I could go on like this for ages. GTA V has an abundance of
such moments, big and small, that make San Andreas – the city of Los Santos and
its surrounding areas – feel like a living world where anything can happen. It
both gives you tremendous freedom to explore an astonishingly well-realised
world and tells a story that’s gripping, thrilling, and darkly comic. It is a
leap forward in narrative sophistication for the series, and there’s no
mechanical element of the gameplay that hasn’t been improved over Grand Theft
Auto IV. It’s immediately noticeable that the cover system is more reliable and
the auto-aim less touchy. The cars handle less like their tires are made of
butter and stick better to the road, though their exaggerated handling still
leaves plenty of room for spectacular wipeouts. And at long last, Rockstar has
finally slain one of its most persistent demons, mission checkpointing,
ensuring that you never have to do a long, tedious drive six times when you
repeatedly fail a mission ever again.
Grand Theft Auto V is also an intelligent, wickedly comic,
and bitingly relevant commentary on contemporary, post-economic crisis America.
Everything about it drips satire: it rips into the Millennial generation,
Grand Theft Auto V
SEPTEMBER 17, 2013
Trouble taps on your window again with this next chapter in
the Grand Theft Auto universe, set in the city of Los Santos.
→ MUCH MORE
KEZA MACDONALD SAYS
Best Open Worlds
Red Dead RedemptionBatman: Arkham CityFallout 3 celebrities,
the far right, the far left, the middle class, the media... Nothing is safe
from Rockstar’s sharp tongue, including modern video games. One prominent
supporting character spends most of his time in his room shouting sexual
threats at people on a headset whilst playing a first-person shooter called
Righteous Slaughter (“Rated PG – pretty much the same as the last game.”) It’s
not exactly subtle – he literally has the word “Entitled” tattooed on his neck,
and the in-game radio and TV’s outright piss-takes don’t leave much to the
imagination – but it is often extremely funny, and sometimes provocative with
it. Grand Theft Auto’s San Andreas is a fantasy, but the things it satirises –
greed, corruption, hypocrisy, the abuse of power – are all very real. If GTA IV
was a targeted assassination of the American dream, GTA V takes aim at the
modern American reality. The attention to detail that goes into making its
world feel alive and believable is also what makes its satire so biting.
Grand Theft Auto V’s plot happily operates at the boundaries
of plausibility, sending you out to ride dirt bikes along the top of trains,
hijack military aircraft, and engage in absurd shootouts with scores of
policemen, but its three main characters are what keep it relatable even at its
most extreme. The well-written and acted interplay between them provides the
biggest laughs and most affecting moments, and the way that their relationships
with one another developed and my opinion of them changed throughout the story
gave the narrative its power. They feel like people – albeit extraordinarily f***ed-up
people.
Michael is a retired con man in his 40s, filling out around
the middle as he drinks beside the pool in his Vinewood mansion with a layabout
son, air-headed daughter, serially unfaithful wife, and very expensive
therapist – all of whom hate him. Franklin is a young man from downtown Los
Santos who laments the gang-banger stereotype even as he’s reluctantly seduced
by the prospect of a bigger score. And then there’s Trevor, a volatile career
criminal who lives in the desert selling drugs and murdering rednecks; a
psychopath whose bloodthirsty lunacy is fuelled by a combination of
methamphetamine and a seriously messed-up childhood.
The missions flit between their individual stories and an
overarching plotline that involves all three, and it’s a credit to GTA V’s
versatility and universal quality that each character has his share of standout
missions. As their arcs developed I felt very differently about each of them at
different times – they’re not entirely the archetypes that they seem to be.
This three-character structure makes for excellent pacing
and great variety in the storyline, but it also allows Rockstar to
compartmentalise different aspects of Grand Theft Auto’s personality. In doing
so, it sidesteps some of the troubling disconnect that arose when Niko Bellic
abruptly alternated between anti-violent philosophising and sociopathic killing
sprees in GTA IV. Here, many of Michael’s missions revolve around his family
and his past, Franklin is usually on call for vehicular mayhem, and extreme murderous
rampages are left to Trevor. Each has a special ability suited to his skills –
Franklin can to slow time while driving, for example – which gives them a
unique touch. Narratively, it’s effective – even off-mission I found myself
playing in character, acting like a mid-life-crisis guy with anger issues as
Michael, a thrill-seeker as Franklin, and a maniac as Trevor. The first thing I
did when Franklin finally made some good money was buy him an awesome car,
because I felt like that’s what he’d want.
Trevor feels a like a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card for
Rockstar, providing an outlet for all the preposterous antics and murderous
behaviour that otherwise might not fit in with GTA V’s narrative ambitions. I
found his violent insanity a little overblown and tiresome at first. As get-out
clauses go, though, it’s pretty effective, and Trevor’s over-the-top missions
are some of GTA V’s action-packed highlights. It’s a successful way of solving
a problem that’s prevalent in open-world games: the tension between the story
that the writers are trying to tell, and the story you create yourself within
its systems and its world. Grand Theft Auto V accommodates both, masterfully,
allowing neither to undermine the other.
It could be nearly anything, because there is a bewildering
multiplicity of things to do in the new San Andreas – tennis, yoga, hiking,
racing on sea and on land, flying planes, golfing, cycling, diving, hunting,
and more. The missions are an able guide to both San Andreas’ locations and its
activities, touring you around the map and whetting your appetite for
independent exploration of it all. The way that we’re introduced to San Andreas
never feels artificial – the map is completely open from the start, for example
– which contributes to the impression that it’s a real place, somewhere you can
get to know. If GTA IV’s Liberty City feels like a living city, San Andreas
feels like a living world. I saw people walking their dogs along the beach in
the country as I jet-skied past, arguing on the street outside a cinema in Los
Santos, and camped – with tents and everything – overnight on Mount Chiliad,
before packing up and continuing a hike in the morning. It’s astounding.
The ambience changes dramatically depending on where you
are, too. Trevor’s dusty trailer out in the middle of nowhere in Blaine County
feels like a different world from downtown Los Santos or Vespucci Beach. It
wasn’t until the first time I flew a plane out of the city and over the
mountains I was cycling around a few hours before that the full scale of it
became obvious. It pushes the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 further than it has
any right to, and it looks incredible. The biggest jump in quality since Grand
Theft Auto IV is the character animation, but the world is also much more
expansive, detailed, and populous. The price we pay for that is occasional
framerate dips and texture pop-in, which I found became more prominent the
longer I played, but never significantly detracted from my experience. For such
a gigantic and flexible world it’s also remarkably bug-free – I encountered
just three minor issues in the 35 hours I spent on my first playthrough, none
of which caused me to fail a mission.
San Andreas’s extraordinary sense of place is heightened by
the fact that so much of it isn’t on the map. There’s so much going on that
it’s easy to find things organically, rather than spend your life following a
mission marker. I once stole a passenger jet from the airport for the hell of
it, then parachuted onto the top of the tallest building in Los Santos. (I then
accidentally jumped off the top and fell to my death, forgetting that I’d
already used the parachute, but I usually leave that bit out.) Out driving in
the country, I came across a man tied to a telephone pole in womens’ underwear.
I chased down criminals who randomly swipe purses on the street, and happened
across gunbattles between police and other miscreants, events that add a sense
that this world isn’t completely uneventful if I wasn’t here to disrupt
normalcy. I bought an expensive mountain bike and cycled around in the hills,
enjoying the view. These little moments can be captured on your phone camera –
which, brilliantly, can also take selfies. I have several snaps of Trevor doing
his unhinged version of a smile in his underpants on top of a mountain.
The story that GTA V tells through its missions takes full
advantage of all this variety beyond driving and shooting (though the driving
and shooting is still supremely enjoyable). It’s got so many great moments. It
had me racing Michael’s lazy blob of a son across Vespucci Beach in one of many
misguided attempts at father-son bonding, using
It’s the heists – multi-stage, huge-scale events that serve
as the story’s climactic peaks – that show Grand Theft Auto V at its most
ambitious and accomplished. Usually there’s a choice between a more involved,
stealthier option that will (hopefully) attract less heat, and an all-out
option that will be less tense but more explosively chaotic – and what crew to
take along with you on the job. All of GTA V’s missions are replayable at any
time, letting you relive favourite moments or try out another approach. They
also have optional objectives in the vein of Assassin’s Creed’s synchronisation
challenges, but crucially, these are invisible the first time you play a
mission, and so they don’t distract you from doing things your own way.
Sometimes your own way won’t be the way that the designers
expected you to do something, and though Grand Theft Auto V is usually very
good at bending around you when that happens, there were one or two occasions
where it wasn’t prepared for my personal brand of chaos. Overtake a car you’re
not supposed to overtake and it will zip through lines of traffic as if by
magic. Despite the introduction of new stealth mechanics, enemies will
miraculously see you when the mission dictates that they should. Kill someone
before you’re supposed to, and that’s sometimes Mission Failed. Most of the
time the scripting is good enough to be invisible, but when it’s not, you
really notice it – if only because most of the time it’s so seamless.
As ever, some of the wittiest writing shows up on the
in-game radio that plays behind all of the exploration and mayhem. “There’s
nothing more successful, more masculine, more American than a big wad of cash,”
blasts one of the in-game ads. “We know times are tough, but they don’t have to
be tough for you. Still got some liquidity in your house? Are you insane?” The
music selection is also typically excellent, leading to many of those
serendipitous moments where you’re driving along and the perfect song comes on.
During a heist, when the radio isn’t blaring the background, a dynamic
soundtrack seriously builds tension.
The satire is helped by integration of modern life into the
game world. Every character revolves around their smartphone – it’s used to
trade stocks, call up friends to meet up and send emails. There’s a great
Facebook spoof, Life Invader, on the in-game Interne, with the slogan “Where
Your Personal Information Becomes A Marketing Profile (That We Can Sell)”.
You’ll hear adverts for preposterous parodic TV shows that you can actually
watch on your TV at home, optionally whilst enjoying a toke. It might not be
realistic, but it definitely feels authentic.
It’s worth mentioning that when it comes to sex, drugs, and
violence, GTA V pushes boundaries much further than ever before. If the
morality police were worried about Hot Coffee, there’s a lot here that will
provoke moral hysteria. It’s deliciously subversive, and firmly tongue in
cheek... but once or twice, it pushes the boundaries of taste, too. There’s one
particular scene, a torture scene in which you have no choice but to actively
participate, that I found so troubling that I had difficulty playing it; even
couched in obvious criticism of the US government’s recourse to torture post
9/11, it’s a shocking moment that will attract justified controversy. It brings
to mind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s No Russian mission, except worse, and
without the option to skip over it. Some other stuff, like the ever-present
prostitution and extensive strip-club minigames, feels like it’s there just
because it can be rather than because it has anything to say.
There is nothing in San Andreas, though, that doesn’t serve
Rockstar’s purpose in creating an exaggerated projection of America that’s
suffused with crime, violence and sleaze. There are no good guys in GTA V.
Everyone you meet is a sociopath, narcissist, criminal, lunatic, sadist, cheat,
liar, layabout, or some combination of those. Even a man who pays good money to
assassinate Los Santos’ worst examples of corporate greed is playing the stock
market to his advantage whilst he does it. In a world like this, it’s not hard
to see why violence is so often the first recourse. All the pieces fit.
THE VERDICT
Grand Theft Auto V is not only a preposterously enjoyable
video game, but also an intelligent and sharp-tongued satire of contemporary
America. It represents a refinement of everything that GTA IV brought to the
table five years ago. It’s technically more accomplished in every conceivable
way, but it’s also tremendously ambitious in its own right. No other world in
video games comes close to this in size or scope, and there is sharp
intelligence behind its sense of humour and gift for mayhem. It tells a compelling,
unpredictable, and provocative story without ever letting it get in the way of
your own self-directed adventures through San Andreas.
It is one of the very best video games ever made
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Selasa, 17 September 2013
Review game GTA V
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