I couldn't complete Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas HD. After 10 hours, I hit a wall. I probably could push on and finish the game at some point as I've done many times in the past. But this time, I absolutely could not motivate myself to see it through until the end.
There's a lot of quirks that makes this game difficult to return to, especially playing it after Grand Theft Auto V. But even after dealing with them, the failure of one mission caused me to turn the game off.
I appreciate this port adding checkpoints. Without them, I would have had to drive about five minutes back to the mission start point and retry. So after failing, I hit “Retry From Last Checkpoint”.
It returned me to the beginning of the mission. I turned off the game, and I doubt I'll turn it back on.
For a ten year old game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas still has some cool tricks. The world feels larger than even Grand Theft Auto V, even though that may not be true. The character customization is still cool, as you can completely change CJ's clothing and physique. If you want to make a buff Mr. T impersonator complete with mohawk and tacky gold jewelry, you can. If you'd rather eat a lot of fast food and get fat, you can. And there seem to be hundreds of lines of dialog related to your character's physique and clothing that change as you alter those parameters.
There is a ridiculous amount minigames and collectibles scattered around the game. It's possible to go through the story and never encounter pool, blackjack and poker, dating, hidden packages, and an entire line of sidequests. I know I won't encounter some of these, because I can't bring myself to finish the game.
At $3.74, I couldn't resist delving into the Grand Theft Auto nostalgia. I know the game is technically a mobile port, but I'm completely fine with the updated visuals and improved draw distance. It only took a few minutes to get over the weird faces and blocky hands.
The dated graphics aren't the worst part of the game.
It's a known issue in this port that sound will cut out during cutscenes. I've played the game for about ten hours and it happened during four cutscenes. It's a low percentage, but considering that it NEVER happened in the original version, it's an unacceptable percentage.
The control scheme is imperfect compared to the original. I prefer total free aim and played both IV and V without using lock-on targeting once. In San Andreas HD, you can use Free Aim only...but I do not recommend it. Even after tweaking sensitivity settings, I never got the aiming to feel completely natural. Slight movements would cause the reticle to fly way off, and I could never aim onto targets as fast as I needed to. I switched to Lock-On targeting which limits your targeting to ONLY Lock-On. If you're trying to use Free Aim with this control method on, you can't. It locks onto the nearest human, making it completely impossible to aim for a car's tires or gas tank when you really want to.
I know I'm not remembering things incorrectly here. In the PS2 version, you could lock on to someone but then move the reticle, smoothly transitioning you to Free Aim. It wasn't Free Aim Only or Lock-On Only. This change makes an already awkward combat system feel worse.
The dated controls are only a minor reason why I gave up. I remembered shortly after starting the game how poor the pacing can be. The missions where you are stranded in the mountains involve large amounts of travel time across uneven terrain. There's no GPS line on the minimap, which lead me to many situations of driving across the grass and up mountains because I didn't know which road to take. After a mission ends, you often must drive several minutes to get to the next one.
Rockstar probably wants you to get distracted by side missions between story missions so the travel time feels less repetitive, but I've played this game to 100% completion in the past. I only focused on finishing main story quests, and that meant a lot of monotonous driving back and forth. After a few hours, I was begging for a fast travel system. The 5+ minutes of driving after every mission is boring now.
I had a few more reasons to stop playing San Andreas HD apart from being completely fed up with driving everywhere. There's a San Fierro mission that locks you out until you build up your Lung Capacity, which meant spending some time swimming underwater and resurfacing over and over. I've never spent the time building that stat, so it would be a session of level grinding that I have no motivation to do.
My favorite parts of San Andreas were the Las Venturas and Los Santos missions near the end. I loved the storylines of setting up an elaborate heist and returning to Los Santos to retake it for Grove Street, and looked forward to the missions where you visit Liberty City, skyjack an airplane, and break into a military base to steal a jetpack.
Most of those missions are in the latter half of the game, however. The initial Grove Street missions are basic, the countryside missions are annoying due to the travel time and dealing with unlikable characters. The San Fierro missions are largely uninteresting. San Andreas has major pacing issues, and for every spectacular mission there are five uninspired ones. The controls actively hindered my enjoyment of many missions, particularly ones that involved drive-by shooting.
Still, there are parts of the game that were good to revisit. Going into fast food places to restore health and being able to customize every part of your outfit individually were missing from Grand Theft Auto V. It still seems like there are more random hobbies and side missions in San Andreas compared to the latest game, and they have tangible, useful rewards for completing them like increased maximum health or armor.
The sheer amount of things to do in San Andreas is impressive, but the dated design of the game wore me down too much. It was worth the three dollars to revisit, but I've been spoiled by its successors. I couldn't finish Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas HD, but going back makes the newer games look even more impressive by comparison.
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