Last year people were joking that Rockstar intentionally spread the ports of GTA V over 3 years so it could get Game of the Year award 3 times in a row. Many played the game in all its version. I was waiting for the PC port… Actually, no. Reality is – I wasn’t waiting for this game at all. I don’t know why, but I simply didn’t care about another sequel to the series that used to be so interesting to me. I just didn’t care anymore. So when it was released, I was checking reviews, I was listening to my friends’ opinions on it, but wasn’t much interested in playing it. Perhaps that’s exactly why now, when I’ve completed it, I feel so strange.
Since so many of you might’ve played the game before, I’ll start with the PC port. It’s great. Like, really. So far the only weirdness that I know of is that if you play with kb+mouse but have the gamepad connected, you’ll be aiming as soon as you take out any weapon and it’s fixed if you alt+tab the game out and in again. It’s super weird, but isn’t bothering me much especially with how well optimized and customizable it is. If you don’t touch the PC-specific options which make the game output far better visuals than what’s possible on consoles, it’s very easy to make this game work on high settings while maintaining high framerate. Playing with both keyboard and mouse and the gamepad and switching on the fly is easy, in case you prefer to do certain things with certain types of controls. Well, I suppose, there’s one thing that’s still nigh impossible with a keyboard – flying copters and planes, just like in the previous games in the series. Either way, it’s a fantastic PC version with lots of amazing extras (you can even record replays while changing models without the need for any mods). And it’s a great upgrade over the current gen consoles and an even bigger upgrade over the older generation of consoles.
But what about the game itself? It’s a surprising return to the core of the franchise. It’s updated and a lot of things have been changed and reimagined, yet this is as far from what GTA IV tried to do as possible. IV was a dark depressing tale, while V feels like a mature take on what GTA III (and Vice City and San Andreas) were doing. IV had lots of curious yet often obnoxious “realistic” elements, while V is as arcade as it could be while maintaining a certain sense of realism, with responsive drive physics, far more convenient system of avoiding the cops, weapons that you keep even if you die or get arrested and an overall easier difficulty. It returns the whole WASTED and BUSTED screen thing, it’s crazy and over the top again, especially when playing as Trevor. “Get on a bike. Jump on a train” – simple objectives from the old 2D and 3D entries in the series that got lost among all of the darkness of IV. And what’s most amazing is that despite Saints Row 3 and 4 existing and providing the over the top sandbox experience, GTA managed to find its own tone to return to the arcade feel and it’s great.
It’s like all of the previous recent series of Rockstar Games reimagined in one game. You get serious Midnight Club vibes, especially in GTA Online – a surprisingly well fitting Online mode/game within the game. It’s the already mentioned feel as if the entire GTA III “trilogy” was deconstructed to its core and best elements and those were used to build a new, modern game, something that you especially can feel in what the main characters of the game are. You can see obvious lessons learned from Max Payne 3. There are occasional notes of Manhunt. And if we try very hard, we could even see bits of Bully and Red Dead here. It’s a successful attempt at taking just the best from the previous lessons and trying to avoid all of the worst. Sometimes that means that some of the more “difficult” parts of projects that were taken for the template are also absent, but at least it’s all done for the sake of making sure that the game is fun to pick up and play.
What’s sometimes annoying is that after the fantastically written Saints Row 4, the whole “let’s show the shitty elements of the american life” thing this game has going on feels really boring, predictable and dry. There are wonderful jokes, don’t get me wrong. It’s just weird to think that Saints Row started as just some “crappy San Andreas clone” yet it grew and evolved to be something great by SR 4. While with GTA V it’s like the time has stopped and the cynical jokes from years ago are more or less the same.
But since I’m comparing to other titles, where Rockstar is above competition is in creating cities that feel alive, feel unique and have plenty of memorable places and wonders. Los Santos and its outskirts look and feel astonishing even without cranking the visuals to max. And transitions to missions are so… seamless, it’s just beyond all expectations. I mean, there are no visible loading screens for it all, you’re just playing the game, then the controls are subtly taken away from you to switch to the cutscene, and then it switches to gameplay again in the same extremely unobtrusive way. Rockstar tried a similar approach in Max Payne 3. But there, in a linear third person shooter it was horribly annoying. In an open world game, where things like this happen when you expect them to happen and it doesn’t happen very often, it’s perfect.
In general, I feel a bit weird about the game. It was a fantastic journey that I was glad to partake in and will most definitely return to later, to play more side activities and maybe try more of the Online stuff. Yet, it wasn’t something that just blew me away, something that happened every time I’ve played previous GTA titles for the first time. All those games were like huge events for me… I suppose, apart from Vice City, which is the one I have fondest memories of. Actually… Yeah, let’s compare V to Vice City. Even the soundtrack for this game, composed by the legendary Tangerine Dream, has those 80s-early 90s crime thriller music vibes. It’s not as memorable of a soundtrack as the main theme from IV, or heck even the main theme from 2. But it’s great either way. So, let’s say – GTA V is as good as Vice City was, except by the modern standards. Which is probably the highest praise I can give to a GTA game.