Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

About This Game

Gameplay

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is an action-adventure game set in an open world environment. It has a different presentation from previous games in the series, by partially resembling the first Grand Theft Auto titles. Instead of a ground-level view behind the protagonist or a top-down perspective, Chinatown Wars uses a fully rotatable camera angled down at the action. Chinatown Wars also uses cel-shaded polygons with black outlines to produce a comic book-like aesthetic—a first for the series. The title takes place in a scaled-down rendition of Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City, with the exception of Alderney. Unlike Grand Theft Auto IV, the player can lose wanted stars by destroying police cars to escape the police instead of leaving a "wanted zone". The more stars the player has, the more police they have to take out for each level. For example, for a six star level, they have to take out six police cars to get down to a five star wanted level and so on. There is also a drug dealing sub plot which allows players to peddle heroin, acid, ecstasy, marijuana, cocaine and depressants around the city.

History

On 15 July 2008, at a Nintendo press conference, it was announced that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars would be released on the Nintendo DS in the following winter. The game contains over 900,000 lines of "hand-optimized" code.