Porting a game with a pedigree as rich and environments as large as Grand Theft Auto onto Nintendo’s modest handheld is no easy task, but with China Town Wars on the DS Rockstar Leeds (the team behind Liberty/Vice city Stories on the PSP) have achieved just that. On first playing this game you’re hit by an unavoidable sense of nostalgia: from the eagle-eye view, which pulls out when you speed down the motorway, to the little pools of red pixels that spread out beneath those unlucky enough to stand in front of your careering car, it feels like you’re playing the very first Grand Theft Auto all over again. You quickly realise, though, that whilst this may be satisfyingly true on an aesthetic level, Chinatown Wars is every bit as new as GTA first felt back in 1997.

What Rockstar have achieved by paring down the visual presentation is not only a game that is so perfectly adapted to its format that you can’t help but feel the DS was made for it, rather than the other way around, but a game that injects new life into the series, which in the last few titles has arguably lost sight of innovation in the rush towards next generation graphic realism. On the top screen you have at your disposal a surprisingly large version of the now iconic Liberty City, filled to the brim with fast cars, loose women and twisted characters, whilst the lower touch screen holds a treasure trove of interactive opportunities. The stylus is for wimps; you can set GPS waypoints on your map with a flick of your thumbnail (you may want to grow it a little for just this purpose – I’ve even filed mine into a point and carved the DS symbol into it) and like-wise your emails, drug trading stats and radio stations are just as easily reached.

As the title suggests the game is set in an oriental demi-monde, where you play Haung Lee, charged with delivering his family’s ceremonial sword to his Uncle Wu "Kenny" Lee in Liberty City’s Chinatown after his father’s death. But on arrival Haung is given a warm American welcome when he is shot in the head, robbed and driven off the edge of a pier. The game begins with you having to smash the rear windscreen with the stylus in order to escape the sinking car, which is the first of many elegant little minigames that are integrated perfectly into the overall dynamic of the game and include hotwiring cars, rummaging in trash cans for guns and losing thousands on scratch cards.

Cut scenes are beautifully drawn and minimally animated in a style reminiscent of Chinese ink paintings and the script crackles with incredible writing and the kind of fresh wit we have come to expect from the series by now. The Chinese setting is a welcome change after the Italian mafia, black gangstas and (most recently) East European mercenary immigrants of previous games. Meanwhile outside of the now familiar missions that drive the gripping narrative, which positively drips with triad honour and heroic bloodshed, you can raise cash as well as your reputation by engaging in some shady drug dealing. In parks and back alleys around the city dealers can be found selling a variety of pharmaceutical delights, and the object is to buy a stash of drugs and sell it on either to another dealer or a user for the biggest possible profit – that’s capitalism baby! It’s also one of the most original things to happen to the series in ages and places Chinatown Wars on a whole new level of enjoyment.

Considering the tiny little box it’s all crammed into there’s an incredible amount of depth to almost every aspect of GTA: Chinatown Wars. Without a doubt this is one of the most accomplished and enjoyable games out on the console, something that is all the more surprising given the fact that it is essentially a spin off from a series that didn’t seem to have a lot of gas left in it. Rockstar have just gone and proved us wrong yet again.

Words > Dean Bowman