If you are receiving a dreaded dose of “gamelessness” (defined by me as a horrible withdrawal symptom where gamers ran out of games to kill their time and find themselves edgy, twiddling their thumbs, staring blankly or drooling uncontrollably), look no further…GTA V is guaranteed to remove the affliction off faster than you can say “Rockstar Rocks” 10 times and you will stay gameless-free for a loooooooong time.
Why? Simply because there’s a ton to do in GTA V.
Let’s talk about SIZE. Because, as advertisements like to put it to pander to the male ego, size does matter (for an open world game). GTA V is gargantuan. Rockstar told the press that the map size of GTA V is going to be greater than that of Red Dead Redemption, GTA IV and GTA: San Andreas combined. Converted into square miles, that is an astonishing 49 square miles of area in real life. To get a sense of how big 49 square miles is, it is the size of San Francisco, and double the size of New York’s Manhattan Island.
(Fun fact: Singapore has a land area of approximately 275 sq miles)
Despite having a huge map like this, GTA V runs as smoothly as greased silk. There are no slowdowns in frame-rate, no loading times during the game and no disappearing textures. The world of GTA V is a beautiful sprawling metropolis full of activity. You walk down the streets as one of the 3 characters (Franklin, Trevor and Michael) and witness people jogging on the streets, people playing golf, people goofing and hanging around, biker gangs riding their Harveys on the freeway etc. The world is very much alive and unpredictable.
So what are the things you could do? Well, apart from going on a berserk killing spree and blowing things up for fun, GTA V actually packs a lot of stuff to do, and none of them feels like a last-minute rushed job slotted into the game.
Play golf? Check. Tennis? Check. Yoga? (I’m not kidding, killing one moment and yoga the next?) Check. Stripper performing lap dance? Check. Hang out with stripper after the lap dance? Check. Get her contacts? Check. Dabble in stock markets? Check. Having your own “social” webpage? Check. Secretly shoot a sex tape? Check. Steal the underpants of another celebrity? Check. Get eaten by sharks? Check. Online sex dating? Check. Have your own attack dog? Check. Take selfies after commiting a crime and pose it on Facebook? Check.
(Nothing spells “Sicko” more clearly than a selfie after an arson attack)
It is so easy to get distracted when letting out the depraved psycho in some of us, but the main story is actually one of the strongest points in this game. You have a retired robber Michael undergoing mid-life crisis and seeking help from his therapist; mixed with Franklin, a street-smart but inexperienced criminal at the beginning of his career looking at Michael as his mentor; and wells, Trevor, a terrifying psychopath who happens to be the best friend of Michael, and is a character that Rockstar needed to keep things outrageous, funny and batty. All three characters are so disparate but yet they could display such amazing chemistry when acting together. The script was very well-driven and the voice-acting is superb throughout the game despite the huge volumes of dialogue (The previous GTA IV apparently has 80,000 lines of dialogue, which is much more than Mass Effect 3 at 40,000 lines and Fallout: New Vegas at 65,000 lines). Throughout the game, you can switch and play seamlessly between each character, and see the world through their viewpoint. This is a refreshing take from previous GTA games and really strengthens the effect on story-telling.
Another major plus is the mission design. Open world games typically suffer from a design flaw, and that is the repetitive missions and gameplay that drives gamers away with boredom. A lot of poorly-designed missions eventually boils down to fetching things from A to B, or killing X number of people/creatures for some stranger you spoke to for the first time. In GTA V though, you could feel that great care has been taken to ensure that the missions stay fresh and unique, from spying on people with a police helicopter’s on-board camera, to hacking traffic lights to guide a getaway car through downtown Los Santos, or using a smartphone app to track someone. As the storyline progresses, you receive the masterpieces in GTA V mission design: the heists. These are the missions that makes you feel like you are part of Ocean’s Eleven team. They are big, awesome and open-ended as it should be. And how the heist will unfold would depend very much on the approach you choose and the crew you pick. With these heist missions being introduced, I simply couldn’t get enough of it. I wish the developers would eventually allow modded content from players to design and post their heist because that would put the A in awesome.
Vehicle handling is also much improved. The tires actually have more traction now and driving is not longer a skidding-messy-explosive affair. I was never really good at driving in the earlier GTA series. But with the word “Auto” in GTA, I absolutely have to drive (Duh, otherwise GTA would just become GT). Driving in GTA V actually feel a lot more pleasant and fun with the improved vehicle handling (plus Franklin has a special ability to slow down time while driving; the other two have other special abilities). Planes and helicopters are also much easier to fly now; the controls are intuitive and easy to pick up, and flying is absolutely a blast with the parachute equipped.
Beneath the layers of mindless fun, GTA V is actually a powerful social commentary. Again, you have to be impressed with the developers at Rockstar to use GTA V as a platform to satirize almost everything. GTA V takes a dig at Facebook blatantly (which in the game is known as LifeInvader) and the CEO boasts proudly about the number of child workers it employs across the globe. Apple is referenced as iFruit, and in the stock market, iFruit is described as “Purveyor of white shiny internet-surfing devices. The world’s largest religion.“. The US economic crisis is not left unnoticed by the developers, which described BankofLiberty in the stock market as “Multinational banking corporation that made billions out of bankrupting the American people, went bankrupt themselves, then got the American people to bail them out. Classy.”
A lot of negative reviews out there would point to a particular gruesome torture scene by torture is used to extract information. Yes, I know what you are thinking; that’s the one and only famous one that stirred up the hornet’s nest. What many people fail to realise is how incredibly genius it is for Rockstar to slip their message about US government use of torture using black humour. The scene is definitely uncomfortable and many a times, the player is reminded that the torture victim is perfectly willing to talk before he’s tortured, but you are ordered to do it anyway and Trevor happily obliges. The entire torture scene was pointless and towards the end, as Trevor sets the victim free, he says,
“The media and the government would have us believe that torture is some necessary thing. We need it to get information, to assert ourselves. Did we get any information out of you?”
“I would have told you everything!” the man replies.
“Exactly!” says Trevor. “Torture’s for the torturer. Or the guy giving the order to the torturer. You torture for the good times! We should all admit that. It’s useless as a means of getting information.”
There you have it. GTA V caters perfectly to the adult thinking gamer who knows how to juggle mindless fun with satirical introspection. That is Rockstar’s way of telling you their point of view. Such scenes may not sit well with many stomachs, but they are still food for thought. Therefore, if the player could just pause and think about it, they will see how brilliant Rockstar is for trying to drive their point across. While the pow-wow nature of the action is exciting, the game also shows you the consequences for their actions in the end. The sad pathetic lives led by the “protagonists”, while seeming glitzy and exciting on the surface, resonate loudly with how very empty they are.
I give it a 9.8/10 (0.2 for too few heists…I want more!)
