While a humungous leap from its predecessors, this one is still not worth playing.

This game has tremendous atmosphere, great radios albeit with more songs needed, and an actually comprehensible city. It is actually pretty fun to drive around in this game, with the good tunes and wacky car physics, though I could do without my car blowing up from 2 bumps. The problems lie within the actual missions, and the gameplay outside of driving.

The missions are structured similarly to the first two games, where you just go and do random jobs, though of course they become increasingly higher-profile and dangerous, but most notably they become annoyingly difficult. I am 95% certain a lot of these missions were never play-tested, with some being nearly impossible unless you already have guns or something going into the mission.

The flat-out bad mission design isn't helped by the lackluster story either, you get cut-scenes now but they tell hardly any story, and as a silent protagonist, it really feels like you're just doing missions for the fun of it, not because of a developing plot.

The shooting sucks, driving boats isn't fun, there's no mission checkpoints which can be quite frustrating, there's no overall map so if you don't remember where something is, tough shit. There's just too many things getting in the way of actually having fun, which is unfortunate, cause I was really loving this world, and really getting attuned to the driving. Hopefully Vice City improves.

Reviewed on Feb 24, 2024


5 Comments


1 month ago

daaaaaaang man, you've been dunking all over the early GTAs haha

1 month ago

@RedBackLoggd This one was probably the hardest call, cause there's a lot of good about this game that I loved, I mean yk there's a reason it was so successful. But uhhhh yeah, I just really stopped having fun with this one unfortunately.

1 month ago

Why play the OG instead of the remaster?

1 month ago

@RedBackLoggd I figured for my first time the remasters would be too different, as the aesthetics are very different and there's a lot of changes to gameplay systems and animations.

1 month ago

That's fair, but I heard either this game or San Andreas had game-breaking bugs that were, at the very least, fixed in the remaster.