1345: A Grand Old Time

I’ll probably write something in more depth over on USgamer tomorrow, but I wanted to give some immediate reactions to having just finished Grand Theft Auto V.

Short version: I was extremely impressed. I was expecting to just duck into it for a little while in order to be able to write about it during its launch week, but I found myself hooked in various ways: the story, the world, the characters. The whole thing is put together in such a marvellously coherent way that it just works really well — and I barely even touched all the largely irrelevant side stuff.

GTA V has drawn a bunch of flak for various reasons, but from what I can tell, it’s business as usual in GTA-land. In fact, GTA V nails the balance between biting satire and straight-up drama better than any previous installment in the series — there’s always been a certain dissonance between the fact that you can freely whip out a rocket launcher and start blowing shit up and the actual linear story that Rockstar is trying to tell.

The interesting thing about GTA V is that a lot of its most “offensive” stuff is down to the player. The notorious “shag a prostitute then run her over to get your money back” thing that people always fixate on? That was emergent player behaviour that people discovered in Grand Theft Auto III. Murderous rampages? You’re free to commit them any time you see fit, but there will be consequences — some people will shoot back, other times, you’ll attract the attention of the police. The story and all the bad things you commit in the name of the ongoing narrative? It’s always your choice to proceed down that path; if you’d rather play the game as a “city living” simulator, you can do. If you’d rather play the game in an attempt to steal the most heavily-guarded vehicles as possible, you can do. If you want to ignore the structured content, you can do — and there’s very little “unlocking” of things to do, unlike earlier installments, so you have pretty much free roam of the enormous map from the get-go.

I was surprised that GTA V’s plot actually hooked me, though. I enjoyed spending time with Michael, Trevor and Franklin, each of whom are interesting, well-realised characters and all distinctive in their own right. None of them — not even Trevor, whom a lot of critics have fixated on — are one-dimensional characters, and each have their own personal story arcs to follow amid the overall plot. The story itself has a good blend of dark humour and serious(ish) crime drama, and there’s some fantastic setpieces. There’s potential for different playthroughs to unfold slightly differently thanks to some (admittedly limited) choices — but the game caters to and copes with these differences with unique dialogue.

Outside of the main story components, the missions are well-designed, too; one of the strengths of the open-world structure is that it provides the scope for you to tackle situations as you see fit, and the game embraces this philosophy wholeheartedly on a number of occasions. There are assassination missions where you need to figure out the best way to approach a target, for example; and later in the game, you have to steal some cars based on limited photographic information. This latter one really impressed me, actually; I found myself walking rather than driving around the city, looking carefully for the landmarks I was supposed to be seeking out, and it wasn’t a frustrating experience at all — it felt like walking around a real city looking for something.

GTA V has its elements that will make people uncomfortable or turn them off, sure, but there’s little denying it’s a great game and a fantastic technical achievement. I’m glad I actually took the time to play it through — I was all set to pass it by after getting frustrated with all the frankly ridiculous hype, which I still think was completely overboard — and would recommend that if you’ve been on the fence about it, you should give it a go.