There have been times where I’ve been completely wrong with
my opinion on a video game, especially a video game that seems to be beloved by
the rest of the world. In certain cases, my opinion changed upon giving the
game another chance in the form of an HD Remaster, where various graphical
boosts and quality of life improvements, along with maybe reduced expectations,
have allowed me to love games that I previously struggled to get into.
Grand Theft Auto V on the Xbox 360 was a game that, for
whatever reason, I majorly disliked upon its release in 2013, and for nearly 10
years, was the only modern Grand Theft Auto game that I’d never finished, my
Xbox 360 Red Ringing as I neared the end of the game resulting in me having to
watch the rest online. It was weird, as a huge fan of Rockstar Games and their
iconic GTA series, that I didn’t like GTA V, and though my thoughts at the time
were undoubtedly sincere, I have to admit, upon finally giving the game another
shot nearly 10 years later, that I had no idea what I was talking about.
GTA V is of course a great game, one that has been beloved
for nearly a decade and has remained a top-seller for nearly a decade. It still
has its flaws, and though I haven’t gone back and re-read my review of the 360
version of the game before writing this one, I do remember some of what I
wrote, and those flaws are still intact. But Grand Theft Auto V is an
atmospheric, exciting, incredibly fun, and visually striking game that presents
its city of Los Santos and its wild surroundings in a loving, very detailed
way. Though it carries several of the weaknesses common in games from the 7th
generation of consoles, it in many ways stands above its fellow open world
adventures from that area and largely holds up incredibly well today.
Grand Theft Auto V is unique so far for the series in that it
stars 3 playable characters who you can switch between on the fly. You can do
this when exploring the open world, each character often having their own
available missions at any given time, even if the game more or less dictates
which character ultimately needs to be selected in order to progress through
the main story. During the missions, which often take the form of multi-part
heists, the characters can also be switched between, all of this putting a fun
spin on the typical GTA proceedings. GTA V may not really rock the boat in any
major way in terms of the series’ famous formula, but changes such as the
multiple playable characters and the frequent heists and setups help it to
stand out, while returning a lot of the craziness and wackiness that was in
short supply in the far more grounded Grand Theft Auto IV.
The game begins with three characters in the middle of a heist
mission, something along the lines of a tutorial, and admittedly offers a less-than-impressive
first impression; the grimy interior corridors, lack of awareness as to who the
characters are, and the lack of ability to save for something like the first 30
minutes of the game feel like just as much of a bad start as they did to me on
the Xbox 360. Once you do get set loose into the open world though, the magic
of Rockstar’s incredible visuals and art direction, along with their great
talent for immersive music and atmosphere, takes immediate center stage.
You play as Michael, a retired bank robber-turned family
man, along with Franklin, a young man who repossess cars in South Los Santos,
and of course Trevor, a deranged and truly psychotic individual who does have a
certain charm to him that was completely lost on me the first time I played
through the game. Each character is given their own fairly comprehensive setup
before they all eventually team up, but admittedly the narrative doesn’t treat
them all equally, with Trevor and Michael having a history together that
ultimately plays a big role in the game’s events, while Franklin gets, without
a doubt, the short end of the stick. His character’s likable and I was
generally interested in his life and his friends, but unfortunately every time
I switched to him, his map always seemed almost empty, without much to really
do, and it becomes clear pretty quickly that GTA V’s really Michael and Trevor’s
show.
Certain flaws like that do exist throughout Grand Theft Auto
V, and they aren’t flaws that ruin the game in the same way that I once thought
they did, but they come across as development oversights that I’m surprised
this massive team didn’t catch. The driving controls and physics are all over
the map, with driving greatly sped up from its sluggish handling in GTA IV, but cars still spin out with alarming frequency, and there’s no
consistency whatsoever as to which types of objects you can run over and which
ones will stop you completely in your tracks. It’s a true testament to the
quality of the rest of the title that frustrating driving controls, despite
cars playing a huge role in the proceedings, don’t hurt the overall game too
much, even though they have the potential to.
Simple actions that could be done with the press of a button
are instead given multi-step control prompts, leading me to constantly have to
remind myself how to shoot from a vehicle, or how to check the current radio
station, or how to change my weapon. It’s something that was common in the 7th
console generation and GTA V definitely reminded me of it. Other little things,
like character conversations while driving continuing on long after you’ve
reached your destination, feel surprisingly sloppy, as it forces anyone who
wants to hear the whole conversation to sit at the location and wait for it to
end before exiting the car and proceeding to the mission, making me wonder why
they didn’t better match the length of the conversations to the expected drive
time. The game can also be frustratingly unclear as to what exactly it wants
you to do, especially during any section that involves flying a plane or a
helicopter, and Rockstar seems to under-estimate how difficult certain things
are, such as in a particular mission where you have to land a plane, and in another
where you have to drive a motorcycle on top of a train. That the game isn’t
more forgiving during missions like these makes them frustrating in a way that
I don’t think was intended by the development team.
The characters, though, I found to be genuinely likable this
time around. Michael and his horrible family are a constant source of laughs,
while Trevor, terrifying as he is, managed to win me over, at least in a sense.
Franklin’s under-utilized but he serves as a decent anchor between his two
crazy cohorts, and the way they all function together is compelling. The
argument can certainly be made (and I’m sure it’s one I made back in 2013) that
the cartoonish characters are a step down from the more realistic, human casts
of GTA IV and GTA: San Andreas, but I find myself able to appreciate the
entertainment value of GTA V’s characters too. Maybe as I get older, it’s
becoming easier for me to appreciate things for what they are instead of
wishing they could be something else, or maybe I didn’t appreciate them with an
open mind back then, it’s hard to say. But I did feel a genuine affection
towards these characters by the end of the game, though it has to be said that
one of the three available endings is significantly better than the other two.
Where GTA V shows its age is mostly in the size of its world.
The size of the map is absolutely huge, but the portions that exist outside of
the city of Los Santos dwarf those of the game’s signature city by such a huge
margin that it has the effect of making Los Santos feel so much smaller than
intended. The game as a result takes you outside the city so frequently that it
makes it feel less developed than the cities in other Grand Theft Auto titles,
whether or not that’s actually the case. It’s a design choice that makes sense
in what was a notoriously difficult generation for open world games, and it
undoubtedly made it possible to release the game before that generation ended,
but it’s the one thing that stood out the most to me as someone revisiting the
game all these years later. If you have any familiarity with the city of Los
Angeles it’s hard not to notice how much
smaller Los Santos feels than the real thing, with the omission of the San
Fernando Valley entirely, along with your ability to clearly see the Downtown skyline from the Santa Monica Pier, both standing out in a pretty major way.
Otherwise though, GTAV does a great job at capturing the set
and setting of LA, or at least, the LA as it existed in 2013, when the game originally
released. Though Los Santos feels quite small by today’s open world standards, it
still leaves a great impression by the game’s end, as do at least two of the three
main characters. It may not have the emotional weight of some of the other GTA
installments, but its over-the-top craziness and top-notch atmosphere, along
with many incredibly fun missions, help GTAV stand out despite its occasional
frustrations and strange game design oversights.
This is obviously not a review that’s going to get much
attention now in 2022, as almost everyone’s played the game by now, but it’s a
review that I felt compelled to write, if for no other reason than to correct
the record left by my review of the original GTAV back in 2013, a game which I
was entirely wrong about. Though it’s always better when studios focus on new
releases as opposed to remasters, the beauty of remasters is that they can give
games second chances, and in my case, more often than not, the second chance
has allowed me to appreciate a title that I just didn’t back when it originally
came out.
Not a perfect game, but truly a great one.
4/5
Note; This review is based on the PS4 version
