as the best in-game menu the series has seen.

Chinatown Wars is true to its heritage but boisterous with it. It has taken the juggernaut that is GTA, pulled out the driver, climbed in and screeched off into the distance, shooting out of the window as it goes. The console may not see better all year.

9/10

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