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.
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.