Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

June 13,2006 - Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories came out last year for the PSP and became an immediate hit, as had all of its predecessors. It was the first portable GTA game that had the 3D GTA feel to it and that was a selling point alone. We at Amped IGO love Grand Theft Auto. On numerous occasions—well, three—we have awarded the GTA series our highest honors of the Editor’s Choice award. The first one to break the mold was Liberty City Stories last year. It wasn’t a bad game by any means, in fact it was as good as could have been expected on such a unfriendly 3D platform. So what happens when you bring a slightly handicapped version of GTA from the PSP to the PS2? Well, it’s not always pretty.

Liberty City Stories is essentially the same game as it was a year ago. All of the same missions, characters, and music are all there; in essence, if you’ve played the PSP version, you already played the best one on the store shelves. However, if you haven’t played Liberty City Stories yet, there are a number of reasons why you should definitely pick this game up despite its glaring flaws.

First and foremost, Rockstar has packaged Liberty City Stories for the PS2 at a nice $20 price mark. The PSP version is selling for twice that at retailers. Considering you can play this one on a much bigger display and on a more comfortable system makes it worth it. That being said, however, the game looks worse in every way on the PS2 than it did on the PSP. You might be wondering how that’s possible given the PS2’s technical superiority, but imagine taking a picture on your computer that was about three inches big, blowing it up to fifty inches, and that’s what you get with Liberty City Stories. It’s a big blurry, murky mess at times.

The game puts you in the role of Tony Cipriani, a small-time mobster working for the Leone family. Now if you’ve played Grand Theft Auto III, then you should recognize the Leone family. In fact, most of the main characters in the game are straight from GTA III, and so is Liberty City. Tony Cipriani is a cool character on one hand, but on the other hand he just feels like the same guy you played in Vice City combined with the man with no name from GTA III.

From a gameplay standpoint, Liberty City Stories is pretty standard fare. It’s more or less the same thing you played in GTA3, except maybe a bit stripped down. The mission structure never really surpasses the first bit you get into in each GTA game. You’ll do a lot of picking up cars and bringing them somewhere, or you’ll go out and have to kill a guy, or maybe even a group of guys. It never gets into the epic bouts that you may be familiar with if you played San Andreas, or even Vice City for that matter.

There’s nothing here that sets Liberty City Stories in the same league as past GTA games, and as you can imagine, since it’s running as a PSP port, it looks quite bad. This is, no doubt, the worst looking GTA game yet. If you played GTA III through San Andreas and were turned off by the less than perfect graphics before, then you probably will not want to play Liberty City Stories. Blocky characters, sluggish framerate, and bad textures define LCS, and quite frankly the city shows its age.

If this is going to be your first GTA game you may want to skip this outing and start at the beginning of the GTA revolution, that being the Grand Theft Auto III. You can find it for the same price, or even less if you shop the used racks. Conversely, if you’ve wanted to re-explore Liberty City and don’t have a PSP, this is the game for you. Despite most of the game being less than phenomenal, it still is a good game and doesn’t do much wrong to the series. It’s a game that is absolutely worth the price charged, but definitely not worth anything more than that. GTA: Liberty City Stories is a short, less-than-perfect experience that could have used another year or so in the oven for fine-tuning. It’s a dish best served on a handheld where standards are lower.

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