Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Hands-On

The most detailed hands-on playtest of the hottest DS game this year, complete with HUD diagrams and new screens.

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Huang's PDA, accessed by pressing Select, is another important companion in the game, similar to the cellphone in IV. The PDA provider is Panoramic, whose logo is a parody of Panasonic's, and the device features a range of options: System (which gives access to your basic options and controls - and some not so basic, since there's actually a lot of depth of customising HUD elements and stuff), Email, Mission Briefs, Statistics and Social Club, Contacts (which get added as you progress and meet new people), Multiplayer (via LAN or Wi-Fi, which we'll learn more about soon), Music Player (called Alchemist), and Trade Info (more on that later). The PDA also gives access to Ammu-nation's new online business - these guys were nowhere to be seen on the streets of Liberty City in IV, but Huang can now log onto their site and order his killing tools from the comfort of his underwear and benefit from fast delivery.

Pressing Start bring up your GPS, onto which you can set any waypoint just by tapping on the map, or browse locations of interest as you unlock them and add them to your favourites. The map is not road-for-road the same as in GTA IV; it's been tweaked slightly and the highways have been taken out for gameplay and camera angle considerations, but if you played through GTA IV, you'll notice all the familiar roads and places - the airport, Star Junction, Happiness Island, the works. The reason Alderney's disappeared, Rockstar claims, is that it was mainly an Italian-focused place in GTA IV which doesn't play into Chinatown Wars' story so much. And by not including it, it frees up capacity and detail for the rest of the game. We don't think anyone's going to mind too much that Alderney's not there, to be honest.

As well as a garage where you can keep cars, you've also got your own Apartment, which as well as saving your game using the, er, sofa (which you can also do at any other time using the PDA), you've got a desk with your laptop, and things will appear on the apartment's shelves and desk as you unlock them, including your stash box where you keep supplies of drugs among other things.

GTA Chinatown Wars Apartment Layout

The laptop in your apartment is manufactured by 'Fruit', whose logo is a parody of Apple's. It gives the option to sync stats, friend codes and so forth, it's hooked up to the ever-expanding Rockstar Games Social Club, and it also gives email access - although at the start of the game all you've got is one welcoming email from your ISP, the Badger Network. You can also expect to receive spam emails once again. Elsewhere in the apartment you'll find a white board, with a number of Polaroid images on it, each one representing different people and different missions you can undertake - as well as all the missions you've already done, since for the first time, you now have the ability to replay completed missions at your own leisure. That's a feature missing in GTA IV, and a further example of how Leeds has really thought to include stuff that fans want. Perhaps more importantly, you can also shuffle around the magnetic letters on the board as you would on your fridge, to spell out rude words. Incidentally, Rockstar told us that other 'in-door' areas like your apartment will also be portrayed in this illustrative 2D way.

We also checked out Chinatown Wars' police system. Rockstar wanted to return to the fast-paced, over the top police chases of GTA1 and GTA2, and we found the police to be a little bit more persistent than in GTA IV. For every level of star you have, you get a corresponding police car symbol underneath it. To get rid of them, you need to shake them off and disable the pursuing cars by ramming them - they're bad drivers, so they'll take corners badly and hurtle off at high speed if you're successful. Pay and spray is also back in the game, and you can try staying out of the police's line of site by hiding down an alley. As long as the police don't see you, your stars will go down. When the stars are flashing red and blue they know where you are, and when it's blue, you're nearly off the hook. It's generally fun, although we're going to be interested to see how well the police system maintains itself throughout long-term play sessions. Certainly, you're more likely to get arrested in Chinatown Wars than in GTA IV, where arrests were actually quite rare compared to deaths.

We checked out six missions during our two-and-a-half hour visit - the first two Rockstar demoed for us, and then four missions we got to play ourselves. The first mission, named Street of Rage, is a basic driving and shooting mission sees Huang hook up with Wade Heston, a cop who's got the internal affairs department on his back, but who Huang develops a mutually co-operative relationship with. Our demoer actually fluffed this mission fairly early on - a handy opportunity to show off not only the mission retry feature (similar to that of IV), but also Trip Skip, a nifty feature that IV could have benefitted from, allowing you to skip an initial long drive at the start of a mission to the end of that journey, and jump straight back into the action. Bravo, Leeds. The mission finishes with a sort of mini-boss, but a few grenades later and he's a goner, leaving behind him a sweet chain gun weapon for the taking.

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