Igns review Of the most anticipated game of this generation# For me, Grand
Theft Auto V’s extraordinary scope up is
summed up in two favourite moments.
One is from a mid-game mission in
which I flew a plane into another plane,
fought the crew, hijacked the thing, and
then parachuted out and watched it
crash into the sea to escape death at the
hands of incoming military fighter jets.
Another time, whilst driving around in
an off-road buggy, I got distracted by
something that looked like a path up one
of the San Andreas mountains. Turns out
it was a path, and I spent 15 minutes
following to the summit, where I nearly
ran over a group of hikers. “Typical!” one
of them yelled at me, as if he nearly gets
run over by a rogue ATV on top of a
mountain every time he goes on a hike.
I could go on like this for ages. GTA 5
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,
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.
The actual act of switching between them
also provides a window into their
individual lives and habits, fleshing out
their personalities in a way that feels
natural and novel. Pick a character and
the camera zooms out over the San
Andreas map, closing back in on
wherever they happen to be. Michael
might be at home watching TV when you
drop in on him, or speeding along the
motorway blasting ‘80s hits, or having a
cigarette at the golf club; Franklin might
be walking out of a strip club, munching
a bag of snacks at home, or arguing with
his ex-girlfriend; there’s a good chance
that Trevor could be passed out half
naked on a beach surrounded by dead
bodies or, on one memorable occasion,
drunk in a stolen police helicopter.
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 a thermal scope to search
for someone from a helicopter before
chasing them across the city on the
ground, torching a meth lab, towing cars
for Franklin’s crack-addict cousin to
prevent him from losing his job,
infiltrating a facility from the sea in a
wetsuit and flippers, piloting a
submarine, impersonating a
construction worker, doing yoga,
escaping on jet skis, failing multiple
times to land a plane loaded with drugs
at a hangar out in the desert… it goes on
and on. The days of a repetitive series of
“drive here, find this guy, shoot this guy”
are behind us. Even missions that would
otherwise be formulaic are imbued with
novelty and excitement by the potential
to play them from three different
viewpoints – in a shootout, Trevor might
be firing RPGs from a rooftop as Michael
and Franklin flank the enemy on the
ground.
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 3’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.score 10/10 #

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Gta review scores. Aggregator Score
GameRankings 96.81% (X360)[62]
96.73% (PS3) [63]
Metacritic 98/100 (X360)[64]
97/100 (PS3)[65]
Review scores
Publication Score
Computer and Video Games 10/10[66]
Edge 10/10[67]
Eurogamer 9/10[68]
Game Informer 9.75/10[69]
GameSpot 9/10[70]
Giant Bomb [71]
IGN 10/10[72]
Joystiq [73]
Official PlayStation Magazine (UK) 10/10[74]
Official Xbox Magazine 10/10[75]
Polygon 9.5/10[76]
The Guardian [77]
The Independent [78]
The Telegraph [79]