Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

By: Captain Gordon Edward
Review Date: Wednesday, July 26, 2006

If you are looking for Grand Theft Auto 3....2, well welcome to Liberty City Stories. Originally put out for the Sony PSP, Liberty City Stories was the first hit on the system. It showed off what the system could do, and even today it would be my favourite game for the PSP. Its success could only spell one thing, and that was a cross over to the system that originally allowed Grand Theft Auto 3 to live, and that was the PS2. After a long wait, get ready to get even more back-story on a character that could be considered one of the most evil people to live... Toni Cipriani.

Toni is back in town, after having to leave because of some family business. With his return though, he needs to start over the pecking order list all over again, returning to life as a thug. His new boss hates his guts, and his tasks are so low on the totem poll that the jobs are almost suicidal. Of course this is going to cause some friction with this infamous killer, and near the beginning of the game, Toni quits the family. The story continues in its dark fashion, including mass murder, drugs, prostitution, and guys dressing up in bondage. There is a certain level of humour, but nothing too refreshing. The story seemed average for the Grand Theft Auto series, which is great by all means. What were not great were the voiceovers, which seemed to be missing a punch. They got the job done, but nothing jumped out and wowed me.

Some of the missions felt a little lopsided, but that only intensified my resolve to complete them. Sometimes it seemed like the world was against you, which made the missions a little less than fun, and more like a chore. The missions are standard to what you would find in the other games in the series, with stealing cars, and running away from police. The gross amount of missions you will enjoy, leaving you wanting to complete one after another.


Graphically this game is pretty much the same as the PSP game. There is nothing wrong with that, but it does lose out on some details that were included in other Grand Theft Auto games. What I like is how big the game is, considering this was originally only for the PSP system, and this is pretty much a port of it. This game retains its full size, with different sections of the city, which is just like Grand Theft Auto 3.

Continuing with graphics, something that I am not terribly happy about is the interesting way the camera likes to travel around when driving. I prefer more of a top down view and whenever I would set my view with that and speed away it pulled backwards. This made it a little difficult to see what was ahead of me while driving down the streets, especially when it was nighttime.

This problem followed suit when running away from a gang that was armed with guns, while you had a baseball bat. It was difficult to have a more pulled back view to see how many thugs were chasing you. I was mainly interested in this so that I would know when I could stop running away, and return to kick some butt and chew bubblegum. Of course what I mean by kicking butt is using a garbage truck to run over them with. At least it was multitasking, so that I could take out the trash at the same time.

Talking about combat though, it is the same stuff you have all ready played. There is nothing wrong with them, so if it is not broken, there is no need to fix them. The same can be said with the vehicle mechanics, but I felt they seemed a little cartoony, with how many times I could get a car to roll. To keep you on your toes though, the police now employ spike strips to blow out your tires. This makes running away from the police an even greater challenge.

This game has done a lot right, but there have also been a few drawbacks as well. Something that they have done right, possibly better than any of the other Grand Theft Auto games, is the soundtracks of each of the different stations. It seems that this run through the conversations heard over the air are more colourful than ever before and I love it. We are also greeted by Lazlo, once of the iconic characters of the series, continuing to chat it up on Chatterbox. This time though he is upset that this is a real low point in his career. Perhaps it involves one of those drawbacks that I was talking about, involving listening to the radio.

I had noticed that when flipping through the radio stations, not all of them were in order. Sometimes it seemed to flip randomly through channels, rather than cycling through them in order. This occasionally made trying to listen to channel you wanted to hear very difficult. Another thing that kept the music from being perfect was the fact that there was no steady timeline when it came to the radio stations. Every time you would exit and re-enter a vehicle you would be either shifted forward or backwards in the conversation, meaning you were missing out on what you were just listening to. This would not be so bad if you were just sitting in one vehicle like a car, but I personally liked driving around on a motorcycle. Driving in a motorcycle often meant getting thrown off when hitting numerous vehicles as I zipped through traffic, partly because of camera issues. Just as the conversation was getting great, I would lose my place and have to wait quite some time to hear it again. I suppose that would be a good reason to try and buy the soundtrack to the game, if you can find it, but I hoped for more in this game.

Something I think was missed out on this game was multiplayer. I would have loved to play some multiplayer on this game, because it would bring me back to the old 2D games. This would have been the best place to expand upon, because it is something that has been missing from the console games. If it had this feature, I could easily give this game an A, but without it, the game feels like an expansion pack.

In the end this is a game that you will love, if you love all the other Grand Theft Auto games. This feels like a perfect continuation of the Grand Theft Auto series, and something that is very easy to enjoy. This would be the perfect follow up to Grand Theft Auto 3... if we had not seen it progress through Vice City, and San Andreas. I personally can see that soon they will be releasing other story games for these other towns, and if they are anything like this game, they will do the job perfectly. By no means is this a bad game, in fact I love it. It just feels that it came out a little late. All and all, Captain Gordon gives this game a B+.

Comments? Questions? Email me: CaptainGordonEdward@Gmail.com