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Rockstar Games’ premiere title debuts on PSP. Grand Theft Auto III is arguably the most influential game of this generation. It created an expansive, living world that is replicated in so many other games today. Successive iterations improved on the formula, granting Rockstar Games the ability to be one of the most successful publishers of the generation. With Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Rockstar Games hoped to bring the entire console experience to a handheld and reenergize the console. They certainly succeeded.
As the name implies, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories takes place in Grand Theft Auto III’s Liberty City. This means that you’ll have access to all three of the islands that made up the PS2 (and PC and Xbox) versions of the game complete with every single sidewalk, alleyway and structure present. In the game you play as the Leone’s family Toni Cipriani. Since the game takes place a few years before Grand Theft Auto III, this is when Toni was just starting up, taking on lowly missions before becoming the big-time mobster he was in that game. In typical Rockstar fashion, the story is excellently directed and voiced.
The gameplay should be familiar to Grand Theft Auto fans. The game features a massive environment that you can interact with, whether this means that you’ll steal cars, beat up on citizens, or cause havoc to attract the police’s attention. If you want to continue the story, you’ll participate in a series of missions. The missions are given to you by people you meet in the game who usually want to help themselves and hire you to make sure it happens. When you meet this person, their name will appear on the map so you can go back to them for more missions or take missions from another person since the game is fairly nonlinear. The actual missions are pretty varied. They range from excellent to mediocre and from one goal to three goals per mission. You’ll usually have to kill a number of people, participate in some vehicle activities, and stuff of the sort. There are some weirder missions, too, like helping a lunatic become mayor or killing off celebrities. You’ll also get to use boats and motorcycles in the game to accomplish your goals.
The game’s missions take about ten minutes to complete but each includes about two minutes of loading and about five more minutes of transportation to get to the actual mission. This is a bit annoying when you die since you’ll have to travel all the way back, unless you want to take the taxi and lose your armor and weapons. The game includes three safe houses to save your game in, which is a bit disappointing after the countless save houses that San Andreas included. That said, the actual transportation for the game’s countless vehicles is very smooth. The game includes cars, motorcycles, and boats and more specifically, ambulances, trucks, vans, big rigs and armored vehicles, among many others. They all handle very distinctly and very well.
The other gameplay mechanics did very well in the conversion from PlayStation 2 to PSP. The targeting system in the game isn’t perfect, but it has never been in the Grand Theft Auto series. The auto targeting system works pretty well for the most part, although it will sometimes target people who you don’t want to target, causing you to lose precious time. This is further complicated since the game doesn’t let you move around when shooting unless you’re carrying a light gun. The camera is pretty good in GTA: LCS, though it will take some time to get used to maneuvering the camera with holding the L button and using the analog stick.
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories includes a complete offline wireless multiplayer mode, a first for the series. Although there have been third-party modifications made to include multiplayer this is the first time Rockstar Games actually included it in the package. The multiplayer mode is quite extensive since it lets you run around in the massive islands of the game with the same freedom that the single player mode grants players. All of the weapons (and upgrades like radar invisibility and mega damage) from the singleplayer portion can be found lying around the map. Aside from killing each other in the massive islands, players can also engage in street races in the “Street Rage” mode. The “Tanks for Memories” modes tasks you with finding a tank and staying inside it for as long as possible as you avoid rocket launcher-carrying opponents. In “Get Stretch,” you have to steal limos and in “Protection Racket” you protect limos from attack. On a technical level, the game’s engine manages to keep up with multiplayer thought there were some frame rate drops here and there. This comes at an expense to battery life though; the game will only let you play multiplayer for about three hours.
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories really pushes the PSP. It outputs the entire cities with all of the detail found in the console version. All of the character and vehicle models have also been very well ported to the PSP. The game appears a bit less lively than the console versions but nonetheless you can tell that you’re in a living city.The game runs at a basically unhindered 30 frames per second although there are a few frame rate drops in the game when things get too hectic. For the most part though the game will impress you with how well it runs. The game’s load times are also pretty generous considering the size of the game. It’ll load when you change islands, load a save, enter an indoor location or begin a cutscene. Thankfully, there are no one-minute long load times a la Midnight Club 3. Of course, all of this technical wizardry comes at a cost to the PSP’s battery life. The game will play for about four hours in single player.
The sound package is equally impressive. As I mentioned above, all of the dialogue is excellently written and superbly acted. This really helps push the story along and immerses the player. The sound effects are standard GTA fare but sound convincing nonetheless. As expected, the soundtrack is where the audio truly shines. There are a number of stations, each with seven or so licensed tracks spanning boy bands, rock, hip hop and talk among others. Each station also features a DJ that really brings life to the game. In addition, the radio stations will occasionally play news bulletins that detail your recent actions.
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories is hardly a perfect game. The game has a number of mishaps and annoyances, some of them which are borderline frustration. For a typical game, this would be enough to keep it from being undoubtedly recommendable. But GTA: LCS does so much by featuring a console-like Grand Theft Auto experience on a handheld that these rough edges are simply forgotten by everything the game does right. If you’ve been trying to rationalize a PSP purchase, this is definitely the game that will do it for you.
-- Jose Liz & -- Adam Nunez, PGNx Media
---- Oct 27, 2005
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