This is definitely the most beautiful, expansive and generous GTA sport and, by some distance, the nastiest and most nihilistic. Rockstar went through a stage, in Bully, Grand Theft Auto IV along with the regrettably console-bound Red Dead Redemption, of framing their protagonists as anti-heroes. GTA 4 Niko Bellic did some horrible things, but he had a downtrodden charm that helped you enjoy him as you chased him through the underworld. He was surrounded by men and women who were larger-than-life but finally, under the surface, individuals.
Its trio of protagonists occupy a town full of vapid, two-dimensional caricatures, and they flirt with that boundary themselves. Michael is a midsize former bankrobber, unhappily married and on the edge of a breakdown. Franklin is a young hood, purportedly principled but eager to do almost anything for cash. The campaign explores their connection through a string of heists and misadventures as they battle each L.A. stereotype you may imagine--the bored Beverly Hills housewife, the corrupt fed, the bottom-rung fraudster, the smug technology exec, etc.
Against this background, it's only Michael, Franklin and Trevor that seem to possess any sort of internal existence. Trevor's introduction, in particular, amounts to some particularly explicit 'fuck you' to the characters and themes of Grand Theft Auto IV. GTA 5 is heartless in this way, and as a result I found the story difficult to take care of. It's rough, well-performed, and the production values are extraordinary--but it's also derivative and brutishly adolescent, place in a world where the line between criminality and the principle of law is fuzzy but where it is always hilarious that someone may be homosexual.
The campaign's best moments come when your cigar-chomping master strategist, mad former army pilot and gifted driver come together, and if you're given the ability to choose how to use each of them. These heists are set-piece assignments where you pick an approach and perform set-up tasks in the open world before putting out on the job itself. In the very best of these, which occur later in the campaign, it really does provoke the satisfaction of having a plan come together. Perhaps you place Trevor on the high-ground with a rocket launcher, Michael on foot with a stealth strategy, and Franklin in an armoured ram-raider. Using a button press you can flick between the three, dynamically orchestrating a crime caper in your own terms.
It is also in those moments that Rockstar's most ambitious storytelling occurs. Your choice of character, team, and even particular in-game activities have subtle effects on the dialogue. In a young heist, a crewmember fell a part of the score however, as Franklin, I was able to recover ita side-objective that I had set for myself but was subsequently reflected in a subsequent conversation between him and Michael. This is another illustration of Rockstar's extraordinary attention to detail, and whether the rest of the campaign admired your bureau in this manner it might conquer its weaker moments.
As it is this is a very long game with a lot of filler. There is much driving from A to B, a great deal of discussions in cars, a lot of gunfights with hordes of goons who appear only to run into your gunsights again and again. It is much richer in set-piece minutes than its predecessor--drug trips, aerial heists, dramatic chases--and many of these seem incredible even when they're light on actual interaction. In the best examples, you soak in the air and happily ignore the fact that you are only really being requested to follow the onscreen instructions. In the worst cases--insta-fail stealth sequences, sniper assignments etc--it is more difficult to ignore the shackles that are put on the player in order to conserve the game's cinematic look and feel.
I invested lots of my time with the campaign frustrated along these lines, bored of the same assignment templates that I've been enjoying through because GTA III and making the most of the scant opportunities to play my way, like Franklin's refreshingly open assassination assignments. Then, necessarily, I'd be doing one of those rote activities--a heavily scripted freeway chase, perhaps--when the magic of the extraordinary world would creep up on me. It'd struck me : I am doing 150 km/h across the Pacific Coast Highway in sunset. It feels incredible, a collision of pop-culture, atmosphere, music and drama that is unique to GTA.
On a slightly better system, running a GTX 970, a mixture of very high and ultra configurations could be used without framerate loss. I encountered a fair variety of texture errors in multiplayer, however, and lots of players have reported frequent crashes.
Here, then, is the kicker: that forty-plus hour campaign together with all of its flaws amounts to an optional portion of the vast overall package. Measure the main course and you will discover fully-functional golf, tennis, races--even a stock market. You'll find cinemas displaying funny short movies and fully-programmed TV channels. You'll come across armoured trucks to rob, secrets to locate, muggers to assist or hinder, cults to experience, vehicles to customise and gather. This is what it seems like when one of gaming's most profitable enterprises reinvests that profit to the sport itself.
The total amount of work invested to the first-person mode is further evidence of this. It's not merely a novelty choice: GTA 5 is a fully-playable FPS, full of detailed animations for everything from gunplay to getting your phone. It achieves a similar sense of physical presence to Alien: Isolation, however, at a vast open world. Steal an open-top car and go for a cruise in first man, steal a plane, or just go for a stroll at night in the rain: there has never been an open-world game that offers this excellent a variety of atmospheric adventures at this level of detail. Hell, few games of any type have managed it. The only disadvantage is that it's considerably more difficult to play, which falling off a bike is so well-realised it seems like falling off a bike--people who get motion-sick in initial person may suffer.
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Can I mention that GTA 5 was likewise a cinematography tool? Unique into the PC version, Director Mode lets you explore the open world as any personality you need, in whatever situation you want, and then record, cut and remix those experiences into short films using a profound and accessible toolkit. As simple and exclusionary as the out-of-the-box campaign can be, the option to take this planet and make something else from it is always there, available whether you're knee-deep from the narrative or cruising south Los Santos with a couple of friends.
Right, yeah: GTA 5 is also an ambitious online game, a sandbox for deathmatch, racing and inventive co-op with MMO-lite progression features within a world that is an order of magnitude more detailed than some of its contemporaries. The conventional multiplayer options alone amount to a feature-complete additional game. You can build your own tracks for races or utilize one of Rockstar's very own, and configure your lobbies to account for different times of day, vehicle collections, weapon choices--even radio stations. I have raced sportscars throughout the financial district, jetplanes through a windfarmdown bicycles through the mountains beneath the Vinewood sign. There's also an attack-and-defend siege manner, regular deathmatch, plus a hide-and-seek situation that pits on-foot fugitives against predators with sawn-off shotguns on bikes.
Freeroam is the glue which binds these many experiences together, offering GTA 5's full open world (albeit with a reduced pedestrian count) for up to 32 players. You can rob stores collectively, murder each other, set bounties on each other, even pay to ship mercenaries after one another once you get to the ideal level. Your advancement is expressed during your expanding choice of customisable weapons, the vehicles you maintain and create your own, the apartments you purchase where your friends can hang outside to drink your booze and watch your own TV. As elsewhere, it's the details that make it : on the TV, by way of instance, you can observe police chases live. These aren't pre-recorded shows--you're seeing footage of real players, really on the run, presented from the perspective of a news chopper full with Fox News-parodying ticker.
I've always adored asymmetric co-op, especially the way that interdependency in a team generates moments in which you get to shine equally as individuals and as a unit. Heists are fantastic for this. I've had assignments where my only job was to wait in a helicopter to find out the ground team, but it feels amazing: I'm anxious for them, concentrated on what I am doing, waiting for this one moment where I fetch her in low and sweep them off together with the score--a payout that feels got in a way that videogame rewards rarely do.
Two key caveats hold me back from stating GTA on the internet is great enough to warrant your purchase on its own: co-op is rubbish with strangers and it is littered with bugs and link problems. Reviewing the game on a mid century rig, the singleplayer mode was relatively stable. Online, I have had the world load without flaws, crash outright, and each variation on lag, matchmaking bugs and disconnections. I understand that it is nowhere near as bad as it was when it started on games console, but it might be much better.
This is very true of multiplayer, in which the existence of other people injects energy and meaning to the open world. I've got as many examples of this as I've had drama sessions, but here is one: getting spent a chunk of my ill-gotten heist money on a high-speed bike, I break into the airport to see if I can attain top speed on those wide, flat runways. It is rainy and overcast, the rest of Los Santos dropped in thick fog.
I jump in and take off without a larger strategy than 'get into some trouble'. I give chase, which takes us across the map and in the wilds of Mount Chiliad. Then, out of a gully on the mountainside, a monitoring rocket explodes up and blasts the helicopter and its pilot from the atmosphere. There's another set of players around, making their very own pleasure, taking pot-shots at anybody unlucky enough to wander past. I buzz them, close, dipping down to the gully and over a ridge to avoid missile lock. In my second pass, they hit me. Smoke and flame pours from my motor and the prop gradually dies. I lower the landing gear, tip my nose down the mountain, and attempt to glide down her to the freeway. It works. I feel no small amount of pride as I get down in heavy traffic. Slipping from the cockpit, I cast about for something to do next.
This isn't something that I will replicate and it relies in no way on cinematic motion capture or cynical dialog. It is an adventure that stands alone, thankfully gamey, a moment immune to the cultural review you might apply elsewhere. Moments like this are what push Grand Theft Auto 5 on the threshold from 'impressive' and to 'essential'. Like the city it both loves and hates, you will find rough sections of town and individuals who will piss you offbut there's also the shore, the country, the skyline, the way the lights of the city play off the surface of the street in the rain. It is these ever present things that remind you why a lot of people may choose to spend as much time in this place. Rockstar did not need to build something this absurdly complicated, this quixotic in its attention to detail, but I am happy that they did.
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