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Giant Bomb Review

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Grand Theft Auto V Review

5
  • X360

Grand Theft Auto V's unique storytelling meshes well with standard GTA-style action, giving you multiple perspectives on some fantastic criminal activities.

Michael's therapist will probably have something to say about all this.
Michael's therapist will probably have something to say about all this.

Grand Theft Auto took a turn for the serious when it moved to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2008. In the pursuit of a world that felt more fully realized, the developers at Rockstar left the free-wheeling weirdness of San Andreas behind. Suddenly all the random mayhem and madness of the previous entries felt somehow out of place and, though you could get into a firefight at the drop of a hat, the chaos felt less fun than it did during the GTA III trilogy. With Grand Theft Auto V, the franchise attempts to get it both ways, with another cluster of serious narrative that's told in an exciting way, but also in an occasionally more lighthearted one, as well. Sprinkle in a little bit of genuine weirdness and you've got a recipe for disaster that works in spite of itself, a well-told tale of criminals in mid-life crisis that doesn't always mesh properly with the trappings of your typical open-world crime simulator, but the individual parts are usually so good that it barely matters.

Rather than settling on one criminal, GTAV asks you to play as three. You're introduced to these characters over the course of the game's first few hours, and each settles into his own niche. Michael is the career criminal that left the life and settled down with his wife and two kids in Los Santos--the game's version of Los Angeles--only to be bored out of his skull, resulting in a lot of sitting around, drinking, and watching old movies. Franklin is a low-level gangster that has seemingly remained unaffiliated with the city's larger gangs, but he and his lifelong friend, Lamar, seem to want to get out of the hood by stepping up into the larger-sized crimes. But for the meantime, they're working as repo men for a crooked car dealership.

A memorable chance meeting between Michael and Franklin sets the story in motion, reconnecting Michael to the life of crime he left behind while giving him a young apprentice to school in the ways of doing dirt. It doesn't take long for the duo to raise their profile just enough to catch the attention of Trevor, Michael's old partner-in-literal-crime. Trevor is the classic "loose cannon" of the game, meaning he swears a lot and threatens to kill people all the time for no good reason. He also happens to be running a meth and guns operation just north of Los Santos, making it convenient for him to come into town to track down his old friend who, by the way, has been thought to be dead for the past ten years. This makes for a series of uneasy relationships, not only between the three core protagonists but also the people in their lives, be they feds of questionable integrity, methed-out desert dwellers, or Franklin's crazy aunt.

Trevor, in one of the game's more uncomfortable sequences.
Trevor, in one of the game's more uncomfortable sequences.

Unless you're in a mission, you can typically switch to any of the three characters at will. That doesn't mean you can drop any of the three characters into any point in the game, though. Each character has his own missions and switching between them moves you to wherever that character is as you join his life, which is already in progress. This means you might catch Trevor waking up in the middle of the desert, wearing a dress. Or you might catch Michael waking up screaming. It's a good little trick that gives the illusion that these characters are off living their lives, even when you aren't directly controlling them. It also helps make each character's personal story make sense. Since Trevor is the one wrapped up in meth dealings with the Chinese, he's the one starting those missions. Franklin is the one occasionally getting wrapped up in some gangster shit. And so on. The multiple characters concept works out beautifully, giving you the feeling of "taking a break" from one character's drama to peek in on another's.

The mission design is your basic Grand Theft Auto sort of stuff, for the most part. You'll drive to the start of a mission, get a cutscene, and then usually have to drive somewhere else to get things going. But some of the missions start to mix up multiple characters, like one where Trevor just happens to show up at Franklin's as he's about to go help a friend cop a brick of coke. As video game drug deals tend to go, this one goes bad, and the crew is forced to shoot their way out of a bad situation. With two of the game's three playable characters along for the ride, the game lets you swap between them on the fly. This lets you get a little tactical, but it also plays into the game's stat system and special abilities. At the outset, Trevor is a better shooter than Franklin. This only makes a big difference when you're free-aiming a sniper rifle, since the game's lock-on targeting system trivializes the game's combat to the point where you're just blazing helicopter pilots through the windows of their choppers without giving it a second thought, regardless of the shooting statistic. The meaningful difference comes from a character-specific ability. Franklin uses his while driving, getting a slow-motion moment or two while significantly increasing a car's steering, which keeps you from getting too turned around during races and other pursuit-like activities. Michael has a standard on-foot bullet time that makes the shooting even easier than it already is. And Trevor goes into a rampage-like state where he takes less damage. They all have their uses, but as long as you're patiently using the game's competent cover system and letting your health regenerate (it only pops back up to 50 percent, though) between shots, you'll make it out of most fights alive and well, no body armor required.

The game is at its best when it deviates from the typical GTA mission structure, and you'll do this several times over the course of the story in the form of heists. These big scores are typically placed at pivotal points in the story and require some additional planning. Typically you'll start a heist situation by choosing one of two approaches to taking a score. One may require more setup but it might also have a lot less risk than, say, walking in the front of a jewelry store and gunning down everyone in sight. Once you've decided how you'll take the score, you'll have to choose a crew. In addition to the other protagonists (who are usually all together on every job) you may have to choose a getaway driver or find someone that's handy with an assault rifle. You'll choose these crew members based on their stats and the cut of the overall take that they'll get at the end. Choose an inexperienced shooter and he may die on the job--and if he happened to be carrying a significant portion of the score, well, that's money you won't be getting at the end. If a member of the crew lives through the job, his or her skills will increase, but the percentage won't, giving you some incentive to rank up your low-level, low-paid criminals on the earlier jobs. As you play the game, you may find additional people who will want to take down scores with you, giving you a wider pool to pick from.

Franklin wants to be an upwardly mobile criminal, not just some two-bit gangbanger.
Franklin wants to be an upwardly mobile criminal, not just some two-bit gangbanger.

The heists often require some additional setup, too. If your heist needs masks, well, you're going to go buy some masks. Need a getaway car? Go find a four-door vehicle and you'll be able to choose your own stash spot to hide it in--just remember that you'll need to actually drive there in the middle of the heist. Specific cars, like firetrucks and maintenance vans, must also be sourced in some instances, so you'll have to go and steal those at your leisure. Having these more-freeform tasks appear right before the heist is an exciting change from how Grand Theft Auto typically unfolds, and my only complaint is that I wish there was a lot more of it. Once you've completed all the setup, you can head out and take down some scores.

When out on the heist, you can usually swap between the three core protagonists. So if you don't feel like flying a helicopter, you often don't have to--just don't swap to Trevor. The game does force swaps in specific occasions, though, and it typically does this to ensure that you're not missing the action. Annoyingly, the characters you aren't using aren't always on top of their game. I had a couple of missions end randomly because one character or another would die on the job, without any sort of warning that they're even in trouble. It felt like the typical sloppiness that comes with the average open-world game, right alongside trying to drive into a respray shop to lose the cops only to have the game tell me that I failed the mission I was on by "abandoning" it. Failing missions isn't much of a problem; the game has pretty good mid-mission checkpoints. But if you're attempting to earn gold medals by completing all of a mission's tasks, you can't restart at any checkpoints along the way.

The heists are the greatest part of GTAV's gameplay. The only real problem with them is that there aren't more of them. But what do you do when you're off-mission? Well, aside from the main missions and heists, the game has random events and "Strangers and Freaks" missions. The random events are things like armored cars that drive around the city, begging to be taken. Or you'll find plenty of ATM robberies that you can foil, if you like. The Strangers and Freaks missions are more structured, and some of them spin out into the typical sort of side missions you might expect from an open-world game. Some are basic--Michael runs into a woman jogger who riles him up to the point where he demands a foot race with her. Franklin gets mixed up with some marijuana legalization weirdo who wants him to recover a couple of coolers full of weed from around the city. Trevor gets involved in a bail bonds operation that has him tracking down bail jumpers. He also falls in with a couple of guys who think they're running some kind of border patrol operation, and the three of them go off and use stun guns on men with vaguely Mexican-sounding accents. Some of them are funny, and some of them bring a lot more weirdness into what would otherwise be a pretty by-the-numbers crime saga. So they make for a nice break from the action.

Some heists go smoother than others.
Some heists go smoother than others.

The game also has a lot of other activities. There are movie theaters to visit with short, pre-rendered, overly-compressed and badly artifacted "films" you can watch. There's a golf course, complete with a passable little golf game. You can get into tennis. Or take up skydiving. You can take bong rips and watch TV at your house. One side mission has you driving a tow truck and towing specific vehicles back to an impound yard. You can use your phone's built-in web browser to invest in the stock market, complete with a series of assassination missions that allow you to influence said market a little more directly. And so on and so forth. I tried a little bit of everything and found a lot of it to be distracting and largely unnecessary, given the quality of the main story, but if you're going to make an open world game, you might as well fill it up with a bunch of different optional events. But personally, I'm done with checkpoint races in open-world games. This game already has plenty of driving in it without tacking on a ton of additional driving-only missions.

The writing associated with those main characters and their stories is the best part of Grand Theft Auto V. It strikes a weird tone that occasionally veers into comedy, particularly the subplot involving Michael's estranged family, all of whom think he's sort of a washed-up joke that's suddenly become an old psychopath. But at other times it's deathly serious. It manages to work more often than it doesn't, even if Franklin and his motivations for sticking around these two aging bank robbers feel a little thin. Tonally, however, the game is all over the map once you take the radio and everything else into account. The radio, its talk shows, and its news clips are straight-up classic Grand Theft Auto, poking fun at the "American Dream" and everything that comes along with it. A lot of the radio chatter, funny as it can be, ends up giving the game an almost nostalgic feel. It's the thing that comes on and reminds you of all those other times you spent with a Grand Theft Auto game, listening to the writers' satirical take on America. But this time you can slot in financial bailouts, fracking, and reality TV as the topics that pop up around the world and remind you that it was written for 2013, not 2004. It would have been great to see this aspect of the game evolve a bit more, from a writing perspective, anyway. As it stands, it all feels expected and unadventurous, hardly the biting satire that it felt like in past outings. Presentationally, though, it is great, with news reports that tie into the main missions and a sharp, varied selection of music... even if the mere concept of turning on a terrestrial radio in this day and age comes off as a little quaint. Sometimes, the tone of the radio and the dopey lines coming out of pedestrians as you work your way around the city feel sharply at odds with the tone of the actual missions.

The playable area includes plenty of unincorporated space north of Los Santos, with trailer parks and meth labs.
The playable area includes plenty of unincorporated space north of Los Santos, with trailer parks and meth labs.

That said, the individual pieces of Grand Theft Auto V are nicely done. The driving is a lot looser and more exciting than it was in GTAIV, and the lock-on targeting and cover system means that you're never fighting the controls in the middle of combat. It also looks great on current consoles, with a solid draw distance and a frame rate that takes few major hits along the way. Furthermore, the characters themselves emote well in cutscenes, which really helps make the story feel more meaningful. The city itself is nicely evocative of Los Angeles, as well, giving you GTA-ified equivalents of studio lots, the TCL Chinese Theatre, the Santa Monica Pier, and more. Little touches like lighting as the sun rises and sets go a long way, too. That all meets well with the game's on-foot and on-mission soundtrack, which delivers tense backing tracks that heighten the heists whether you're opening fire on the obstacles in your way or watching Michael slyly convince a guard that he is, in fact, supposed to be there. And all of it comes together to bring you a fantastic approximation of LA's sleazy-yet-sunny West Coast vibe.

In a lot of ways, that sort of vibe--or the skill with which it is achieved--is the real star of any Grand Theft Auto. Overall, this game is less surprising than you might like, because so much of it is precisely what you'd expect from a GTA game. As other open-world games push forward in ways that make things like traversal more convenient, GTA forces you to look at the minimap for your turn-by-turn directions. At times, it feels like it was made in a vacuum, away from the influence of other games. But while you could certainly pick out a handful of individual systems or design choices that feel like they've been handled more intelligently elsewhere, none of those other games bring together so many interesting and disparate systems with the same level of aplomb on display here. That, combined with the game's unique multi-character approach to storytelling, makes Grand Theft Auto V an exciting successor in the long-running franchise.

Jeff Gerstmann on Google+

487 Comments

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Vasper_Knight

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Good write up Jeff, i really enjoy your reviews. All other pail in comparison.

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courage_wolf

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Glad to see this getting great reviews, but I am still kind of worried about it. GTA4 also got great reviews and I ended up not liking it very much. It sounds like R* toned back the "realism" some from 4 and that should go a long way toward making it fun to play, especially the car handling.

I did see one extremely important question that didn't seem to be addressed in the review. On a scale of 1 to Heat, where do the heists fall?

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Spongetwan

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Just payed off my copy! Can't wait to play it tonight!!! Who's getting it tonight??

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courage_wolf

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Glad to see this getting great reviews, but I am still kind of worried about it. GTA4 also got great reviews and I ended up not liking it very much. It sounds like R* toned back the "realism" some from 4 and that should go a long way toward making it fun to play, especially the car handling.

I did see one extremely important question that didn't seem to be addressed in the review. On a scale of 1 to Heat, where do the heists fall?

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courage_wolf

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Glad to see this getting great reviews, but I am still kind of worried about it. GTA4 also got great reviews and I ended up not liking it very much. It sounds like R* toned back the "realism" some from 4 and that should go a long way toward making it fun to play, especially the car handling.

I did see one extremely important question that didn't seem to be addressed in the review. On a scale of 1 to Heat, where do the heists fall?

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Vasper_Knight

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Edited By Vasper_Knight

Good write up Jeff, i really enjoy your reviews. All other pail in comparison.

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bybeach

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I won't be picking this game up right away, but it does not surprise me on the score which I regard on the money most likely. Because I do not buy into the GTA universe that well does not mean they do not put in good workmanship into their games. Max Payne 3 and Manhunt will always be efforts that slid to the side of legit, and Vice city will probably be the one GTA game I enjoyed in full, despite my distaste for one mission.

Maybe later and kudos for producing a good game, Rockstar..

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Vasper_Knight

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Good write up Jeff, i really enjoy your reviews. All other pail in comparison.

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Quantical

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Yeah it's another one.

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matatat

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So... is the cousin still gonna call me to play pool?

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JackyChiles

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Great review!

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JoeyRavn

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I'll wait for the PC version, but as soon as it's out, I'll get it for sure. Such a great game deserves a great version.

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McGhee

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Brothers is still better.

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JoeyRavn

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I'll wait for the PC version, but as soon as it's out, I'll get it for sure. Such a great game deserves a great version.

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deactivated-6050ef4074a17

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At the risk of being a bit too short compared to the others posts on this review, I just felt like saying: This was a great review, Jeff. Really well written and a fantastic job of explaining your full thought process on the game.

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ShakeSoda

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Great review Jeff. Thinking about picking this up, although I'm super interested to see if it gets ported to next-gen.

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Edited By AMyggen

@marokai: I agree, one of the best reviews of the game I've read. I won't be able to play this game until monday last week, but I'm looking forward to it!

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groverat

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Waiting for the PC edition. I hope I don't have to wait too long.

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deactivated-5a0917a2494ce

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I went ahead and pre-ordered despite my better judgement. All GTA games have been overhyped nonsense and have paled in comparison to their counterparts, even those internal counterparts such as Bully and Read Dead. Still, I'm going to give this a shot because even though I thought GTA IV was one of the most frustrating games ever created, surely they fixed all of those issues? Right?

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FinalDasa

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FinalDasa  Moderator

Great review. I was worried most about the balance between serious story line, which I enjoyed in 4, clashing with the zany style and comedy of previous titles. Glad to see it all works out for the best and matches up better than what 4 did.

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Wilshere

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Edited By Wilshere

@zevvion said:

@groverat said:

@zevvion said:

I have not played GTAV yet and haven't kept up with trailers or anything simply because I want to experience it myself, so correct me if my assumption is wrong but; isn't GTAV about the crime scene? I mean, to my knowledge most people that commit crimes of the violent kind that you mostly deal with in GTA are done by males. Just like how most frontline warfighting is done by males.

Doesn't not having a lot of female characters in the arc of these characters that mostly deal with violent crimes, therefor, also logical as the warfighting is in shooters?

I think that's a good argument against a female protagonist, but a few things...

- Violent crime is predominantly male, but not exclusively.

- The world of Los Santos is massive and involves dozens of NPCs. Roughly half the population should be female.

- There is nothing all that realistic about GTA, a series in which lone individuals get away with astonishing crimes, murder dozens/hundreds/thousands, and suffer no lasting harm. Yet, when the subject of female representation is broached, realism suddenly matters a lot.

Saints Row already showed us that this works with a female lead.

I feel my comment is taken slightly out of context here. The person I was replying to argued that in shooters it makes sense that there are only/mostly males because of the setting. I argued that if that is the logic we use, then isn't GTAV also making sense because of its setting? Because, similarly, the majority of soldiers are male, but also not exclusively.

Again, I haven't played it and am just assuming things here, but half of the NPC's are female are they not? This issue was regarding questgivers being very few female, mostly male.

But I might agree with your point that GTA isn't realisticly portraying real life and so criticizing it only for its inaccurate portrayal of women might be hypocritical. But then, it is a sensitive subject, so I do get it.

That said, I'm not entirely sure why it's called misogynistic. Not having a lot of supporting female characters isn't misogyny. If you don't want to write about it, think it didn't fit, or couldn't make it work, that's the writers call. Again, I haven't played it, so I don't know how bad that stuff is, but I'm somewhat skeptical whether it's actually featured in the game.

I also felt like criticism of "there were 2 horrible deaths of women in the game, that's misogynistic" kinda weird. I mean, this is GTA, dudes die in horrible ways, and I doubt anyone making this game was like "hey there's a gruesome death in the script, let's make it a WOMAN lolz". Haven't played it yet ofc but the way those scenes are described don't make them sound misoginistic at all.

GTA is about violent crime. Most of it is done by males who have the physical capability to do it. Believe what you will but a woman can't rise in the crime world by beating up men. Women are violent, but due to their physical limitations they use more backhanded methods and proxy (manipulating men into doing the violence for them). The game and gameplay is about being in the middle of the action. In this terms it tries to be realistic. By its nature as a game it has to have unrealistic elements otherwise it wouldn't work. It won't be fun for the game to end anytime the character gets wasted or busted.

Also, please, restrain yourselves of using the word "misogyny". Do you really believe that game developers HATE women? I am ok with people wanting to be catered to their desires but straight out labeling people isn't right.

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gamefreak9

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Edited By gamefreak9

I've gotta say I don't think you are being fair Jeff. I mean I understand the rating is your personal experience but 5 stars for a game which has average gameplay, boring side-quests, bad AI... I don't know when I see 5 stars I see a must buy but after reading the review it sounds like the game doesn't have anything great about. Being a jack of all trades isn't a fantastic quality for games because they are competing for our time with specialized opponents. I just know you are into your gangster shit but I expect a professional critic to be able to look past personal biases a little more. Not saying its not a good game, I haven't played it, but what you are describing doesn't sound too amazing.

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Thuggish

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Good review; I'm anxious for a quick-look. I watched the video review over at Gamespot, and there were a lot of frame rate issue that i'm hoping was just a poor recording and isn't indicative of the game itself.

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"As other open-world games push forward in ways that make things like traversal more convenient, GTA forces you to look at the minimap for your turn-by-turn directions."

Why are you even comparing SR4 to GTAV, they are COMPLTELY different games at this point. Also, what do you expect Rockstar to do? Give the player super powers and just say 'Fuck realism.'

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RudeTrooper

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"As other open-world games push forward in ways that make things like traversal more convenient, GTA forces you to look at the minimap for your turn-by-turn directions."

Why are you even comparing SR4 to GTAV, they are COMPLTELY different games at this point. Also, what do you expect Rockstar to do? Give the player super powers and just say 'Fuck realism.'

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redgonzo

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it would be depressing if it was any lower then 5

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Carousel

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@thuggish said:

Good review; I'm anxious for a quick-look. I watched the video review over at Gamespot, and there were a lot of frame rate issue that i'm hoping was just a poor recording and isn't indicative of the game itself.

It's just Gamespot's dog shit video player.

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Keeng

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GTA 4 also got a perfect score and in hindsight it was a pretty mediocre game.

That coupled with the line "Overall, this game is less surprising than you might like, because so much of it is precisely what you'd expect from a GTA game. As other open-world games push forward in ways that make things like traversal more convenient, GTA forces you to look at the minimap for your turn-by-turn directions." makes me feel like maybe I shouldn't spend $60 on it. The reviews (and bombcast) made me eventually buy GTA IV when it dropped to $40 and I hated every second of that game outside of the cutscenes. Hearing that GTA V isn't very surprising - that it's not making the radical changes to open world design seen in something like Assassin's Creed, Saint's Row, or Infamous - is a major turn off. No amount of awesome-sounding, pointless mountain biking will change that.

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Keeng

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@luck702 said:

"As other open-world games push forward in ways that make things like traversal more convenient, GTA forces you to look at the minimap for your turn-by-turn directions."

Why are you even comparing SR4 to GTAV, they are COMPLTELY different games at this point. Also, what do you expect Rockstar to do? Give the player super powers and just say 'Fuck realism.'

I don't think that is necessarily a Saint's Row comparison. I think he mostly means other games in the genre have become more conscious of the actual gameplay and making that more enjoyable/convenient. More directly, he could be referring to something like Mafia 2 which would make your car's blinkers go off indicating that you needed to turn instead of forcing you to constantly glance at the minimap. Little things like that go a long way towards giving you that feeling of "I can't go back to the old game" when you play a sequel. Like being able to fucking combat roll in Mass Effect 3.

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astrophyle

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I'll wait for the PC version, and hopefully they don't fuck up "V" like they did "IV" on the PC.

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Hef

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@luck702: Could have been referencing sleepings dogs as well. Just saying

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Draxyle

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@datajack said:

Pouring one out for the Gamespot mods and crew...the comments, such a shitty situation.

I thought that by sorting the comments by "top rated" I'd avoid a lot of the garbage. Nope!

I'm reminded of why I never normally visit that site.

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Wilshere

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Edited By Wilshere

@keeng said:

@luck702 said:

"As other open-world games push forward in ways that make things like traversal more convenient, GTA forces you to look at the minimap for your turn-by-turn directions."

Why are you even comparing SR4 to GTAV, they are COMPLTELY different games at this point. Also, what do you expect Rockstar to do? Give the player super powers and just say 'Fuck realism.'

I don't think that is necessarily a Saint's Row comparison. I think he mostly means other games in the genre have become more conscious of the actual gameplay and making that more enjoyable/convenient. More directly, he could be referring to something like Mafia 2 which would make your car's blinkers go off indicating that you needed to turn instead of forcing you to constantly glance at the minimap. Little things like that go a long way towards giving you that feeling of "I can't go back to the old game" when you play a sequel. Like being able to fucking combat roll in Mass Effect 3.

Call a taxi - fast travel.

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Jiddra

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We need a quick look, live stream or something!

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Jiddra

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We need a quick look, live stream or something!

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Keeng

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@wilshere: Not sure if that was sarcastic or not, lol.

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Wilshere

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Edited By Wilshere

@keeng: I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

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Knives

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Didn't you know there are always strong female characters in real life?

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mdmac92

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Great review Jeff, but I'm still on the fence. I guess I'll wait for the QL and subsequent podcast.

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RVonE

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I've gotta say I don't think you are being fair Jeff. I mean I understand the rating is your personal experience but 5 stars for a game which has average gameplay, boring side-quests, bad AI... I don't know when I see 5 stars I see a must buy but after reading the review it sounds like the game doesn't have anything great about. Being a jack of all trades isn't a fantastic quality for games because they are competing for our time with specialized opponents. I just know you are into your gangster shit but I expect a professional critic to be able to look past personal biases a little more. Not saying its not a good game, I haven't played it, but what you are describing doesn't sound too amazing.

Part of the point of this site is to commit to those "personal biases".

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sadsadsad

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Edited By sadsadsad

@rudetrooper: install the play disc to a usb device.

you'll avoid disc reading and pop ins.

Loading Video...

waiting on reports from PSN users.

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GrumpyBob

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Jeff seems to only "like" this game rather than "love it" as the score seems to indicate...

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DedBeet

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Since they do not give partial stars, for all we know Jeff's score may be closer to a 9/10 :P