Grand Theft Auto V is an outrageous, exhilarating, sometimes troubling
crime epic that pushes open-world game design forward in amazing ways.
Where do you begin talking about Grand Theft Auto V? Do you start with
the vast, varied, beautiful open world? Do you start with the innovative
structure that gives you three independent protagonists you can switch
between on the fly? Maybe you talk about the assortment of side
activities you can engage in, or the tremendous number of ways in which
you can go about making your own fun. Or perhaps you dive right into the
game’s story problems, or its serious issues with women. GTA V is a
complicated and fascinating game, one that fumbles here and there and
has an unnecessary strain of misogynistic nastiness running through it.
But it also does amazing things no other open-world game has attempted
before, using multiple perspectives to put you in the thick of cinematic
heist sequences and other exhilarating, multi-layered missions like no
open-world game before.
Formats: Xbox 360 (tested), PlayStation 3
Developer: Rockstar North
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Age rating: PEGI 18
Released: 17 September 2013
Developer: Rockstar North
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Age rating: PEGI 18
Released: 17 September 2013
It’s brilliant, of course.
Given the pedigree and almost brutish levels of hype surrounding Grand Theft
Auto V, it would have been a surprise if this wasn’t the five-star humdinger
that you expected. But here we are: Grand Theft Auto V is the pinnacle of
open-world video game design and a colossal feat of technical engineering.
It takes a template laid down by its predecessors and expands upon it,
improving on and streamlining some of its rougher aspects. It doesn’t break
out of that template and can be brash, nasty and nihilistic. But for all its
more unsavoury aspects, this is a game built with skilled mechanical
expertise and creative artistry.
And money. Lots of it. If the reported cost of £170m is to be taken at face
value, GTA V is the most expensive video game ever assembled. If nothing
else, that lavishness seeps from every pore of Los Santos, Rockstar’s
twisted facsimile of Los Angeles and the grand stage for our crime caper. It
is a virtual world of such tremendous scale and fine detail that it
continues to baffle how the developers have managed to squeeze it all onto
current generation hardware.
The urban sprawl of the city itself is a tangle of roads and definable
districts; Strawberry is an area of limited social mobility, characterised
by boarded-up shops, tatty slat-board houses and gangland graffiti. Downtown
is a cluster of high-reaching skyscrapers, the city’s homeless shuffling
alongside office yuppies. Rockford Hills houses the city’s wealthiest,
lavish mansions sitting alongside expensive hotels, tennis courts and golf
clubs (both with playable sports, they’re good too). Vespucci Beach is a
hive of swim-suited pin-ups and party boats. Vinewood is the neon-splashed
refuge of movie-star wannabes.
Travel north and the city disperses into countryside, reach Blaine County and
you find a brushland littered with trailer parks and filthy hick bars under
the shadow of the County’s mountain range.
It is enormous. And while the broad strokes of GTA V’s map are impressive
enough, the finer details are lavished with the same care. Boxes piled
carelessly in a player’s safe-house. The crude sign for a chinese restaurant
daubed on sheet metal fencing. The evening sun dappling an orange sheen
across the landscape as it glints over the Los Santos highways. Hell, I was
even impressed that my character’s flip-flops actually flip-flopped. There
is no expense spared on any inch of its colossal mass.
To put it another way, Los Santos feels like a city that people live in,
rather than a virtual playground built for your enjoyment. The danger of
this approach is that real cities might not be as much fun as a bespoke
urban-Americana theme park, but Rockstar make it work. My admiration for
video game designers knows no bounds, but it befuddles as to how a mass of
land as huge as Los Santos is so tightly crafted and densely interactive.
There’s a natural openness, diversity and cogency to the design of the map
that makes it a pleasure to explore. And it’s a place in which the game’s
missions can slot into in a way that leads to emergent and unexpected
thrills.
I’m in Downtown, and after stealing some precious weaponry for a jewelry store
heist from a moving van, I find myself under the attention of local
constabulary. Sirens blaring behind me, I gun my car through the latticework
roads before finding a freeway. Thundering into oncoming traffic, cars
scatter and smash into the partition. It’s not long before I’m in
countryside. I slide off the freeway into the brushland, sweeping round
dusty trails and leaping over grass hills. Losing sight of the cops, I dump
my vehicle behind a bar, walk into a discount store, change my clothes and
find another car. I’m miles away from where the chase started, in a
completely different area, purely due to the natural course of my actions.
Now I’m out in the sticks, free of the law and with a scenic trip back to
the city ahead.
Such a scenario is enabled by a few things. The map design is one, with wide
roads that allow you to weave through its dense traffic and a cogency that
means the expanse of land feels connected from top to bottom.
Secondly, Rockstar has tweaked how the police hunt you. Now you can play a
game of hide and seek from the very beginning, nipping out of sight down an
alleyway or under a bridge and watch police cars prowl by. Or you can go
hell for leather and try to lose them in a high-speed, destructive chase.
Your choice.
Thirdly, the car handling in V is much sharper than the heaviness of IV. It
retains just enough of IV’s weight and hyperactivity to make crashes feel
consequential and handbrake turns tricky to control, but is tightened up
enough to make driving more instantly gratifying. IV’s handling was great
but took some work to master, V’s handling is better and easy to pick up.
This extends to sea-based vehicles and flying aircraft.
The driving is one part of GTA V’s technical improvement over its predecessor.
But before we delve too much further into general mechanics, let’s talk
about V’s most disruptive change. Instead of the traditional focus on one
character, GTA V has you playing as three separate crooks. It’s a change
that seems so basic on paper, but in practice is a revelation, making Los
Santos’s huge expanse more negotiable as you freely switch between each
character, adding spice to missions and allowing for a more layered
narrative.
Let’s meet the boys. Michael has been described by Rockstar as “the GTA
character who won”; a retired thief that has found his way into witness
protection while keeping the stash of cash he appropriated over the years.
He lives a quiet, boring life in a huge mansion in Rockford Hills with his
wife and two children. He hates it.
Franklin is a young gang-banger from Strawberry. At the start of the game, he
is working as a repo man for a dodgy Armenian car dealer, chasing down those
who are (apparently) late with their payments. Franklin has his own moral
code, but makes no excuses for who he is, with his ambitions lying only in a
higher quality of crime.
Trevor is Michael’s former partner, a redneck psychopath and sexual deviant.
He is an extraordinarily nasty piece of work and Grand Theft Auto’s most
disturbing character.
Each character is a tribute to crooks from GTA’s history. With his mafioso
swagger and obsession with 80s movie quotes, Michael is Vice City’s Tommy
Vercetti. Franklin is San Andreas’ Carl Johnson. And Trevor? Trevor may well
be you. Trevor is the Grand Theft Auto player that causes carnage and
squelches pedestrians just to achieve a five-star wanted rating and watch
the following mayhem unfold. He is the twisted, ugly reflection of all the
nasty stuff that GTA lets you do but rarely explicitly encourages. Rockstar
wants you to look at his face and feel uncomfortable. And it works.
They are not a nice bunch, to put it mildly. Rockstar have seemingly taken one
of the main criticisms of GTA IV to heart: that of the disconnect between
protagonist Niko Bellic’s sense of guilt and honour and the gleeful chaos
that he finds himself causing. GTA V tackles that head on, making an effort
to contextualise everything you do, from the main thrust of the characters’
motivation to the side-missions and activities they go on. Franklin is a
speed-loving thrill-seeker, so he’s the one you go to for street races. And
Trevor’s the only character with “Rampage” missions, such as being tasked
with wiping out a never-ending army of rednecks in a blind rage after one of
them called him something we cannot reprint in a family newspaper.
Given GTA’s sense of freedom, you can cause wanton carnage on the streets with
whomever you wish. But if you’re that why inclined, you may find yourself
switching to Trevor. It’s a curious form of method-acting, Rockstar making
sure that all the frolics from GTAs past are available to you, but providing
a choice of people so that enjoying them doesn’t clash with the characters
they have created.
This does come at something of a cost, however, in that GTA V’s main narrative
is almost relentlessly misanthropic. Niko’s words may have jarred against
his actions in GTA IV, but he was written with a strange sense of warmth
that is largely absent here. Franklin is the most sympathetic character, a
smart kid that has travelled the wrong path, and Michael has a twisted
honour of his own. But largely these are horrible people doing horrible
things to other horrible people.
The Good
- Innovative three-protagonist structure leads to loads of amazing moments
- Outstanding, multilayered heists and other missions
- Huge, gorgeous, varied open world packed with things to see and do
- Trevor is an unforgettable character
- Great vehicle handling makes traveling the world a joy.
The Bad
- Politically muddled and profoundly misogynistic
- Character behavior is sometimes inconsistent.
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