GTA: Liberty City Stories: Hands-On

What 'M' is the single most wished for feature in a modern GTA game? We go hands-on with LCS to bring detailed impressions, including multiplayer. New trailer included.

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We also know more now, about the single-player campaign, having gotten our greasy mitts all over Rockstar's (until then) clean PSP. The earlier comment on this portion of the game being 'just' more of the same, deserves further qualification though, as the same could be said for any of the console based sequels, but that statement alone doesn't take into account the actual experience that comes with the familiar gameplay.

We didn't have much chance to sample the humour, but we did note that the Hindi music was still in there, as was the Double Cleff radio station, and there was one particularly amusing dialogue on chat radio (though no Pogo the Monkey as of yet). Was there ever any doubt that this game would provide the same layered humour as the other GTAs. Rockstar's PRs were still very keen to point out that "[Liberty City Stories] is just the next chapter in the GTA series", but it's still nice to have the reassurance playing it yourself brings.

The most important technical issue that needs to be covered is the game's loading times. Rockstar Leeds's own Midnight Club 3 conversion onto PSP had some tea-making-ly long loading times between races, at least in the US version of the game. The UK release was tweaked, roughly halving those times, and the claim now for Liberty City Stories is a loading system in line with the console GTAs, namely an initial load of around 20 seconds, and just under 15 seconds when moving between islands.

Now we've had an actual play of the game we can confirm that the controls are, for the most part, laid out the same as in the PS2 games. The targeting system is indeed improved, with the added feature of being able to use any weapon in free aim mode (by pressing R to target, then down on the stick). This alone should help improve accuracy, for taking out car tyres and making headshots.

The shooting system is introduced in the mission "Snuff", giving you a pistol and a few mobsters to put new holes in, and it coped just fine. How it will cope with waves of enemies will only be revealed with the review code, but one of the earlier missions in the game, "Sindacco Sabotage", deals with this exact scenario, so Rockstar obviously have confidence in the targeting tweaks made.

We also got to play the "Caught in the Act" mission, mentioned in our earlier preview. The refined shooting controls did much to get us through this first person shooting gallery, though we still managed to fail due to a lack of body armour, and pure cack-handedness. The camera controls are another matter though, considering the PSP has just the one analogue stick, therefore to move the camera you must hold down L and move the one stick it does have. A quick tap of L will also swing the camera back behind you. Our time with the game was only brief, but we were starting to get the hang of it in that time, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue come release day.

Grand Theft Auto is going to do the business. Again.

The last mission we had a crack at was "Driving Mr. Leone", getting a good feel for vehicle handling, escaping the police in a Mafia Sentinel with a 3-star wanted level. The rain very noticeably affected the vehicle's handling, but not nearly as much as the police stingers.

From what we've seen, and now actually played, along with the news of multiplayer modes, confidence is high that Grand Theft Auto is going to do the business once again come the end of October, and will do much to put little black boxes of Sony love underneath Christmas trees this year (or indeed, white ones, as recently released in Japan, if you're really lucky).

If you missed our previous first-hand eyes-on with GTA, catch up here. Stay tuned for our final verdict later this month

Stephen Rowley
Staff Writer, Kikizo Games

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