Pete Hindle

I had Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on my iPhone for about 72 hours before I deleted it.

GTA:CW is supposed to be one of the best games out there for the iPhone. It offers an immersive world, with full sandbox features, and it’s a continuation of one of the best game franchises around. So why is it so terrible on the iPhone? It’s not a straight port of it’s earlier incarnation on the Nintendo DS, but a well-crafted rejigging of the game for the iPhone’s particular aesthetic.

What it fails to do is to take into account the situation it will be played in. The most successful iPhone games offer the chance to step out of whatever mode you are in (say “waiting for the bus” mode) and indulge in some frantic button-bashing. Nobody can resist the simple charms of Canabalt (also available online as a free flash game), but GTA:CW is a far more complex affair. And, as a more complex affair, it suffers from needing more complex controls.

It’s been mentioned in other reviews that GTA on the iPhone suffers from control issues. This is true. It’s almost impossible to control the game “in the heat of the moment”, and I struggled to drive cars around corners when not being chased by the police. It was like playing whilst wearing gloves, and led to a lot of aggravation when trying to complete some of the missions.

This game cost me six pounds, and unlike nearly every other game I’ve brought (on any platform) I realised it was a lemon. I think what really did it was the inclusion of mini-games, something I’ve always found annoying. Why would I want to break the flow of one activity I’ve committed to to play another, smaller game? This was an essential flaw in all of the later Final Fantasy games following FF7 – if I wanted to play cards, I’d play a card game. Quit wasting my time. Similarly, if I want to buy molotov cocktails, I will resent any time spent playing the “make molotov cocktails” game. Particularly the little stroking motion required to stuff the rag into the bottleneck.

This is a game that demands attention, but this is the wrong format for that. iPhone games are about distraction, not immersion, and GTA:CW requires you to log in some long hours, focusing on a (simulated) life of crime. If it had an adequate control system, allowing you to rampage across the city (as the earlier console versions did) then I could forgive it and utilise it as a cathartic release. But it doesn’t, and I can’t.

GTA Chinatown Wars might be the iPhone game most likely to appeal to hardcore gamers. For everybody else, it’s a bad introduction to what gaming can be.