Over the last two weeks, I’ve shot down planes, landed planes in planes, jumped out of planes, jumped off rooftops, landed helicopters on rooftops, shot pilots out of helicopters, shot gangsters, shot policemen, shot cars, shot FBIFIB agents, and shot random people on the street. I’ve also played tennis.
After twenty hours in GTAV, but I think I’m ready to write about what I think about the huge, loud, empty world of Los Santos. Minor spoilers follow.
The game starts off pretty strong, introducing the storyline and mechanics right off. After the barest of introductions, you’re put in control of one of a group of criminals in the process of robbing a bank. Controls show up as text in boxes, for anyone who’s new to the genre. As someone who isn’t, I appreciated this opener; it doesn’t hold your hand in any way, and introduces the story through gameplay. It tells the tale of a heist gone wrong, from which only one crewmember escapes. We’ll come back to that story shortly.
Soon, you’re freed onto the streets of Los Santos, and my, what beautiful streets they are. The amount of effort put into Los Santos is palpable. There’s no trace of a reused texture anywhere (for a 60gb game, there’d better not be). There’s both foot and car traffic no matter where you go. Bodybuilders frequent beachside weights, and show off to the people roaming the boardwalk. There’s even a sizeable rural area, outside the city, filled with trailer parks and scenic mountains. You can rent bikes, take taxis, run into gang ambushes, the whole lot. It’s a shame that the interiors aren’t given the same treatment - you can only enter a few select buildings - but I can definitely understand why. The exteriors benefit from the art focus.
The facade falls apart just a little bit, though, as you roam around the city. First off, why is barely anyone talking? You’ll run into the occasional group of people, but they usually trade one line between them and then stand silent. One particularly interesting exchange I witnessed was between a neatly-dressed black guy and a hipster white guy. They stood near each other affably, both with coffee cups in hand. As I approached, the black guy yelled at the white guy: “Walk away friend, you about to get mashed!” The hipster guy responded, “apologies”, to which the black man taunted, “alright fool”. The white guy then dropped his coffee - literally, just dropped the cup from his hand onto the sidewalk - and started walking away as if nothing had happened.
One can argue that Los Santos is not a city made for walking about in, that it’s a city for doing things in. Really, though, for sugh a huge open world, there’s not many things to do - or, maybe, rather it’s just that not many of the things available are fun. You can play tennis, or go to the shooting range, or throw some darts. Maybe it’s just me; maybe I’m just too old these days for screwing around in a sandbox. Still, why play a half-baked game of tennis in GTAV when you can play a game designed around tennis instead, like Mario Power Tennis?
Indeed, it often felt like I was forced to spend too much time in the city. While, again, the city is a sight to behold, you can only behold so much of it before getting tired of driving the same streets over and over again between missions. After ten hours in the game, you begin to wish for a fast travel option a-la The Elder Scrolls. Twenty hours in, you begin to contemplate stopping for the night when the game places you miles and miles away from the next mission.
One clever mechanic that the game introduces is the switching between characters. Instead of taking control of only one character as in previous games, in GTAV, you can alternate between three characters - Trevor, Michael, and Franklin. Each of them has their own specialties, like driving or flying or shooting. Each of them also has specific missions that they can complete; Franklin does reposession jobs and assassionations, while Trevor has lots of flying missions and Michael has most of the story missions. Every time you switch between them, there are nice little vignettes that play out showing what they were up to since the last time you took control of them. Franklin might be playing with his dog, Trevor might be getting kicked out of a strip club, and so on. It adds flavor to each of the characters.
Franklin’s past is curiously never really explored, but Michael and Trevor have a pretty neat backstory together. They’d worked together as criminals in the past, but in one fateful heist, Michael betrayed Trevor so that he could start a new life with his family. Trevor thought he’d died, and knew nothing about the witness protection program Michael was placed under. Joyful to find out that Michael is alive, Trevor, Michael and Franklin partner up to complete big jobs across the city for various sponsors; the FIB (Federal Investigation Bureau), movie makers, and of course, for their own profit.
Like in GTA 3 and 4 before it, the story is advanced by completing missions strewn about the city and the countryside. They can range from reposessing (stealing) cars, to shooting up farms, to large-scale multi-mission heists. Often, it suffers from the same problem as GTA4 - you’re forced to do missions for stupid, arrogant people. However, the interaction between the three playable characters alleviates this to some extent. The tension, and ultimate falling out, between Michael and Trevor is interesting enough that I want to stick with the main storyline to figure out what happens.
No, there is a bigger problem with the missions, and it’s this: of the huge variety of things you do on missions, only a few of those varieties are any fun. Many of the missions that cast you the hero of an action movie, like in the first mission when you shoot your way out of a bank - these are the good missions. However, too many simply have you doing tedious things to pass the time. I know, you can’t have all action all the time, you’ve got to have balance, but rest and boredom are two different things.
There are a few really low points; minigames that seem designed only as filler content. One instance of this is when, as Trevor, you scope out the docks for a score. To keep cover, you have to do menial chores, like moving shipping containers to the right bays and loading them on trucks. Maybe someone thought it was important to keep immersion, that people would mock the mission for having two dock workers just wandering about taking pictures of things. Perhaps that’s true, but honestly - it’s Grand Theft Auto, a game where you commit multiple high-profile crimes and never get caught. Immersion shouldn’t really be an issue here.
By far, the mission most aggravating for its tedium is the mission called Eye in the Sky. Most of the mission involves sitting in a helicopter as you point a reticle at people on the ground, “scann” them for a few seconds, and compare their names to that of a guy you’re looking for. This section lasted about ten or fifteen minutes, but it felt like an eternity. When you actually find the guy you’re looking for, you can’t even be the one to chase him; all you can do is follow the guy with your stupid scanner and tell Franklin where he’s going, so he can do all the work. There is no reason for this mission to exist. The in-universe justification is that Franklin is stealing five cars for someone, but honestly, the car count should simply have been reduced to four with this mission cut.
When the missions aren’t just plain boring like the above, they’re often too scripted. In every car chase, you’ll be told repeatedly over the radio that he’s getting away, get him! and every time, you’ll be wondering whether your car is just slow or whether the mission is scripted such that you can’t actually catch up to your target until some climax point. I often felt myself just going through the motions, following the game’s instructions just so I could finish the damn mission and get on with it. Run after that guy! Now pull the dog off of him! Now have the dog search those boxes! Not those boxes, these boxes, these highlighted ones! You took too long about it, now do it again, stupid!
The thing is, though, there are missions that show the game can be so much more than just going through the motions. Often, the game is best when it falls back onto its tried-and-true shooting mechanics. One mission had Franklin, with a sniper rifle, cover Michael as he makes his way through a locked-down military ship. Switching between them as Franklin takes out targets and Michael plants explosive charges imparts the very neat, clean feeling of being in total control of the operation. Another mission gave the crew heavy armor and a hand-carried machine gun to fight their way out of a bank and through the streets, demolishing police cars and helicopters and tanks. That mission imparted the opposite feeling: the sheer destruction was a great thing to behold.
Great missions aren’t always made of cordite and gunmetal, though. In another mission, Michael shoots down a plane and you, as Trevor on a dirtbike, must chase it down as it is falling from the sky. The chase starts in the city, with Trevor dodging and weaving through traffic. Then, it moves into the countryside, where you have to go offroad, jump trains, avoid intersections, the whole nine yards. While it’s still scripted to hell and back, it’s incredibly empowering, and, more importantly, fun.
Essentially, I’m of two minds on GTAV’s single player. It suffers from a lot of problems. A lot of them. At the same time, it features the best city to be featured in a game to this point. Some of the missions are high octane awesome affairs. Graphically, the game looks great, and the technology that went into it must be astounding. Still, when so many of the missions feel like filler content, I just can’t let them go. Given, I haven’t yet finished the game, so likely there will be more low and more high points to write about in a followup article. In addition, I haven’t yet tried GTAV online. So, as I get more into it, I’m sure I will write more on the game.
For now, though, my verdict stands: There’s an incredible amount of things to do in GTA, and some of them are fun.