What I really liked about the game was that for the first time in a
long while it felt like a full blown original game on the system. Most
other games either boil down to simple puzzle mini-game stuff or cheap
rip-off of titles from the big consoles. GTA:CW on the other side,
while not 100% original, knows that its not running on a big console
and doesn't try to emulate GTAIV. Instead it goes back to a more
cartoony style of the original GTA PSone titles and for most part
success quite well with it.
Car chases are over the top
ridiculous with a new mechanic that lets you crash policecars into
buildings and objects to get rid of them, giving it a nice
Micromachines/Matchbox feel. It never feels realistic, but its always
fun. Fighting with weapons is just as over the top, with flamethrowers,
miniguns, molotov cocktails and chainsaws being at your disposal. The
AI never looks good in those fights, but it doesn't have to, because
the game does a good job of just throwing enough of those dumb enemies
at you. Mission design provides quite a bit of variety and a drug
trading system gives you something to do between the missions.
What
I however probally like the best in the game is how it uses the lower
screen. There are a few useless mini-games on there, but they are used
rarely, most minigames are ok and some minigames are actually kind of
cool. I really like how you can pay the toll by throwing coins while
driving, its a really nice way to give a game more interactivity
without interrupting the core gameplay. Most of the time however the
lower screen isn't used for minigames, but as a fully functioning
PDA/GPS system. You can read mails on the thing, define a routes you
want to drive, look for people to trade drugs with, order weapons in a
online shop and all that stuff. You also can switch weapons on it and
throw grenades. It is great to finally see a game that uses the screen
for extending the core game, instead of trying to replacing it.
Thinking about it, the whole use of the lower screen is actually quite
close to what I experimented with in my WindstilleDS prototype thing, so no supprise that I really like it.
But
with all things pretty, there are of course a few ugly parts too. The
most ugly being the story. While I like the way the story is told
technically, via decent looking static-image cutscenes, the dialog is
just awful. I don't mind profanity in a game, but here they are just
trying to hard, every sentence is filled with it and you don't really
meet a single friendly character in the game (well, there is tha girl,
but that gets killed like 15 minutes into the game...). Which of course
kind of makes you question why the hell you work for those guys in the
first place. On top of that the plot just isn't interesting either. So
it boils basically down to doing random jobs for random people for
random reasons, to bad that they didn't come up with something more
interesting.
Another thing that feels badly broken in the game
is the virtual economy. Drug trading can make you thousands of dollar
in a single deal, while solving missions hardly pays anything. When you
can get a hundred times the money for simply driving from A to B,
instead of solving a complex mission, it just doesn't feel right. On
the positive side of things, I however had quite a bit of fun with it,
in the beginning I once ran out of money, leaving nothing for drug
trading and me stranded driving a taxi around to get some money in the
pocket again, followed by me buying all the safe houses I could find,
since drug traiding really pays once you have enough money to invest.
The
last three issues aren't GTA:CW specific, but apply to all GTA titles
and its annoying that they are still not fixed. The first one is the
lack of reset points in the missions. You can easily restart missions
and skip the cutscenes by just pressing a button, but you don't have
any reset points in the mission itself, which gets really annoying when
you die close to the end of it. The other big issue I have with the
series is a direct consequence of former one. As you don't have any
reset points, all the missions are all extremely simple and short. Its
annoying to have such a huge world, but then only missions that can be
solved in 5 minutes and are completly local in scope. It would be much
more fun to have a proper quest system and some persistantce in the
game instead of just missions and no persisntance. The final issue I
have is simply that the game doesn't give you anything to do once you
are done with the main quest. You can still drive around, find some
hidden stunt jumps and trade drugs, but there really isn't much of a
reason to do so. Once the story is over you won't receive any new mail
for new missions and the whole world just runs kind of dry. It would be
nice if the game would auto-generate new missions or something to keep
things interesting, but it doesn't.
Overall, is not a perfect
game, the story is just to bad for that, but its a really fun game for
the 12 hours it lasts and for the first time since Mario64DS it felt
like a full game making it to the DS, it makes great use of the
hardware without feeling gimmicky or ugly.
