Grand Theft Auto five review

Friends reunited. Our original review of Rockstar’s open world opus.

The location is king in this staggeringly evocative crime caper.

By Tom Bramwell Published Legitimate/11/2014 Version tested PlayStation three

Grand Theft Auto five releases on Xbox One and PlayStation four today, bringing Rockstar’s expansive open world game to the fresh generation of consoles. Digital Foundry will be assessing the technical differences via the week, and we’ll be bringing you more on what’s fresh and how the original stands up almost a year on from its release. To embark, however, here’s our original review, very first published in September 2013.

If there was one criticism of Grand Theft Auto four that evidently stung Rockstar, it was the complaint that it lacked an endgame. Liberty City was an incredible place, cramming as much character into one city block as most open worlds manage in a thousand, but once Niko lodged his last score, there wasn’t much to do but cruise around waiting for the DLC.

Grand Theft Auto five is a welcome overreaction. Rockstar has rammed Los Santos and the surrounding desert and mountain areas with more things to do than I could describe in half a dozen reviews. I’m not sure it feels like the largest open world in the series’ history, but I think that’s just because it’s so effortless to travel across quickly, and it’s certainly the most densely packed with hedonistic thrills, stuff to buy and steal, random events and weirdoes who want something. Then there’s the promise of GTA Online, the evolving, persistent multiplayer component due to land for free at the begin of October.

Packing in all those activities – from trash-diving to skydiving – hasn’t impeded Rockstar’s world-building either. Los Santos takes the basic geography of Los Angeles and files it down into something taut and entertaining to navigate, where every street has its own story etched in phony colonnades or chain-link fences and landmarks are lifted from real life (Grauman’s Chinese, Chateau Marmont) or the silver screen (the house on stilts in Lethal Weapon two springs to mind), then woven together with practised ease.

You can play tennis, go parachuting, take part in all sorts of races, hold up shops, tow vehicles, hunt deer and attempt to legalise marijuana, among many, many other things.

Layered on top of that is Rockstar’s trademark cynicism. GTA four took a few swings at fear-mongering 24-hour news, right-wing neo-cons and reality TV, but GTA five is spoiled for choice and the gag writers go for the jugular, skewering TV talent contests, self-help gurus, social media, internet trolls, political hypocrites and our obsession with hook-up, hook-up, lovemaking. You can’t go half a block without walking into a punch line and every radio ad is telling you to buy a fresh smartphone because you might as well get that last bit of liquidity out of the house while you still can, or else just keep jacking off in the garage after the kids have gone to sleep.

Troubling moments?

Grand Theft Auto has been no stranger to controversy over the years and GTA five clearly aims to be no more of a stranger than any other instalment.

Lovemaking isn’t truly the issue. There are functioning unclothe clubs where you can buy lap dances and attempt to coax chicks to take you home, albeit there’s no Hot Coffee mini-game and the dances are ditzy rather than especially sordid. There are also a duo of graphic representations of hookup in the game, but nothing worse than you would see in a movie or TV demonstrate.

Where GTA five goes a little overboard is in a mission around a third of the way through the game, where it takes violence in the series to a fresh and unpleasant extreme. It’s not a good moment for the game, which can’t pull it off without it feeling gratuitous. I’ve gone into my thoughts about it separately in another feature, which naturally carries a spoiler warning: Is the most disturbing scene in GTA five justified? Brief reaction: not truly.

Perhaps these are demonstrable targets and perhaps GTA has little to add to the discussion, but the way the writers and designers crystallise what’s absurd about them is still uncommon and welcome in a mainstream movie game, and it feeds into what I love most about GTA: cruising around, glorying in the details and watching and listening as the game holds mirrors up to things we see every day – and then violates them over someone’s head. There’s an intoxicating richness to that practice when you very first arrive in Los Santos that I’ve missed in the five long years since GTA Four, and the game bites just as sharply after thirty hours.

The main thoroughfare through the game, tho’, is Rockstar’s latest narrative hike up the criminal mountain, except this time it’s delivered with a twist: GTA five has not one but three main characters, each with his own history and goals. Michael’s a retired bank robber, bored out of his mind in a Vinewood mansion where his wifey flirts with the tennis coach and the kids play movie games and suspend out with sleazebags. Franklin’s more sympathetic – a youthfull black man with a gangster-wannabe best friend and an appetite to learn. Trevor, who we meet later, is a certifiable bad stud who kills people for no reason and is tougher to like.

Things commence off interesting as Rockstar plays it fairly straight, dragging Michael out of retirement with wit and a few good set-pieces as Franklin falls into step alongside him, before they plan a heist together and Trevor comes onto the scene. Apart from a few story-specific periods, you can switch inbetween the three of them at any time by picking someone else on the character wheel. The camera zooms out into the sky, pans to their location and zooms in to find them – you might catch Michael cycling through the hills or Trevor waking up half-naked under a rock – in a process that only takes a few seconds. If they’re in the same location then the transition is instant.

GTA Four’s famously bouncy suspension is gone, substituted with more refined physics. Cars have a habit of self-righting now, too, so you spend less time cursing while upside down.

The best thing about their adventures together, which span sixty nine story missions, is that it breathes fresh life into Rockstar’s mission templates. You still spend a lot of the game driving around having conversations, crouching behind walls, hunting down crimson blips on your mini-map and watching people swear at each other creatively in cut-scenes, but in the fever of battle you have more tactical options, and Rockstar has more directorial ones.

A high-speed pursue on a freeway can see Michael firing out his window while Franklin climbs aboard a stolen yacht on a trailer, for example, or Michael can shoot out a plane’s engine with a high-powered rifle so Trevor can pursue it on a mud bike until it crashes spectacularly in the desert. Even elementary gunfights are elevated by the capability to switch from Trevor in cover here to Michael on overwatch there to Franklin sneaking around on the flank. There are different approaches and outcomes across, and far fewer standard shooting galleries. Each character has a special capability, too – Franklin can shortly slow down time while driving, for example.

The high points are the heists, where the gang’s tech wizard friend Lester puts together a plan, you choose the treatment and backup personnel, and then the trio spread out and collect the materials needed to pull it off before everyone plays a part in the score. It’s all very scripted and stage-managed – go buy three boiler suits, steal a fire engine, modify some cars and stash them under a bridge – but each heist has a blockbuster set-piece feel to it, and when they go to plan and you walk away with a thick stack of cash to spend on Los Santos’ many expensive distractions, you feel like you’re living the life.

Individually, each character is good joy to be around and Michael and Franklin make an entertaining father-and-son type duo.

In a way, however, your criminal success is also the downside to GTA Five’s lengthy story, which loses its way after an interesting begin. Michael and Franklin could both carry interesting games on their shoulders – Michael’s going through a midlife crisis, depressed because he can’t control his family after providing them everything, while Franklin’s ripped inbetween his roots and a desire for more. When Trevor arrives, tho’, the game reverts to a standard crime story – can’t escape my past, enemies everywhere, one last job, etc – and more interesting themes are abandoned in favour of endless cut-scenes of roaring arguments.

Customs and exercise

There’s a lot more scope for customisation of weapons and cars in GTA Five. AmmuNation has a yam-sized range of guns and add-ons for them – I tended to whack a silencer and a scope on anything I could and grew very fond of jerry cans and goopy bombs. Los Santos Customs respray shops also let you upgrade vehicles with more than just paint jobs – bulletproof tyres and chrome plating work very nicely on that superfast getaway car.

Each character also steadily improves their physical attributes over the course of the game, including stamina, strength and harm dealt. This stuff has a less perceptible influence on the game, but you can max it out by taking part in various activities if you wish.

The problem is that Trevor is an asshole. When you very first meet him, he does something so unpleasant that you wonder how you’re ever going to empathise with him, and before long you’re rotating an analogue stick so he can pull a tooth out of someone’s jaw with a pair of pliers. These are serious and intense moments, but Trevor is too shallow and unconvincing to justify them, and instead his antics derail the narrative. He’s such a distraction to Michael that his family become a footnote rather than a subplot, while Franklin is almost entirely forgotten until a bit of last-minute catch-up near the end of the game. The outcome ties up liberate completes, but I’d lost interest by then.

All the heist stuff is difficult to reconcile with the world Rockstar has built, too. This is a game pretty much designed from top to bottom to equate the American Wish to some sort of elaborate pyramid scheme, but the message is that hard graft buys you a mansion in the hills, a helipad downtown and a fleet of tricked-out sports cars? This contradiction was at the heart of Vice City, too, but it made more sense in a love letter to Scarface. GTA five captures the absurdity of modern life, but I expected it to do more than join the party.

When the story cuts liberate from the hard-edged heist film template and has some joy, it’s much more entertaining. Trevor’s missions are a ideal example – when the writers stop treating him as a serious character, sending him off to hijack a plane or rob a money train instead, the rage goes out of his voice and he feels like the cartoon creation underneath. Franklin’s adventures with his friend Lamar are the kind of unpredictable, high-energy capers that stick in the memory, too, and a superb chance to spend time with Lamar, who steals every scene he’s in.

GTA five is at its best when it starts cracking wise and doing impressions of half-remembered movie set-pieces.

A greater emphasis on this stuff would have been more welcome and fair in a game of nihilistic thrill-seeking, but GTA five is still an effortless sell. There’s so much excellent stuff to do, see and hear across the dozens of hours you can spend touring Los Santos that you’ll lightly overlook the inconsistencies in storytelling, if that stuff even bothers you in the very first place. This is also the slickest, easiest GTA game Rockstar has ever made, utter of fine detailing that smoothes your practice moment to moment, like decent checkpointing and gentler law enforcement.

Most importantly, however, it’s the very first game in the series where you feel as however you can strike out in any direction and find something entertaining to do. You can wander onto a golf course and find yourself in a reasonable facsimile of a Tiger Forest game, enhanced after every shot by Michael swearing and banging his club on the fairway. There are innumerable well-hidden items to recover, some of which are well protected. At one point I drove into the desert and found some sort of camper van, got out of my car, heard a weird zapping noise, then woke up naked on a railway line. Mystery! Serendipity! There’s a giant prison elaborate I haven’t even been to yet. It goes on and on.

GTA five may not be the Hollywood-beating crime story it wants to be, then, but it’s the best movie game it’s ever been, and I’ll take that.

We’ve also got a guide to all the GTA five cheats, plus explosions of money-making tips.

Grand Theft Auto five review Tom Bramwell Friends reunited. Our original review of Rockstar’s open world opus. 2014-11-18T14:00:00+00:00 nine Ten

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