Grand Theft Auto V

Rockstar North - 2013 - PS3/X360

Just from a sheer technological standpoint, I found this game quite impressive. To have an open world as large as GTA V did and with the amount of detail in the environments that this game had is pretty mind blowing. You can wander out in the middle of nowhere and look around and the environments will appear just as detailed and vibrant as they do in the heavy traffic city areas. Add on top of that the complex physics simulations and game systems, realistic character animations and large open world and this is probably the most technically impressive video game I've ever played. Especially when you consider that the game is running on 8 year old hardware.

Gameplay wise, it’s pretty much your standard GTA game. Drive around, blow stuff and cause chaos. What’s different about GTA V is that you can switch between one of three characters at nearly any time. The characters all have different personalities and missions as well as stats and abilities. One of the characters can do bullet time driving while one of the other characters can do bullet time…bullets.

The characters in GTA V all have distinct personalities and are incredibly well defined and well written. Especially when compared to other GTA games where I found all of the characters to be more or less forgettable. While I found the characters to be well written, I found a lot of the parts of the overall story to be hit and miss. Mostly miss. There were a lot of the parts of the story where the characters had no conceivable motivation to be doing what they were doing. Because the characters were so well written and defined, they sometimes felt out of place in story situations that were over the top. There’s a part in the story where one of the characters meets a total random stranger, flies up in a plane with him, rides an ATV out of the back of the plane and opens the parachute at the last possible second just for fun. Okay, but why? Why would my character decide to do this? Maybe I’m not supposed to take the story as seriously as I did, but the game seems to want me to. At least sometimes. GTA V seems to randomly decide to take the story quite seriously whenever it wants to and the tone oscillates between serious and ridiculous which is kind of jarring. The game will have you jumping ATVs out of planes one second, but then want you to care about these characters and their well being the next. Which didn't quite work for me.

But the fun of a GTA game is driving around and causing chaos, which this game does as well or better than any other GTA title. The missions were fun, no driving people around and having to call and chat with them constantly like GTA IV. There were only a small handful of missions in GTA V that I found to be boring or tedious. And there’s a frequent checkpointing system in the game so you’ll rarely need to replay a certain section of the mission over and over again if you fail. I've pretty much ignored the online portion of this game. I don’t know why, it just doesn't appeal to me.

Summary:
Overall, I found GTA V to be a pretty solid game, it’s my favorite in the series and I doubt fans of other GTA games will be dissapointed.