GTA: Liberty City Stories Review (PSP)

Age rating: 18

What is it?

Driving, kill-em up through the medium of cars, bikes, trucks, guns, emergency vehicles and even a helicopter!

Is it fun?

Yes, apart from the frequent annoying bits.

Is it worth the money? £29.99

Yes, if you like GTA games, otherwise try before you buy, and yes it’s most definitely an 18 rated game.

Why?

It’s all about stealing cars, shooting/stabbing/beating up anyone, doing anything you want in a totally free roaming environment and the bad guys are the cops!

The graphics are pretty good, not stunning but GTA games never looked great as far as looks are concerned. If truth be told the graphics do look a little bit gay. Check out the screenshots below to see what I mean.

The game play is a mixture of missions and general wandering around just doing stuff (mostly bad). The missions vary from easy, walk in the park (and then shooting someone), to being urber hard, requiring the reflexes of a chipmunk on speed due to the excessive police response (helicopters, SWAT teams). In addition, the police are truly psychotic drivers in GTA and come out of nowhere to smash your car into a little, itty-bitty corner of the map, and then your car blows up after some serious pummelling by the cops and then you’re dead. Mission over….Aggghhh….Restart.

This is the most annoying aspect of this game as you frequently become stuck on many of the harder missions, made all the harder by the slightly shoddy (or evil) driver AI giving you the feeling that sometime the PSP really doesn’t want you to complete a mission.

Overall Rockstar Leeds have done a great done in bringing GTA to the PSP with the slow loading times the only noticeable difference from the PS2 versions.

So basically if you like GTA games you’ll love this. Me, it’s a kind of love-hate mix.

Firmware version: 2.00 or greater (i.e. all UK PSPs, as these shipped with firmware 2.0)

Links:

GTA – Liberty City Stories

Screenshots:

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