This is the third in a series of reviews on the 3d era of the Grand Theft Auto games and it reference my previous 2 reviews on GTA 3 and Vice City. San Andreas is a fan favourite in the GTA franchise and was a cultural blockbuster on release. The game was a chart topper for the PlayStation 2 beating out both previous games and even Sony's first party releases in sales to become the best selling PlayStation 2 game of all time. What I’m trying to get across is that this game was a big deal and it set the course for Rockstar's future. I want to state up front that I think this game is a monumental achievement, it’s setting and story was a huge step up from previous games, it made meaningful changes to the GTA formula and I had a great time playing it, yet I also felt a sense of disappointment as all too often the game strayed from the intoxicating hands off mission structure that the previous two titles had. San Andreas will often lead the player by the nose and not only does the game reduce the amount of creative expression the player can do but it even goes so far as to actively destroy any chance the player might make in preparing for missions or engaging in creative problem-solving instead choosing a serious of linear scripted sequences which are lacking in a satisfying payoff.

Let’s start at the beginning; its the 1990s and Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson has been away in Liberty City for a while but at hearing the death of his mother he has come back to San Andreas for the funeral. Whilst visiting the his old neighbourhood and gang he becomes dedicated to building the gang back up and its here we meet the cast of characters and establish the setting. San Andreas is set on the West Coast in the 90s and it is reminiscent of gangsta films of the era like Boyz n the Hood or Menace II Society. Unlike Vice City, which was a straight rip off off one particular movie, San Andreas doesn’t really follow beat for beat exactly what happens in it’s filmic influences and instead chooses to take elements from their setting and portrayal of hood life to create a very dry and drab looking aesthetic, one that’s romanticised by the influence of west coast hip-hop where the streets are mean and crime is a way of life. Corrupt police stalk citizens and enable gang violence, different gangs not only beef with each other but there’s also conflict within families. This is a more thoughtful approach to building a setting and it’s fantastic. In the previous games I talked about the ‘rags to riches’ catharsis that comes from building up the protagonist to a very glorified kingpin and whilst San Andreas starts the player on the bottom rung in a neighbourhood of poverty and systemic violence it doesn’t glorify the crime life, tragedy, downfall and consequences strike the characters. San Andreas retains the feeling of progression from older titles but chooses to make a conscious effort to depict its setting and characters with a more tempered approach.

CJ is the best protagonist of the 3 games hands-down because he isn’t an unfeeling, reckless gangster but rather he is a person who at times displays sadness and amusement and anger and despair, he speaks to different characters in different tones. CJ might show respect to his family members and people who treat him well but he also has a playful side where he makes fun of his homies, he speaks coldly and impatiently to Tenpenny and the police officers who keep him on a leash. CJ is successfully established not just as an avatar of player chaos but deep down, a decent guy with a complex thought process, he sometimes comes across as very trepidatious and whiny and like he feels pressured into doing something to appear strong even when he knows it’s the wrong thing to do. This is praise that you cannot say about Claude or Tommy. I think a lot of credit should go to the brilliant performances of the voice actors who deliver a fun and enthusiastic performance from start to finish.

The starting area of the game, Grove Street is a triumphant expression of game design and makes you feel like you’re back in the swing of GTA. San Andreas has better movement mechanics this time around, CJ can crouch, climb, roll and swim and the starting area shows this off by placing a few weapons on rooftops, encouraging players to reach tangible and useful early game rewards by exploring and interacting with these new mechanics. One of the first things I would do upon returning to Grove was pick up a pistol, SMG and body armour, the golden combo of early game GTA. The game also improves on shooting mechanics, the controls are more like what you would expect from a third person shooter with a reticle and finer movement controls, the lock on is very powerful and in fact its almost too powerful, you can snap onto enemies very quickly with very little effort combined with the improved aiming you can absolutely blast enemies away or snipe them before they even notice you, but its an overall good change, it feels like a robust system that encourages you to use movement and cover intelligently.

It sounds good so far right? Good story, good setting and meaningful gameplay improvements aside the shortcomings of the mission design appear very early in the game when Big Smoke takes you on a mission to kill some Russian Mafia. By this point in the game I had done laps of weapon pickups and equipped myself with an MP5 and a lot of ammo for it, what happens next is a sequence where a mac-10 is forced on my character replacing the powerful SMG and all the ammo I had collected so that the mission could perform an extended turret sequence. Needless to say this was where I knew this game and I would start to clash. After the mission all the effort and progress I had put into preparation had been undone and I was left with a shit gun with one magazine, I felt betrayed by this and it was made worse by the scripted mission wasn’t even very impressive in its delivery, considering it resembled a climatic chase scene on a motorbike in a storm drain being shot at by black sedans and a semi truck (A la Terminator 2) it was decidedly flat with no music or impactful sound effects and marked by invulnerable vehicles that had to reach an area to blow up cinematically.

This mission represents a problem with the entire game, the player is not encouraged to figure out a solution to a mission but rather follow a series of instructions and set pieces. If you’ve spent some time picking up grenades a mission will force you to replace them with Molotovs to complete an arson mission, if there's a warehouse full of enemies they won’t spawn from one entrance and you cannot scout the area because you have to hit a trigger at the front entrance and go through the mission on a set course, this linear approach to missions completely clashes with the open world design remnants like ammo and armour pickups and I wasn’t even particularly motivated to look for fast vehicles or use the new vehicle customisation options because the vehicles were either expected to be blown up as part of the mission or the player is just provided with a car and told to drive somewhere. Contextual health and armour spawn in the middle of missions and red barrels are placed everywhere. San Andreas doesn’t want you to prepare and it doesn’t want you to experiment and this is such a massive let down after the feeling of having Grove Street teach you to explore for goodies, any sense of reward or satisfaction is killed stone dead when a mission demands I complete it a certain way.

Nowhere is this focus on narrative-at-the-expense-of-gameplay shown more clearly than the in car conversations you can have with characters; these conversations are themselves really great and I want to listen to them but all too often they conflict with the games scripted timing, I shouldn’t have to stop before a mission checkpoint to hear the dialogue finish but it happens nearly every time CJ and Ryder start having a conversation across the dashboard, I have to park a few meters away from the mission trigger to hear character development happen, it’s like the game’s narrative is not just fighting the player but the nature of the open world itself. The missions also have some straight up awful mini games like the beat matching games where you have to dance or bounce a low rider to arrows like a really slow and clunky step-mania, quite frankly I would not choose to play these game if a couple weren’t required for progression, I decided to cheat engine myself 100,000 points and browsed my phone whilst they played themselves out, you might call this a ‘skill issue’ I assure you that I am capable of playing bad rhythm games, but I don’t actually want to, I would rather be, you know, stealing cars? Shooting people? Playing a bloody Grand Theft Auto game and not Project Diva Compton.

The game is festooned with half-baked mechanics that often feel like the game is trying to be too ambitious, there are terrible stealth missions where you have to crouch walk everywhere for example and whilst I do appreciate that the developers wanted to introduce new scenarios and new mechanics for players to experience I would much rather they took the approach of letting me create my own experiences. When I was playing Vice City and I found a way to sneak weapons into the golf course to snipe an assassination target at range that was ME creating MY OWN stealth mission, I didn’t need a visibility meter or noise meter or a new suite of mechanics that only work in a certain area, instead I built my own gameplay story and expressed myself without the game’s overbearing hand guiding me through it.

San Andreas is filled with ambitious mechanics that aren’t developed enough, the game has life-sim elements where you can increase your fatness, athleticism, muscle and lung capacity, these all effect the on foot gameplay and they add a really awesome element of flavour, I love that you can eat a ton of chicken buckets from fast food places and CJ will start to make wise cracks about his weight, characters will even call you up and tell you to go to the gym. This system is such a brilliant thing to add to this huge world but it’s fucked up by making the gym sections where you gain stamina and muscle these awful button mashing mini games that are a serious concern for people with RSI, its like the game can’t stop switching out the mechanics before fully exploring them. Another life-sim element that annoys the shit out of me is the mechanic of dating women, this ties into the rags to riches power fantasy as you begin to date sexier and more classy women who expect you to dress better and have a nice car but again it’s not thought out properly, you will be hit with random notifications that your ‘progress with Denise’ has dropped it’s like the game constantly demands attention from you as if it were a real relationship but all that it accomplishes is making the player go and do things that they may not want to do. My relationship with a girl should not decrease like a meter 10 minutes after I had already met with her and completed a series of very obtuse and boring date objectives like going to a bar wearing an appropriate amount of swag clothing and a $300 flat top.

I’m sure I could say more about the fact that you’re expected to cheat on multiple women who are largely portrayed as shallow gold diggers that you fuck for like, power ups and car spawns but its a 2004 GTA game, I wasn’t expecting much.

Another element that falls flat for me is the map layout, on the one hand its much much larger than previous games and the game continues the trend from Vice City of having cool interiors and little details, in terms of a variety in elevation and road complexity it still holds up today but it is much harder to navigate than most open world maps, very often I was met impassible geometry between me and an objective. Verticality is a big part of the San Andreas map but its supremely annoying to navigate because it results in the game putting a brick wall in your face and you need to drive an entire block around it. The areas outside the cities are expansive and devoid of any significant landmarks, Vice City and GTA 3 did a good job of getting players used to their environment by landmarking shops and points of interest with other areas to create a puzzle-like map that players could familiarise themselves with quickly. Highways in Vice City were dotted with interesting coloured buildings or a business or a unique bridge to cross to reach a new part of the city, compare this to San Andreas where you drive along featureless two lane highways between cities as if the game is attempting to recreate the mundane experience of driving in real life California. Areas are so generic that you can’t get used to them and you are forced to check a map to make sure the long, twisting road you’re driving on won’t just shit you out in a completely arbitrary direction. When I think about the West Coast of the US and the places there I don’t think too fondly of driving for hours on the i-15 and yet that's exactly what the San Andreas map feels like. Bad traversal of the map is mitigated somewhat by the new inclusion of really fun on foot options like parachutes and jetpacks but these aren’t always available, the bulk of a GTA game is always driving and having a map that feels boxed in whilst also being way too big is frankly upsetting.

It may sound dramatic to be upset with a game like this but I feel like I’m missing a trick with San Andreas, I feel like there's something not clicking for me here. I like the story, I like the characters, I like the driving model, I love the soundtrack which would’ve been a hard act to follow after Vice City and yet is still full of bangers and I love the new movement mechanics, I love the extensive amount of content and environments the game has, I appreciate that the game is ambitious even if it is too ambitious sometimes and I can see why it remains so popular amongst fans but there’s just something not right with it. I constantly felt like the game was wrestling away control from me and its the same feeling I get from contemporary Rockstar games. San Andreas exists in this weird space where the franchise hasn’t committed to its goal of a narrative experience and still has remnants of player choice and player expression like weapon pickups and collectibles so I get the impression that I’m supposed to be going out of my way to prepare for something when the game will just take all that away from me and give me a set of tools that I have to use. When the game lets go of the scripted linear focus it’s great and some of my favourite missions were the things like the heists with Catalina, the game lets off and tells you to choose a target and you play out a small heist with a dynamic shoot-out and tense getaways, these were exciting and unpredictable and were on par if not better than some of the best missions in Vice City and GTA 3. When the game rewarded me for increasing my lung capacity ahead of a mission that requires strong swimming that felt good, it felt like the game was acknowledging the choices I made. If San Andreas had a consistent mission structure that really let the player loose on the open world to build their own fun I think it would an incredible game, as it stands I can’t love it as much. Going forward Rockstar games would become increasingly railroaded in focus but also they became utterly immense in their popularity and cultural impact, its clear that even if this game didn’t click with me, millions more came to love this style of game, I think to understand San Andreas you have to appreciate a more authored approached to mission based open world games, but for me I will always prefer the freedom and unchained mayhem of GTA 3 and Vice City.

This review is the 2nd in a multi-part series on the 3d era of Grand Theft Auto games, it follows on my review from GTA3.

This review is going to be biased, disingenuous and cowardly as I praise a game wholly on nostalgia, vibes and not much else. In my GTA3 review I held off criticising the game too hard because I felt that it was more important to get across how groundbreaking the game was for open world design but I cannot get away with that in this review. I necessarily need to talk about the shortcomings of Vice City because it cannot be as truly innovative as GTA3, instead the game builds on the same formula as the previous game but delivers a stylish, nostalgic and narrative focused experience… but the truth is, I don’t really want to. I love Vice City, it is by far my personal favourite game in the series by a mile and no criticism I can give of it can take away the big stupid grin that was plastered across my face as I flew a helicopter nose down over the blue glass waves of a Florida bay, Laura Branigan wailing through the radio.

Nostalgia is the operant word because the game isn’t shy about its retro factor. Set in 1986 and steeped in the culture of the time period, Vice City is nostalgic both literally in its presentation of a 1980s Miami drenched in Neon, New-wave music and sports cars but also narratively it’s a send up of 80s action films, actually calling it a ‘send-up’ is too generous, the game is just a blatant rip-off of Scarface but the protagonist is Italian Mafia instead of Cuban. Just about the only thing that differentiates the plot of Vice City from Scarface is that Tony Montana is forced to face the consequences of his actions and succumbs to greed and excess whereas Tommy Vercetti just… doesn’t. Vice City is not a cautionary tale about crime, it is just a glorification of criminality and a cathartic rags to riches journey with no downfall faced by the protagonist and no brakes on the exploitation of the drug trade. That said I don’t want to give the impression that the story is ‘good’ it’s very shallow, however I think its an improvement over GTA3. Claude’s journey barely has a point beyond revenge and he doesn’t really earn anything or have any desires or goals, he takes orders from random people until the game ends, the plot of Vice City gives us enough of a framework to enjoy the setting of the game, we want Tommy to succeed because we want money, guns, cars and toys just like he does, we want to be the boss.

Fresh out of a 15 year long prison sentence, Tommy Vercetti is sent to Vice City to conduct a drug deal on behalf of the Mafia, unfortunately the drug deal is an ambush and the Mafia reps and dealer are killed but Tommy and his shifty lawyer Ken Rosenberg manage to escape. Tommy now finds himself in a strange town and is tasked with tracking down the money and cocaine for his increasingly threatening Mafia boss. Unlike GTA 3 our protagonist is given a voice and personality, Tommy is voiced by Ray Liotta, giving a performance in between deadpan exasperation with the morons around him and the petulant anger of a sycophantic drug lord. Vercetti is constantly pissed and hotheaded in this game, its hard to ever feel sympathetic for him and instead he is best thought of as a vessel for the greed and violence of the player themselves. Changing to a voiced protagonist alters the feeling of the game significantly, in GTA3 Claude's muteness came across as totally psychotic and unfeeling, he was as grey and chaotic as the concrete jungle of Liberty City. Tommy however has a personality which feels like the prickly humid heat of a low sun hanging over a Florida swamp, he’s a lawful evil type of guy that uses money and organised criminal structures to gain wealth and power for himself, he doesn’t do whatever people tell him to do, instead preferring to take charge of a situation and delegate to his underlings.

Vice City thankfully continues the previous game’s mission design, the player is rewarded for creativity and the missions can be approached many different ways. One example is an early mission that gives you a chainsaw in a cutscene to assassinate a man, the cutscene even explicitly states “use this” and you’ll get unique dialogue and an additional cutscene for using this weapon to kill the target, however if you picked up a shotgun prior to the mission you can skip all of this entirely and just gun the target down. I think this is important because in my opinion Vice City and GTA 3 are the last vestige of this design, GTA as a series becomes increasingly more railroaded after this. There are lots of small examples of this design throughout the game, you can park vehicles in convenient places, find alternate routes to targets and prepare for missions beforehand and its as satisfying as ever to approach missions using your own creativity and planning.

Gameplay wise there isn’t much to expand on, the game features small quality of life improvements over GTA3 in terms of aiming, piloting aircraft and it has a functional in-game map which was sorely needed. I think the game really could have done with introducing some different gameplay elements because it really does feel like an expansion to the previous game in terms of how it plays, there’s no significant change in the sandbox, you drive, you walk around, you shoot and you don’t really interact with the game using any language other than violence, on the one hand this is good because its just a nice little update to an already great gameplay formula with an improved map, bigger story and some tweaks but we’ll see with San Andreas that the series will soon start to make additions and changes to this recipe. The map itself is by far one of the game’s strongest elements, Vice City is very carefully and thoughtfully designed compared to the big grey box of GTA3. I never even needed to use the map extensively because the game is so good at laying out a series of connecting landmarks, you can plot a route to a part of the city just with map knowledge alone. Every part of the game has standout shops, buildings, pickups or buy-able property and it connects them with unique looking bridges and highways, if you see a Mall in this game it’s a unique design and layout and you’ll know exactly where this mall is in relation to a club, a hotel, a police station, a hardware store, the map is a series of excellently blended puzzle pieces. Vice City isn’t just a map that you can familiarise yourself with but one that comes to feel homely and second nature, quite frankly I can navigate it better than I can my real life home-town.

In addition to the improvements in landmarking there is also a greater focus on details and interiors around the world, there are more shops and buildings that you can walk into and there is greater set dressing in general, one example is that rooms and houses you own in the game get objects added to them as you progress the missions, finding all the packages makes a little trophy appear in your hotel room, completing the film set business adds film reels and frames to your mansion, all of these elements combine to make Vice City feel cohesive and so much fun to explore, not just for pickups of weapons and armour but also because you might find a cool little detail like a tiki bar or doughnut shop or a butchers window with human meat. This attention to detail is an element which GTA 3 didn’t have and I’m glad that Vice City takes time to add these small touches to the world because it adds a brush of care an attention that makes the player want to look around and find these small bits and pieces of story-telling.

One aspect I dislike is that Vice City seems to be a bit more stingy on giving the player useful weapons and pickups, in GTA3 collecting the secret packages gives you a suite of weapons at safehouses but in Vice City you get a few very powerful weapons of a single type, like rockets or a minigun which are great by themselves but you can’t use them together. You also get a chance to pickup some secret vehicles like tanks and helicopters. These are very powerful and fun rewards to mess around with but they aren’t as helpful to the missions as an assault rifle or SMG and this makes the process of picking up weapons and ammo more tedious and lengthy as you have to hit up each spawn for a weapon, in fact its so tedious that if I failed a mission I would quit the game and reload a save file just so I didn’t have to do 10 minutes worth of getting more Uzi and AR-15 ammo. On the one hand its great that you get some powerful options to play around with but I think some less situational rewards would incentivise players to restart missions more quickly, GTA 3 didn’t have this problem because it made the rewards more useful and put the powerful weapons in Phil Cassidy’s shop, interestingly in Vice City, Cassidy returns and you can unlock his shop but why bother? Unless you really like using the m60 then you get a minigun and RPG delivered to your safehouses anyway. The rewards in the game feel like the game designers wanted to give the player more options for large scale chaos but in doing so they’ve neglected some of the smaller scale, on foot, gun-fighting elements of the sandbox. Sure you can just buy the weapons but they’re expensive early game and GTA 3 solved this problem by just giving the player actually useful rewards.

But all this sounds serviceable so what elevates the game? surely you can’t just slap an 80s skin on GTA3 and call it done? well as noted before the game is heavy on nostalgia and people are likewise very nostalgic for this game. Nostalgia is a cautious kind of relationship to have with any media, it’s very annoying when people suggest that ‘games used to be better’ or ‘they don’t make em like this any more’ because it sounds like disingenuous old man pining for a by-gone era; the world didn’t get worse, rather you just didn’t have anything else to worry about as a kid when this game was your only time sink, there are so many great games out now and accessing media is so much more convenient that you just wanna slap these morons and tell them to stop feigning some generational tragedy. However I think nostalgia can be a nice escape too and Vice City nails nostalgia. I said before that MSX FM is my favourite radio station and that is still true, but oh my God, Vice City’s licenced soundtrack is completely unparalleled. Every radio station is full of absolute classics; Hall & Oates, Michael Jackson, Bryan Adams, Gary Numan, Blondie, ELO, Yes, The Human League, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Spandau Ballet, Kate Bush, REO Speedwagon, Fat Larry’s Band, The Pointer Sisters, Rick James, Teena Marie, Twisted Sister, Ozzy, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Zapp & Roger, Grandmaster Flash, Cybotron, Afrika Bambaataa, Run DMC. Just banger after banger after banger, a cavalcade of non-stop tunes so good I sometimes drive around longer than I need to just to finish bopping to the song. I think this is so important because the soundtrack isn’t just a separate element of the game like it was in GTA3 but moreso it serves as a pillar of the atmosphere. When every single element of Vice City comes together it produces some of the best and most memorable parts of the whole GTA franchise, the missions themselves are fun sure and there’s a satisfying progression as you build a criminal empire with Tommy but nothing brings a feeling of deep joy to me, like racing down Ocean Drive in a cherry red Cheetah with Tyrone Brunson’s infectiously funky bass emanating from my speakers. When Rockstar North commits to getting a cinematic atmosphere right they are just masters of their craft. GTA3 has come back into focus recently because it’s very strange looking game that intersects with the current trend of liminal spaces and obsession with old video game graphics but that's more of an incidental thing, I like the vibe of GTA3 but Vice City is a different kind of vibe, a very authored facsimile of 80s excess that works on every level to immerse the player.

So that is my assessment of Grand Theft Auto Vice City, it’s my little guilty pleasure, my nostalgic getaway from the world where I can just sink into an 80s dream for a while, I admit this isn’t going to gel with everyone. People will probably play this game without this nostalgic reverence and find a dated and frustrating game with a shallow plot, cumbersome gameplay and a decent soundtrack and leave it there, in fact I do think GTA 3 remains the most important game in the franchise. I don’t care, I can only judge a game by how much joy it brings me and nothing brings me greater Joy than the sickening crunch of an old lady’s pelvis under the wheels of a Countach, Hawaiian shirt on, singing Video Killed the Radio Star, you can’t beat it.