Rockstar's Worst Game Ever: Chinatown Wars

(Disclaimer: I know that Liberty City has its own names for different parts of New York, but since it's much easier for me to use New York landmarks to describe the locations so that people who didn't play the game could understand, that's what I'm going to do.)

Let me make this perfectly clear, Grand Theft Auto 4 was my favorite GTA game in the franchise not because the plot was particularly interesting or because the characters actually had some semblance of a personality, and the shoddy running controls coupled with a tacked-on broken excuse of cover-based shooting didn't really help either. No, GTA4 was a great game because it had the promise of taking the franchise from being the jingling keys to a bunch of adrenaline junkie babies (hey look little kids, a tank in downtown Miami, isn't this FUN?) to being the video game version of Godfather 2 (the MOVIE; as far as I'm concerned, the game doesn't exist). But GTA4 was like the original Ipod, a money printing bag of problems, which is why my anticipation of Chinatown Wars was through the roof. I mean, we're talking about second generation Ipods here. This is supposed to cement Rockstar's reputation of being able to lead the wacky open world gangster mayhem to a dramatic performance somewhere between Scarface and the Godfather. Fortunately, Chinatown Wars is a raging success, apart from its UTTER FAILURES. In short, Chinatown Wars is the answer to the question: what if Goodfellas sucked?

For the uninitiated, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is an open world, rags to riches, gangster game about Huang Lee, a young nephew to a prominent Triad boss, maneuvering the crime ladder to take over Liberty City as the crime lord that his uncle has failed to be. And for a story-driven experience, Chinatown Wars played out like taking random quests from roadside NPCs in World of Warcraft, except the quests are taken from a scrap yard of small minigames. You get your bumper cars minigame, your protect this area minigame, your unscrew this cover and push X to jumpstart minigame, your quick time event tatoos minigame. I half expect some sort of human whack-a-mole. And remember the unspoken rule that protection missions suck and shouldn't exist outside of Team Ico's control? Right, Chinatown Wars has one of the worst protection missions that have you acting as a human meat shield while your partner runs around looking to soak up bullets. Sorry Huang, you fail because your friend jumped off a bridge. Gee, thanks.

But these sort of half-assed minigames aren't really unfamiliar to anyone who has ever played GTA4, as I've said before, it's the dramatic plot to prominence that really drives the whole experience anyways--minigames are just icing on the cake. Except the dramatic plot doesn't exist. The game premised on the tragic development of losing our hero's father and the dishonorable loss of the family heirloom. Sounds exciting. We love revenge stories, dabbled in a bit of tragedy. This sounds like a gangster version of Batman Begins. Soon, however, you find out that nobody cares about your father dying, nobody cares about the honorable sword, and before you know it, you're helping some fat kid cheat his way to win a street race for no reason. Chinatown Wars goes out of its way to piss off the plot. As soon as it realizes that we're right back on track with the whole sword business, you can bet that the next mission is some stupid tacked-on drug mission that has nothing to do with anything. Not to mention, for the trouble of actually completing these missions for no reason, Huang gets absolutely dogged on and shrugs it off as if that's "thug" life. So you just helped destroy a rival gang? You suck! Oh, well. It's as if the writer wrote the entire story in 3 bullet points on a sticky note then decided to shotgun random things to do to fill the hours of inconsistency. The plot is so frustratingly idiotic that I was literally one mission away from contributing the game to another episode of "Will It Blend."

Still, as the pioneer of the open world sandbox, Rockstar's flagship franchise originally stole gamers' hearts with everything outside of the core gameplay. GTA introduced to gamers how much we wanted to lead our in-game avatar through everyday ordinary events like getting a haircut and shooting darts. It sort of drives us to be the person we've always wanted to be, to live in a world without the constraints of the law. The police is just another set of minigames rather than a real consequence to a real action. And that's where Chinatown Wars outshines its predecessors in spades. Apart from your usual change-clothes-for-the-win mechanic where you can run over the entire population in lower Liberty City and get away with it by a simple cosmetic face lift, Chinatown Wars introduces a Burnout-esque mechanic where you can force the police cars to run into walls or traffic to take them out, which reduces your police threat level. This leads to a Need For Speed: Most Wanted But Doesn't Suck mechanic where you are racing against a pack of cops, weaving through traffic, in a daring escapade of bumper car throw-down. It really is as fun as it sounds, which eventually led me to massacre the entire populace around Times Square just so that I could have enough motivation to hunt down the next soul-depleting mission.

So, awesome police mechanics, what's next? Nothing. That's the extent to Chinatown War's sandbox mechanic. Aside from the occasional police chases, the entire map feels like a dreaded obstacle to prevent Huang from getting places. There's absolutely nothing of interest to do along the way between any two locations, making the journey both pointless and dull. Fortunately, Rockstar actually understand just how frustrating this is, so they've integrated a mechanic that lets Huang skip the traveling sequences between missions, but you have to fail the mission first. Well, we can't say that the map is completely barren. In a game version of ten miles, there's probably one tattoo parlor and one lottery store: both of which are boring and unrewarding. Only after scourging the entire map for any shred of the infamous GTA lunacy would you accidentally trip over a tank as a sort of dumpster-side homage to the San Andreas grandeur of old.

The only salvation in the game is a skeletal form of an economy system that spams Huang's email with drug deals to buy low and sell high (no pun intended). Basically, the map is spattered with drug dealers in alley ways and parks for Huang's personal drug trade to earn a little bit of cash to buy guns, cars, or houses. However, since there's pretty much no use for a house, cars break down upon a couple of speed bumps, and guns are handed out like candy during Halloween, there's almost no use for the money. Still, credit to where credit is due, drug dealing does provide a bit of thrill especially when Huang is involved in a high speed chase with 5 units of cocain and 3 packs of weed in his trunk while he is armed with a SMG and a shotgun. But, again, Chinatown Wars does diminish its own high since hospital visits after fatal gun wounds and police arrests cost almost nothing beyond confiscation of his guns and drugs.

Nevertheless, ignoring the plot and the game design flaws, the core mechanics are sound. The weapons are satisfying to use, especially the baseball bat since they're arguably more powerful than the pistols. But, just like the Chinatown Wars fashion, there simply aren't enough of them. And it is a universal rule that flame throwers and chainsaws are un-screw-up-able, but this game manages to make them absolutely un-playable. The flame thrower is a sure way for Huang to commit suicide, and the chainsaw is only capable of unleashing a can of cluster**** where it's a random guess as to whether or not you're actually hitting your victim. Aside from the violence, the driving in the game is surprisingly usable. It's no Grid, but it's definitely a step up from other GTA games. The drive assist helps keep the car going at a straight line, and the cars actually drive like they have wheels on them instead of a pair of ice skates mounted onto mad dogs like in other GTA games.

Ultimately, Chinatown Wars is a failed masterpiece. It's a Mona Lisa imitation made by a 3 year old child with a box of Crayola. The overall mechanics is satisfying, aside from some graphical glitches where the video loads slower than your car so that you'd see a tree pop up in the middle of the screen almost 3 seconds after you've already run into it, but the narrative pace lacks any motivation. Which leads to a final conclusion--if you're the old-school GTA gamer who values game mechanics and side to-dos over narrative plot, then this game is just barely passable. Unfortunately, we review a game based on all of its merits, and Chinatown Wars leads a tradition of excellence straight into the gutter. In essence, Chinatown Wars is a comfortable game to play, but a terrible game to enjoy.