Review: Grand Theft Auto V

Wei Cheng is the Triad gang leader in Los Santos, and when we first hear of him, his son Tao and an interpreter are considering Trevor Philips Character Analysis Philips Industries as a business partner for their meth operation in Blaine County. The Aztecas attack the meth lab while Trevor is giving his potential customers a tour of his business, and the Triads decide to work with the O'Neil brothers inst

But there are games that are stupidly huge with slow traversal that are great. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the perfect example of a slow trudge through a huge world, one that works fantastically. Skyrim dodges GTA ’s pitfall because of how the open-world is set up. If you leave a town and find that you’re approaching a landmark, you’ll more than likely want to go there and mark it on your map. The landmarks and activities are spaced just far enough apart that they aren’t overwhelmingly close (ultimately feeling like busy work), but far away enough to be enticing and worth going after. And those brief periods between the activities are filled with enemies to fight, ingredients to gather, or even NPC’s to help. These things are good because they have inherent and meaningful value. Enemies to fight mean potential for experience. Ingredients to gather mean new items to craft. NPC’s to help means more missions or secrets. This is a pitch-perfect way to make a world big, but not empty. Bethesda intelligently placed each valuable thing in Skyrim to offer tantalizing reward, but a good enough distance to make the world big and full of expansive promise.

One game I had imagined more than any other had to be the open world of Grand Theft Auto. Touring the vastness of Liberty City, meeting colorful characters and going into storefronts all excited me. Not to mention the exhilarating idea of fighting my way through the endless sea of enemies brought on by committing a some petty crimes, like hitting a pedestrian with a car. Virtuix, the folks behind the Omni, have released a video of Grand Theft Auto V being played using the Oculus Rift and their motion tracking peripheral, and I didn’t have quite the reaction I thought I would have.

The world of Grand Theft Auto V is so big that it requires three characters to explore it. While that line may sound ripped straight from a PR-laden interview, it’s quite accurate considering telling a story from the eyes of just one man would lead to new areas not being discovered for tens of hours into the game. The game stars three protagonists: Michael, Franklin and Trevor. After a prologue that sets the events of the game in motion, Franklin is the first playable character. Similar to CJ in San Andreas, Franklin is well-meaning gangster who lives with his aunt in the ghetto and is trying to make a better life for himself. Clearly more intelligent than his known associates, Franklin is confined to being a repo man for a shady car dealer who plays the race car to get customers into vehicles they can’t afford, only to have Franklin repo them weeks later thanks to ludicrous financing. After one of the customer’s father, Michael, gets a whiff of this little scam, he comes down to pay the dealer a little visit. Impressed by his attitude, Franklin decides to reach out to Michael to see if they could work together.


"If you have completed the solo part of the game and the multiplayer does not interest you, then you can do without this version. In contrast, those addicted to Grand Theft Auto Online, hardcore fans of the series and gamers who expect a potential solo DLC have interest in obtaining titles for [Xbox One or PS4]. And if you've abstained from playing/finishing the original version until the arrival of the fifth episode on PS4 and Xbox One, then the question does not even arise. You will not regret


Do you find the overwhelmingly positive reviews surprising, or did you expect to see any re-release of such a critically-acclaimed game go over this well? Will you be picking up a copy to see Los Santos in a brand new way, or did you get your fill on previous conso

Last year I got to use the Oculus Rift to play XING: The Land Beyond , and even though that game didn’t have the most realistic graphics, it felt stupidly real. Despite the facts that I was holding an Xbox 360 controller in my hands and that every one of my senses except sight told me I was not exploring a tropical island, there were multiple times I found myself reaching out for objects in front of me. It made me forget where I was, sitting down in a convention hall full of thousands of people.

Rockstar’s mentality of "bigger is better" is what is making Grand Theft Auto less interesting of a series than it should be. For such a maverick of a series, one that broke ground for gamers, critics and politicians alike, it sure hasn’t been as ambitious as its peers these days. While Skyrim was displaying a smart array of carefully placed activities and Saints Row was slowly chipping away that obnoxious padding between missions, Grand Theft Auto was just putting on more and more unneeded pounds. I like the idea of big games with lots of stuff to do, but simply making a game bigger and smugly putting down your competitors for their "lack of ambition" isn’t a good way to evolve your series, especially when your game is big and empty enough that you need to include yoga as a legitimate side mission.