This is the second part of an ongoing review of Rockstar’s ‘Grand Theft Auto V.’ Read Part One here.
I’ve beaten the game, played almost all the side missions, and explored nearly the entire enormous map of San Andreas.
Note: This review will contain some spoilers. Reader beware.
Grand Theft Auto V is a hell of a ride. It’s a zany tonic of debauchery and crime, filled to the brim with excellent voice-acting and a witty, silly script.
My favorite thing about the game is its attention to detail. The Easter Eggs, listening to Weazel News on the radio, the way each of your crimes is later reported as you drive. You have to pay attention to catch all of it, and even then I suspect I’ve missed plenty.
All of this conspires with the big open world and plethora of missions and side activities to create a content rich experience. But what the game really manages to do well is keep up its brisk pace. Much of the game’s dialogue takes place while on the go—driving or walking on your way to a mission, for instance. The cut-scenes are typically brief, and always amusing enough to keep my attention.
Given my attention span, this is high praise. I have an impatience for games that tarry too long on story without getting me back to the gameplay; I’m quite fond of those that manage to tell a story without forcing us to stop playing the game. GTA V strikes a good balance.
Three men and a city
I’m also quite fond of all three of the game’s main characters. Trevor is an especially fascinating character, at once darkly hilarious and deeply disturbing. I suppose it would be a bridge too far to say I actually liked Trevor, but I did enjoy the game more whenever he was onscreen.
Hints at his homosexuality and the fact that he’s a closeted Canadian only make his character all the more intriguing, especially given his attraction to older women and the weird relationship he has with his mother. All told, Trevor is easily the most realized character of the three, as well as the most cartoonish and over-the-top. That may be a bit of a contradiction, but that’s also part of the charm.
Michael isn’t quite as crazy as Trevor, and we get a sense throughout the game that a part of him does want to change while an even bigger part of him doesn’t think it’s possible, and isn’t quite sure that’s what he wants anyways.
I wish his family problems were better fleshed out in the game, but what we do get is some of the more enjoyable moments with his spoiled kids and his nagging (but ultimately sympathetic) wife. His psychology sessions are also great, right up to the last one and its surprising conclusion.
Franklin is a bit more two-dimensional than his older counterparts, but I have a soft spot for him nonetheless. He’s constantly doubting why he does things—why he’s a follower, why he smokes pot, why he sits around snacking when he’s not even hungry.
It’s kind of a funny meta-commentary on being a video game character, completely at the whim of the player.
In the end, Franklin has to make a choice over the fates of his partners and the game’s antagonists, placing him in an almost central role by the game’s conclusion, even though he feels like less of a primary actor in the game’s events up to that point.
Heist-enberg
What let me down more than anything about GTA V was its system of heists. These start out okay. You make some basic choices, hire a small crew, and then engage in some prep work—stealing a firetruck, obtaining a getaway car, finding masks, etc.—before starting the actual heist mission.
This is all well and good. The problem arises during the actual heists themselves, which are simply too scripted for my taste. I suppose the largely scripted nature of a normal GTA mission works well enough, but I’d hoped that a heist would be more open-ended, that it would require some deeper level of strategy or planning. As it stands, you’re basically given two choices and then hop on the rail and complete the heist. Not much deviation from the script is allowed, though you can make certain choices to get a higher score.
Honestly, I’m not sure how open-ended Heists could even be. I’m not sure how you could pull of important points in the story vis-a-vis totally unscripted play.
Much of the game’s structure relies on a mix of freedom and guidance.
The world is big and open and you can tackle many objectives in whatever order you like (or not at all sometimes) but missions reel you back in. Sure, you can often choose to tackle certain aspects of a mission in a pretty open manner, but more often than not you’re given a pretty clear set of directions that follow a pretty clear script.
Some of the best moments in the game were the few times you were given a choice. Will Trevor drive a movie star onto the train tracks and off him for a pair of crazy old people, or will he let him out of the trunk and pocket some extra cash? Little choices like this add a lot to the game, but they’re far too few and far between.
Like scripted heists, this lack of many meaningful player choices goes against the grain of what makes the game great.
I’m actually a fan of the open-world model here, with plenty of guidance to keep the game moving forward, but I think Rockstar could lean further toward greater player agency with greater consequences for each choice made.
Likewise, more organic heists would have been fun—not even necessarily as replacements for the six major heists in the game, but as additional content.
Maybe have a couple dozen map locations that could be staked out and robbed, each with a varying degree of difficulty, each requiring you to hire a crew and give each main character a job and so forth.
Petty villains
Finally, I wish the game’s villains had been a bit more despicable and not just so bloody annoying.
To be honest, on many occasions I just wished the game would let me follow and kill them sooner. I realize that would have basically ended the game’s main story much too soon, but I honestly don’t buy that Trevor (or the other two, for that matter) would just be strung along this way by the FIB.
A couple bullets would have been a simple end to that story arc, but we’re never given the opportunity.
On the one hand, having such petty ridiculous villains makes sense. After all, the protagonists in this story are only barely anti-heroes. Trevor has one or two redeeming qualities, but he’s almost pure bad guy. Michael is only the tiniest bit more sympathetic, if that. Only Franklin manages to rise, just the tiniest bit, out of the muck.
So annoying billionaires and corrupt FIB agents will have to do, even though I think the game could have tied it all together more completely, lining up the various pieces of private military contractors, car thefts, and FIB heists more elegantly than the piecemeal story we got.
Still, I can’t complain too much.
Grand Theft Auto V is a meticulously detailed game. It’s high action pulp, combining a massive open world with a fun, if not terribly deep, story. Driving the streets of Los Santos, parachuting from a plane, base-jumping, racing a crazy exercise freak, carrying out assassinations of corrupt businessmen—all this and more make GTA V one of the funnest games of 2013. A truly ambitious, addictive game that deserves plenty of accolades in spite of its flaws.
Also, in
part one of my review I complained about being able to skip missions. I want to walk this back a bit. Two or three times I ended up using this feature on especially annoying missions (usually flying related, something I still feel like the game could have handled better.)
I haven’t bothered trying to get into the Grand Theft Auto Online portion of the game yet. Game-breaking bugs, character wipes, and clogged servers all leave me wary enough to keep my distance until things have settled down and important patches have fixed the worst aspects of the multiplayer.
When that day comes, I’ll report back.
