Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories
You were looking for a reason to buy a PSP. This is it. Our biggest review to date.
Published: November 1, 2005
They did it. Holy shit, they actually did it. After the announcement of a GTA game on the PSP, I, like many, wondered what the game would even look like. It could have been a top-down throwback to the older games, but with a storyline to help flesh it out. It could have been a scaled-down version of one of the cities we’ve already seen, perhaps broken down into sections and certainly not streaming off the UMD.
PSP games can’t be streamed off the UMD, it’ll kill the battery, right? Right?
Oh how wrong I was. Liberty City Stories is Grand Theft Auto III made portable and without a single compromise to the experience. I can’t hammer home that point enough: this is GTA3, right down to the smallest nook and cranny of Liberty City, but made better by many of the additions to the gameplay that the subsequent games have brought. It’s everything you could have hoped for in a remake and about three games’ worth of content more. Stop reading this and go buy it. Now.
I loved GTA3, not so much because of the characters or the overall storyline, though they were a refreshing bit of mafia-tinged errands. No, it was the city itself that I really fell in love with, and spent literally hundreds of hours over the years just driving around, sometimes causing mayhem here and there, but usually just on the hunt for a juicy slope just itching for some hotshot to catch some air off of.
It was the progression through this mock New York that worked so well, plopping you right into the heart of the seediest parts of the city and giving you ample time to explore all the side streets and shortcuts that littered the areas from the Red Light District to the Docks. The game always let you know there was more out there, but for the first few hours, it was more than content to let you learn your neighborhood first.
When I finally did graduate to the next part of the city, it really dawned on me how massive this world was, and even though the skyscrapers and choked streets of the financial district would eventually give way to more residential houses and twisting, mountainous lanes, it was these first two parts of the city and the stark contrast that they provided that held me captured with such force that even four years later I still bust the game out from time to time.
Well, until now. Now, I have something sitting in my PSP that affords all of this and with none of the compromises I had to make by going back to the first free-roaming sandbox the series had to offer. Now, I can benefit from all the things that have been added to the series over the years. I can take a cab right back to get missions again – a godsend later on when you can die a bridge or two away from the original assignment. I can dive out of moving cars, I can shoot out tires and hit drivers through the windshield.
I can ride motorcycles now. Oh, God, this city was MADE for ripping around in on a sport bike, and taking all the familiar jumps with – but the new ones are even better. It’s literally a best-of take on the best city the series has offered, a combination of the best tweaks to ease frustration with a city so packed with personality that it never seems to get old. It’s taking everything in me to not pick up the PSP sitting to my right and play again. I’ve already failed this test twice.
