Grand Theft Auto V

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Having played a few previous GTA 3 and GTA Vice City, I can say that I had never been impressed with Grand Theft Auto. Often, the open world would leave me bored as I would not be drawn into the story enough to keep moving forward. Combined with the time necessary to travel, repetitiveness of the missions, I felt as though I would never play open world games again.

After much time though, I saw the trailer for Grand Theft Auto V. The trailer looked stunning featuring planes, scuba diving, and multiple playable characters. After reading about the improvements Rockstar, the developer, has made in other games (Red Dead Redemption, Midnight Club, and LA Noir) I knew that it would be unfair to write this off as "just another GTA". Upon putting in the disc (PS3), you are greeted with an 8GB installation. This took about 15 minutes on my PS3 Slim, your mileage may vary though. The game immediately begins with the characters in a fantastic tutorial that not only introduces some characters, but also gets you intrigued by the plot early. The tutorial is interesting and fun, though the tutorial text in the upper left of the screen was hard to read on my screen (1080i on a 42" Plasma TV). This was easily supplemented / fixed by the print manual or the iOS "GTA Manual" application but did lead to an unnecessary death rather early in the game.

Upon playing this, you immediately will notice that many of the controls have been refined in comparison to previous GTA games. The shooting feels much tighter (it's easier to aim clearly and quickly, switching weapons is simple and doesn't get in the way), the driving is better (cars and trucks feel as though they drive like the type of car they are. Sports car handle amazingly while a tow truck is much slower and harder to maneuver). This makes for a much more enjoyable experience and thus far in my travels have fixed the issues I have had.

Unlike previous games, this also features one huge update, a quick save/autosave which fixes the need to drive for 15 minutes each time you fail a mission. Now, you can pick it back up and keep trying making the game more involved and less repetitious.

The graphics in Los Santos, the city in which GTA V occurs, are fantastic. Explosions feature depth and clarity, the characters are well detailed and thus far I have not seen any technical issues where textures appear randomly. The views from the different parts of the city are amazing as well, with nice sunsets and sunrise, beautiful villas, and more.

The audio is fantastic as well, featuring Dolby Digital surround sound, which uses all the speakers to create a wonderful and involving soundtrack. Whether providing off-screen directional cues, subtle background noise, or enveloping you in your favorite radio station, Grand Theft Auto V provides a wonderful soundstage.

Overall Grand Theft Auto V feels like a new game. With the revised controls, improved graphics, and new mechanics, I feel like this game address most if not all of the biggest issues I have with open world video games. The story thus far is captivating and enticing and is keeping me coming back for more. I would highly recommend this game even if you do not consider yourself a huge fan of previous entries into the series. I hope you enjoy this game as much as I am.

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First off, this is NOT a game for anyone under 18! Honestly, I can be pretty crude myself, and this game was so shocking and so off-color at first I almost quit playing it. I had to remind myself that this game's intent is to shock and push the envelope, so I continued on and I am so glad I did. Once you get past the first two hours of the "shock" value, the story gets very good, the missions are fun, and even the crudeness dies down. (Mind you there are still parts that will make you cringe, however I think you need to be in the mindset that this game is trying to push your buttons (sorry for the pun). Once I got into the game, i played for 3 days, 10 hours straight and I am only 50% complete at this time. The game is HUGE, and you can always find something to do. I cannot warn you enough to not buy for your kids, even if they are mature; this is hard to take in even as an adult. Make sure you play where no one can hear you as if they don't know the content of the story, they will think you lost your mind or get offended.

If your an adult gamer, and have an open mind, you will love this game.

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Game is fun, blueprint map is high quality and had a nice little secret on it, metal case looks great. The in-game items aren't that great and are a bit of a letdown but aside from that the whole package is fantastic.

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GTA V for me isn't like other games such as the Last of Us or Halo, because while it does have a central story the majority of the memorable moments I had came from just messing around in the game doing your own thing and just having fun experimenting. I've put my thoughts below on each aspect of the game.

STORY

GTA V takes place in a fictional Southern California with some bits of Nevada thrown in to round things out. You experience the story from the perspective of 3 central characters: 1) Michael, the retired bank-robber being pulled back into his old life, 2) Franklin, the street hustler who's got dreams of moving up into the big-time, 3) Trevor, the sociopath drug-dealing best friend of Michael from his bank-robbing days. The general story takes place with the 3 characters all being brought together by bigger events that keep adding up as you play the game. The execution of how the characters are portrayed feels accurate, and its fun getting to have such different mission types between the 3 characters. There is now the option to retry missions and try things out differently next time too with gold rankings to shoot for in each. And don't worry about getting frustrated over some levels which have annoying sequences that you just can't get past fail a part of a mission 3 times and you get the option to skip it. While the storyline itself was sound in terms of game design, I felt that it frankly wasn't a very original story and at times to me felt predictable and cliche. This goes back to my main point that the best part of GTA V isn't the campaign story, it's everything else it's got to offer.

GAMEPLAY

The dynamic switching between the 3 characters really adds a new layer of immersion and variety to the gameplay. Each character starts out with their own skillset, and kind of like Skyrim the more you perform any given activity the better you'll get at it. You drive more to improve your character's driving ability, take flying lessons to get better at flying, run/bike/swim more to build up your stamina, etc. It feels like a very natural process and kind of gives the player goals to work towards as you play the game. The shooting mechanic by default comes with a very generous auto-aim, that makes the game almost too easy in terms of combat, though you can change this. There is a great variety of weapons this time around, with plenty of customization and a shooting range to try them out on.

Driving in terms of technical game design is built fine. The main issue comes from the cars that you have available to use. In fact there are only a handful of cars I even bother looking for to drive because the rest handle so poorly. Part of that I get is by design, since a prius isn't going to handle corners like a dodge viper. Still, I can't help but feel like a lot of the cars I expected to be great to drive felt like a mess on the road (I'm talking about cars like the Diablo aka. Lambo rip-off). I even maxed out my driving skill to make sure it wasn't something missing on my end, but my experience with the cars has been a unfortunate mixed bag. I am very happy with the few cars I did think handle well, and upgraded them immediately and haven't had many issues since then. I personally absolutely hated flying other vehicles like helicopters and especially planes, but I didn't really spend much time practicing flying either.

Special abilities for each character keep things fresh, with Franklin getting a mode where he can slow things down while driving and make precision maneuvers, Trevor getting a rage mode where he can take more and dish out more damage, and Michael getting his own combat boost too. All in all, the gameplay is sound mechanically though it doesn't exactly do much to stand out aside from the special abilities either (which you could argue are borrowed from previous games like Max Payne and others).

SIDE MISSIONS/RANDOM EVENTS

This was by far one of the more engaging parts of the game for me, mostly because of how ridiculous some of they are. Side missions range from the standard stuff like assassinations and street races to new ones like bounty hunting, Trevor's "rage" missions, stealing celebrities clothing, to paparazzi stalking. Side missions are often unique to specific characters, and encourages you to try out and advance each character through each one. I frankly loved them because of just how ridiculous they were and how different they are from the standard stuff you've seen in previous open-world games including previous GTA games. The dialogue and banter on these kinds of missions is just great, and really adds a lot to flesh out the game and make it more immersive. There are also random characters you can encounter that give you some of these side activities and missions (again, specific to each character) and there are also random events that happen like robberies or car thefts that you can choose to intervene in or not. This is very similar to what Rockstar did in Red Dead Redemption with random strangers asking you for help on the road-side that you can choose to help or ignore. You can even stop a thief and keep the stolen money for yourself if you want.

HEISTS

The big heists are what are always shown off in the game trailers, and they are definitely plenty of fun because of the planning you have to do before you can pull it off. You get to do everything from picking your crew, opting for the more qualified but higher cost members or going for the cheaper ones of questionable quality. Even how you set-up the heist matters, and will give you different results/rewards based on how well you pull things off. It gives you a great reason to go back and try things differently with a replay, and frankly makes it feel like a more authentic experience similar to most crime movies. The great set-piece moments keep things fun, though like most things they lose a bit of their luster after you've seen it the first few times. I love the fact that you can switch around between the characters on the heists, and see things from a different perspective and always get to try out the really cool parts of each heist that each character gets to do. Not much else I can say about the heists beyond this, since I want to keep this fairly spoiler free.

IMMERSION/THE WORLD OF GTA

Rockstar did a fantastic job recreating Los Angeles, speaking as someone living in LA right now. All the big recognizable landmark locations are there, from the Griffith Observatory to the Promenade and the Hollywood sign. When I say they have it down, I mean I was able to literally walk to the exact area where I took a picture at the observatory overlooking downtown, down to the staircase and pillars. They did their homework, and it absolutely shows in several parts of the game. There are lots of activities to do including shopping, tennis (one of my favorites), yoga, golf, hunting, marathons, mountain biking, flying, shooting, etc. There's plenty to keep you entertained for a while, and that's not counting other things like playing the stocks or buying up real-estate. I love how tied together the world is, and it feels like you're living in a continuously moving world that's reacting to your actions. For example, if you lets say go out of your way to deface/devalue a company and buy up stock in their competitor you can catch the news to see stock prices jump around and reap the rewards. Even just switching between the characters shows them going on living their lives when you're not controlling them. Trevor was driving around still in a semi-truck from a mission that he was in when I was playing as Michael.

It's the little details like that which go a long way to making you feel like Los Santos is a living breathing world. Even just taking a walk around town and overhearing strangers can give you a good laugh, not to mention going in to see a shrink. It's because of how great a job Rockstar does with the little things that it makes it all the more apparent when they do drop the ball. There are a lot of buildings you can't go into, and plenty you cannot interact with. I went down to the Santa Monica pier and couldn't go into the main restaurants there, or go into many restaurants anywhere really. This isn't like Skyrim where nearly every person you run across has a story to tell. What GTA does offer is great, it's just a shame that after 5 years in development there's not more of it. The world size itself is huge, though to be fair the actual city part of it isn't exactly huge and sprawling. I appreciate all the wilderness and desert terrain since it adds some diversity in my opinion, but some people might find it boring.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

The graphics are absolutely a solid step above GTA IV. But honestly compared to other games out today this isn't anything to write home about. I found the facial animations for anyone outside of the main characters to be very lacking in cutscenes and gameplay alike. But I understand that concessions have to be made to run such a huge open world without load times (except for the really long one when you first start it up). It's not an ugly game by any means, and there's a lot of great looking parts to it. It runs incredibly smoothly on what is now pretty old hardware for the consoles, and that's a great achievement. Rockstar clearly put in some serious time for optimization on the framerate front and it is much appreciated. It helps keep things rolling even in high action scenes unlike many other open-world games that start to chug.

The sound design is absolutely fantastic, from the radio station selections to the voiceover quality and variety. Rockstar clearly put in some extra money here and it shows, with the game always feeling authentic sound-wise from street sounds to cars to environmental noises in the wilderness. Rockstar absolutely nailed this, and I think it'll absolutely set a bar for future open-world games to hit. One slight downside is that listening to the same few radiostations means you're probably going to know every song the station can play pretty early on into the game. Not the biggest deal in the world, but more songs are always appreciated and they could easily be updated with new DLC content down the road too.

ONLINE/MULTIPLAYER

This is the main reason why I haven't given GTA a 5 star rating, because how GTA Online is going to play out is largely unknown. While based on the trailer it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun, it's simply not out yet for me to pass judgement on and so I'm going to defer giving my final score until I see what Rockstar has to offer on this front.

WRAP-UP

GTA V is a lot of fun with a rich open-world to explore and keep yourself entertained in for hours on end. Is it perfect, no, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot to offer. It's the random crazy things that happen to you along the way that I remember most. Here's 1 of my most memorable moments. I started out driving down sunset blvd in a new mercedes SL that I just bought for Franklin since he just wrapped up a big heist and had some spending money. I got it all tricked out with the latest engine upgrades and a fresh paint job to top it off. As I pulled out of the auto-shop my screen flashed and the opportunity came up for me to stop a thief. So I did my civic duty and ran the guy down in my shiny new car and went to bring the poor guy his wallet. What ends up happening is a car I didn't see rams into me and pushes me into the poor guy waiting for his wallet and the police car sirens started to screech. I was already up at 2 stars and they were gunning right behind me. Thankfully I had my upgraded car to help me make a quick getaway at first, but then some cop cars slid around to stop me and I accidentally rammed right into several street cops at a barrier, up to 4 stars. Now the cops were really gunning for me, and I ended up driving up a parking structure all the way to the top to help avoid the chopper on my tail. I shot out the pilot of the chopper and saw it crash down into some more cop and FBI cars below, 5 stars. Only way off that roof was courtesy of a stunt ramp which I happily revved up my engine to take. After gunning it for the jump I ended up doing a flip and landing perfectly (completely by accident), and making my way to a construction site to hide out. I found a nice little corner tucked away from site, and decided to go and check my stocks, make a few trades, and rush right back out to avoid the cop car getting a little too close. I end up making a run for the mountains hitting ever winding turn at near top speed thanks to my car's upgrades. I see a nice place in the woods to go hide the car and watch the choppers and FBI scramble around to find me. Then I get out of my car, behind the "Hollywood" sign and take in the sights before making my way back to Franklin's mansion. That was all a completely unscripted random event, and though it doesn't always work out this neatly it sure it a lot of fun every time.

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What can you really say about the GTA series, every new title just steps the franchise up to the next level. I did not expect much from this game as I felt they had reached the max capabilities of the current generation of consoles, but my god did they prove me wrong. If you want to be truly awe struck just get the game, go to the beach and watch the water. It is so lifelike that you will be questioning if you are really playing a video game. Rockstar really did their homework with this one, it is a beautiful world that has plenty to do.

The story line and characters in the game are just as amazing as the enviroment itself, you really get drawn into the characters problems and you feel as though you have a lot on the line.

If you are looking for a game that has no limits, this is the one for you. San Andreas really is a world all of its own, you have the choice to do whatever it is you would like, from flying to driving, to jogging or yoga, this game really has something for everyone.