Rockstar Energy Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories PlayStation Portable (Sony PSP)

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories PlayStation

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Oct 21, 2006 | 5 out of 5 found this Rockstar Energy Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories PlayStation Portable review helpful

Pros: Crams all of Liberty City onto a UMD; load times are quite manageable; good sense of humor from the radio stations; captures a lot of the cool stuff from the grand theft auto series.

Cons: Unstable frame rate; dull mission design; storyline never really goes anywhere; occasionally feels more like a gta iii expansion pack than an entirely new game

Call it Grand Theft Auto Gaiden. While there have been handheld takes on the GTA series in the past, none of them have ever properly captured the things that made the modern installments in the series so popular. Things like the sprawling environment...s, its fast-action freestyle mayhem, and, of course, the series' great sense of humor just haven't come across on a handheld before. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories is not without its problems, either; but it gets enough of the series' signature features in there to do you right. Toni Cipriani is a no-nonsense kind of guy. Liberty City Stories brings you back to Rockstar's fictional take on New York City, first seen this way in 2001's revolutionary GTA III. This time around, the year is 1998, and you play the role of a returning wise guy named Toni Cipriani, who works for Salvatore Leone. Upon your return to town, you get right back to work, because the Leone crime family is about to start getting it from all sides. As you ascend to become Salvatore's right-hand man, you'll start and finish gang wars with other mafia types, a few triads, the yakuza...pretty much all of the usual suspects are present. If you're familiar with the various mafia presences over the course of the past three GTA games, you'll recognize a few of the names and faces here. But the story stands alone and doesn't require you to remember the various cast members. That's a good thing, because the mafia characters in the other GTA games have been largely forgettable. The game's storyline really isn't up to par with the console installments in the series, because very little actually happens. Even potential plot points, like when Toni finally becomes a made man, are squandered by a bad cutscene that doesn't actually show the ceremony. The game's mission path doesn't deviate into crazy territory, and most of the characters are fairly lifeless. There are no enigmatic weirdos like Truth, the crazy hippie from San Andreas, or Steve Scott, the porno director from Vice City, to break up the heavier-handed mafia tasks. This dulls the game's personality, preventing its characters and events from becoming as memorable as we've come to expect from GTA games and their excellent storylines. Read more Less