Much like other versions of the game, screenshots barely do it justice. Liberty City in motion on the iPhone is amazing, and all the jagged edges in the screenshots quickly fade away when you’re racing down a street, under elevated train tracks, and through alleys as you escape the police. The realtime clock in-game also changes the lighting of the city, shifting from the orange glow of a sunset to the street lights turning on at night. It really looks awesome.

The basic premise of the game involves a man named Huang Lee, the son of a Triad gang boss who was recently sent to sleep with the fishes. He flies in to Liberty City with a heirloom sword his father won in a poker game, deciding to deliver it to his uncle. Of course things never go as planned, and not long after landing Huang finds himself in the middle of a gunfight and winds up getting kidnapped. After stealing the sword, the assailants assume Huang is dead, and looking to dispose of the body drive the car he’s in off the side of a pier. In the same vein of other GTA games, story isn’t really anything revolutionary, but it gets the job done.

Chinatown Wars is controlled very similar to Gameloft’s Gangstar, with virtual buttons and a joystick that handle all the driving, running, shooting, and other activities in game. The iPhone port of Chinatown Wars retains the stylus minigames that filled the DS version, appearing in a little popups where you do things like tap to smash the window of the car you were trapped in at the beginning of the game, slide your finger around to turn a screwdriver to start a car you’re stealing, etc.

When the Nintendo DS version was first released, I devoted hours to playing through the game. So far the iPhone port seems like a faithful reproduction with quite a few expletives. I obviously don’t have the full text scripts of both games to compare, but everything I’ve come across so far has fit with what you would expect out of a GTA game, and it would appear that very little if anything was actually censored for the App Store release.

Chinatown Wars seems to be a complete GTA experience. You have your apartment that serves as your character’s hub with a “Fruit” computer you can check emails on, a garage you can stash a car in, and when you’re on the road there is a full GPS system with a map of Liberty City that you can plot your destination on to easily get from one side of the city to the other. There’s all kinds of stat tracking that will tell you everything from how many bullets you’ve fired to how many fish you’ve fed and in-game options that offer all kinds of different tweaks to the interface and gameplay.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

We weren’t initially sure if this release was intentional, as we expected some amount of pre-release fanfare from Rockstar, but we are going to be working on a full review of this version of the game.

App Store Link: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, .99

The post GTA: Chinatown Wars Out in US First Impressions & Video appeared first on AppTrawler.

For the time being, here are the screenshots from iTunes:

App Store Link: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, .99 – Currently available in European countries only.

The post Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Euro debate appeared first on AppTrawler.

There are few good excuses for driving like a maniac, but having just robbed a bank is one of them. With a hostage in the back seat and a phalanx of wailing sirens on your tail, a few swerves and dodgy corners are inevitable.

In Car Jack Streets it’s not the post-felony frenzy that makes the driving erratic, but rather the controls. No matter how badly you may want to play in these streets, any desire to explore this great-looking sandbox adventure is flattened by an awkward interface.

A million dollars in gambling debts catch up with Randal in the opening moments of Car Jack Streets. At the behest of Randal’s Uncle Murphy, you’re thrust into a world of crime as a last resort to pay back mob boss Frankie.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, you have to fork over in one week more than most of us make in an entire year: $50,000 has to reach Frankie each week in order to absolve your debt.

Car Jack Streets plays in real-time, so a week translates to an actual seven day period. When you begin a new game, you first payment is due exactly seven days from when you started. $50,000 is quite a chunk of change and acquiring that much money means working your butt off in a variety of missions.

Jacking cars and dropping them off at a chop shop nets you quick cash, as do more involved violent actions like mowing down a group of gang bangers or serving as the getaway driver for a bank heist. There are also benign missions like protecting city hall from thugs, running a public bus route, and filling in for an ambulance driver. If variety is the spice of life then Car Jack Streets tastes like curry.

Accomplishing these missions, however, is difficult due to an obtuse interface. A GPS function enables you to set destinations via a list of locations, yet there’s no map of the city available. Setting the GPS prompts an arrow that points to your location instead, but it does so as the crow flies. Without a map for reference, you frequently get caught in dead ends until you learn the map.

One wrong turn can cripple your chances of completing a mission, turning a minor annoyance to a serious design flaw. While it’s understandable that a mini-map isn’t included as a measure to avoid cluttering the interface, a map of the city accessible from the GPS pause menu would be extremely helpful for identifying bridges and dead ends.

Control problems mar otherwise entertaining gameplay; specifically, the vehicle controls leave much to be desired. Instead of absolute steering in which pressing left or right on the buttons turns your car toward the left or right of the screen, the controls move your vehicle left and right relative to the position of the car.

In other words, if you’re heading south and press the right key you actually turn left because the car turns to its right – not the right side of the screen. As our own Rob Hearn remarked when he reviewed the mobile version, the awkwardness eventually passes, but Car Jack Streets‘s control scheme is likely to split opinion.

The option to use different control schemes would make it infinitely more playable for those who find the relative system counter-intuitive.

It’s not a game-breaker by any means, but along with the dodgy GPS it manages to take some of the sheen off Car Jack Streets‘s finish. As much as you may want it to hijack your spare time, this is a game that would have benefited from a tune up before hitting the streets.

The post Car Jack City Review appeared first on AppTrawler.