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It’s been a long time coming, but the phenomenally popular Grand Theft Auto series has finally made it to the Game Boy Advance. There have been portable renditions of GTA before, but they all failed to capture the feel and pace that made the big screen versions so much fun. Thankfully, Grand Theft Auto for Game Boy Advance not only takes everything that made the original top-down GTA games fun, it also includes a lot of the elements seen in the latest console versions of the series.

This addition to the GTA library has been in the works for what seems like ages now. Plenty of delays marred the games development cycle, and its seen more developers than I care to remember. Finally, though, Digital Eclipse got their hands on the project, and they’ve come out with something solid, and definitely worthy of the mark of the GTA franchise.

GTA for the Game Boy Advance follows the same structure as every other game in the GTA series, but more so of the first 2 installments, which played from a top-down bird’s eye view. The GBA version boasts the same go-anywhere, do-anything style of gameplay within a massive city that made the franchise famous. Also included is the ability to run over random pedestrians, slaughter countless innocents, and be an all-round badass. Needless to say, most of what makes GTA fun on your TV is kept well intact in your pocket.

The story of the GBA game takes place in Liberty City, which many of you will remember from GTA 3. You take control of Mike, a man desperate to get out of his life of crime. Unfortunately, his friend, and partner who’s suppose to get out of town with him, gets offed (killed). Well, things get better for poor ol’ Mike as becomes a suspect in the killing of his friend. The story will take you to deeper into your partners assassination, and to know killed him, and why. The story is pretty well told, though the ‘cut scenes’ that tell the story couldn’t possibly be more boring. The story is told through still pictures of character heads with dialogue placed at the bottom of the screen.

To make it through the games story, you’re forced to progress via a linear set of missions which move the story along rather nicely, and at a good pace. Much like the other GTA games, missions vary greatly in terms of your objective. One time you’ll have to deliver money to a pick up spot for the mob, while another time you may have to drop off some hookers to their ‘johns’. The setup is basically the same for every mission: go to point a and do something, or go to point a, then point b, etc. The fact that your mission objective is different every time is what keeps the game feeling fresh throughout. You won’t find anything much different than the previous GTA games, but you loved them, so it’s sort of like ‘don’t fix what’s not broken’, right?

Much like the console versions of the game, running straight through the main storyline isn’t the only thing there is to do. You can still take part in optional side quests, like vigilante missions, ambulance missions, taxi missions, etc. Pretty much, if you remember it from GTA 3 or Vice City, then you’ll be able to look forward to playing it in here. Also included are the checkpoint races from the console versions, though, to be honest, they aren’t too much fun. It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that the races are made artificially harder by the inclusion of all the traffic on the streets.

Combat is pretty basic, handled with your usual lineup of weaponry. You’ll have pistols, baseball bats, shotguns, flamethrowers etc. at your disposal throughout the game that makes wreaking havoc on Liberty City all the more easy. All of these weapons behave just as you would expect them to, though learning how to aim correctly takes a bit of getting used to. I spent the first little while during the game missing my target completely, which lead to many a police officer casually running into me and busting me while I sprayed bullets into what I thought was suppose to be him. After a bit of fiddling and dead innocents, I got a hang of things, and now I can lay waste with the best of ‘em.

Anyone who played the original GTA or GTA 2 will fondly (or not so fondly, as the case may be) remember the strange control scheme of up always being forward. This wasn’t always the best way to control your character, since you could easily lose your barings within the game and end up running into random things. Thankfully, DE took note and has updated the controls to allow you to just press whatever direction you want to move. Left is left, right moves you right… revolutionary stuff, eh? None the less, the update is a welcome one, and helps the game play a lot nicer than the old school predecessors.

Controlling the vehicles hasn’t really changed much from what you may remember from the older games, but it’s handled nicer this time around. While turning, vehicles now lean into the turn, giving them a much better sense of weight. Vehicles can now also be flipped if they are T-boned or hit at excessive speeds. While this may sound like a nice addition to the glued-to-the-floor cars of GTA of old, it seems to be randomly generated when a car will flip or not. I hit a car from behind once, at a decent speed, but nothing very fast, and the vehicle flipped. Other times, you can T-bone someone at max speed and nothing happens. Had they taken a bit more time to better implement the new car ‘physics’, it could have been presented in a much nicer fashion that it actually is.

Visually, GTA doesn’t really breach any new ground, but what it does is competently recreate the same look and feel of the original GTA titles. Buildings jut out toward the screen, giving them a sense of height, and there are numerous car styles in the game. Most of the games animations are handled fairly well, and mostly pretty smooth. The frame rate tends to be a bit sketchy at times where there are a lot of sprites on screen at once, but otherwise runs rather nicely.

GTA sounds pretty good on the GBA, though again, nothing to write home about. Each car style has a different style of ‘radio’, which I assume is meant to implement the radio stations that make up the soundtrack to GTA 3 and Vice City, as well as San Andreas. The actual music that plays isn’t all too inspired, and it’s mostly just background noise as you drive. Police radio is rather impressive in that the CB will now pick up on the color of the vehicle you’re driving when reporting your whereabouts to the police. There’s very little voice acting in the game, only coming from random pedestrians as you smash into their cars. I think it would have helped move the story along a lot better if it was told via voice, but I’m sure the limitations of the GBA hardware would argue otherwise.

After all the waiting and all the guessing, the title we are finally offered for GTAs Game Boy Advance outing is a competent recreation of what makes the game so much fun on home consoles. A few glaring issues stop the game from being truly great, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had for long time fans of the series looking for a bit of portable anarchy.