PC Game | Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories

Rockstar has once again revisited a previous title's setting. Vice City Stories takes place two years prior to the events of the original PlayStation 2 game, and essentially works as some sort of an introduction to GTA: Vice City. It's a much bigger game in almost every way than the first GTA Stories release, Liberty City Stories, though once again the PlayStation 2 port of the PSP game does nothing to take advantage of the system's stronger hardware.
Still though, it's Grand Theft Auto through and through. By that we mean that while things have been cleaned up or expanded a bit here or there from Liberty City Stories, it's still largely the same game that we first saw with Grand Theft Auto III. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you've begun to grow tired of the franchise's mechanics, mission structure or overall feel, this won't renew your love of the series.

In fact, after remembering our time with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, we can't help but feel that Vice City Stories isn't quite everything it could be. Sure, the handheld version was a big technical improvement over Liberty City Stories, but there's nothing substantially new to the series here and once again it comes off feeling weak on the PlayStation 2. We suppose that'll have to wait for Grand Theft Auto IV, and we're more than willing to hold our breath, but it seems like this would be the perfect platform, literally and figuratively speaking, for some new experimentation. Being able to swim this time out is nice, but we've seen that before and it really just feels like we're getting something back that we've already had.

As mentioned, Vice City Stories makes a number of technical improvements over what we saw with Liberty City Stories last year. The framerate has been improved a bit, maybe not leaps and bounds on average, but it's a little steadier than last time out. It's certainly not perfect, as the game does chug a bit here and there, but we suppose that's the case with most games in the series. There's a little more detail to be seen in nearly every facet of the game - from the characters to vehicles to the environments, Vice City Stories is a more intricate looking title than the last title.

There's also a tiny bit less pop-in than before, which was a pretty big problem last time out, but it's still far from perfect. Cars and pedestrians fade into view a couple hundred feet in front of you, and buildings and such pop into view as you drive forward. Fortunately, it's a little better than what we saw in Liberty City Stories as things generally don't just appear right in front of you, but it can still happen from time to time. It's somewhat odd that this seems to plague the PS2 version of the game significantly more than the PSP title.

Vice City Stories brings with it the same driving physics system that we've seen slowly become refined since Grand Theft Auto III. It's responsive yet wiley, fast and yet controllable, completely unrealistic and yet really damn fun. In other words, you'll have just as much fun flying down the streets of Vice City as you did the first time around.

The game includes the same "mission acceleration" options that we've seen in the past few games, namely Quick Trip and the taxis that await you after failing a mission. Quick Trip allows you to skip the non-action driving sections of a mission, which is nice in theory though it isn't always available when you'd think it should be. The taxi system returns, where a cab will wait for you outside of a hospital or prison and will take you back to the starting point of the mission you just failed. The old problem of being ill-equipped has been addressed this time in that you can bribe the police to buy back all of your confiscated weapons. It's not exactly cheap, but it can be a big time saver.