Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Been there, done that"

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories for the PSP maintains the action and excitement of past titles in the series, but if you've played Grand Theft Auto before, you're not missing out on a whole lot.

The plot of Vice City Stories is an off-shoot from the ps2 game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, where you begin as Vic Vance, an enlisted grunt in the military hoping to pay the bills back home. While you begin underhanded tasks for your commanding officer, things get out of hand quick and you're set upon the city to make a life for yourself. Of course, the game takes place in Vice City in 1984, a city much like Miami, FL.

The game is set in third person, and you're given almost free range to wander the city (or parts of it) at your leisure. You can drive cars by car jacking people driving by in the street, or hopping in a parked car. Driving is fun, and you can crash into things, run people over, or have a car chase if you wish. The game has a solid balance of entertainment on foot or in car, so you can generally keep yourself interested with the sandbox game play by itself.

When you're ready, you can take on missions from various scum bags, gang leaders, or other npc's that will advance the story and unlock more of the map and other game play options. Missions can be very challenging at times, and you might get frustrated at playing a mission over and over again until you beat it.

Once you're able to buy or steal weapons, the combat system is pretty simple. You can lock on to bad guys and shoot em down, or you can free target enemies as well if you wish. There is also hand to hand and melee combat with items like police batons, chainsaws, and baseball bats. Close up gun combat can be frustrating though, as you'll usually get beat down before you have a chance to fire your weapon.

Along with quests, you can join city races, 4 wheeler time trials, and work on building your own empire. At a certain point in the game you'll be able to take over certain buildings and upgrade them into businesses related to money laundering and prostitution, giving you a source of stable income. While you can do mini-missions for your businesses to increase your reputation (and money earned), they're not required and are a bit repetitious.

As far as the PSP is concerned, loading times are always an issue. Thankfully, they are not too bad to deal with with GTA:VCS. If you're driving full speed on the roads, objects have a way of appearing within a very short distance, causing street poles, cars, or other objects immediately popping into view and smashing your car up. However, I don't think I've ever had the game freeze or pause on me, which I was surprised about. The music is awesome like usual, and VCS takes a large variety of 80's music to keep you entertained while driving. Sometimes the radio station will skip because of the PSP load times, but usually when cruising around it doesn't happen.

Missions are creative and maintain the dark humor known in the series, so be aware of the adult themes and language thrown into the game. Racist and derogatory terms are used without abandon, but if you can take that all in stride and laugh at the way GTA pokes fun at our society, you'll be alright.

Overall, I'd give this game for the PSP a 8.0. For the PSP, it's an engineering feat to fit all of this game onto the system AND make it run pretty well. If you've already played GTA a lot, you could pass this title up since it's much of the same. However, if you want a portable GTA game for your PSP, this is the one you'll want to get.

SCORE: 8.0/10