Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories: Review for PSP

If you’ve not heard of the Grand Theft Auto games, then where have you been hiding? The number of clones out there are legion, but is the original still the best? Well, yes. And this PSP almost port of GTA:3 (new storyline, same game engine but tweaked to PSP) does give you the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) experience in a handheld, but it does fail to take account of the all important ‘mobile’ aspect.

You play a hood ( iforget the character name) and you start of with a mission. Get a car somewhere. Drive it somewhere else. And these all build up, with you running two, three, or four missions at a time, all building up different plot strands in teh game world. Yes plot strands - mroe than any otehr PSP game, Liberty City Stories feels as if the world changes around you, things develop, and you feel involved. Top marks for that.

Top marks too for the driving physics. All teh vehicles (from little moped and people carrier to fire engines, roadsters and supercars) have different handling characteristics, and you can throw the cars around, power slide, or be delicate. It’s wonderful.

The game engine and (especially) the controls are let down when you start walking. It’s just to clunky. Aiming and fighting, either handheld or with weaponry, is notoriously hit and miss (pun intended). By having a system that targets only the closest person, albeit automatically, you end up shooting a lot of grannies trying to get to a distant rocket launcher weidling mafioso.

What I do like, alongside the structured missiones, are the side games. There’s nothing more satisfying (to me) in GRand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories to steal a taxi cab and have an illicit game (Crazy Taxi style) of getting people where them want to go. GRab 100 successfull rides and you get the special Bickle Taxi for Taxi Driver fans everywhere to get the joke.

And while people complain about pop-up on teh graphics, and the ever so helpful fog to keep it all at a good speed, teh graphics, for a handheld, are drop dead gorgeous. You would look at these and think ‘on a protable system? No Way!’

Liberty City Stories is a great example of what the PSP can do, and it’s a great game in teh bargain (albeit with long load times and too few convenient times and places for you to save your progress and put your PSP down). Worth picking up now (even though the sequel is here) because the price point is perfect.

Tags: psp, psp review, gta, gta:lcs, grand theft auto, liberty city, liberty city stories