Grand Theft Auto 5

Video Game Review

By Louis Lalire

Video Games have come a long way since 2008. Now, in the final year before the release of the next-gen consoles, the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One,  games have reached a new maturity; something that will only get better with time as in-game AI get smarter, visuals more immersive and stories more emotionally provocative. The reason 2008, in particular, is highlighted here is because it was the year Grand Theft Auto IV, the most recent game in Developer Rockstar’s eminent open-world, action-adventure canon, was released. GTA IV (as often abbreviated) brought the series to a new generation of video game consoles, and introduced a newfound sense of realism and subtlety in both gameplay and narrative, while also maintaining the over-the-top satire the series was founded on.  Five years later comes Grand Theft Auto V, and while it enlarges and improves the game world and fine tunes the modernized driving and shooting mechanics introduced in GTA IV, it does not attempt to take the series to any new places. It is not necessarily a misstep for the series, but rather a non-step; a game that does not attempt to explore new concepts and characters, instead relying heavily on a tried-and-trued formula that, in 2013, can be at times, still exhilarating, but at others, dated.

Relying on its formula for urban chaos does not make GTA V a bad game, in fact, it is a very good game, a circumstance that speaks volumes for the formula itself. However, it does make it a safe game, and perhaps, at least within its own canon, a disappointing one.  Safe—that  is the best way to describe our second journey* into a life of crime on the streets of Los Santos (Los Angeles), and a descriptor that a series drowned in controversy for its depictions of sex, drugs and violence in the past should be uncomfortable being associated with. It is no longer pushing-the-envelope to show a character smoking a bong in a cutscene. Other games and franchises have caught up to Grand Theft Auto in these respects, and so the series, in order to maintain its highly respected position as a “groundbreaking” franchise, must break the mold in new ways. That is where GTA 5 fails.

For the first time, we have three main, playable characters, and from the onset it appeared that Rockstar missed a golden opportunity to introduce the first female protagonist in GTA history here (maybe next time). Instead, we have Franklin, a very bland African American from the ghetto, whom I turned into a metro-sexual via Suburban outfitters, one of three in game clothing stores the player can use to dress his or her character. Next we have Trevor, a larger-than-life violent psychotic, who seems like a callback to the series’ zanier days. And lastly we have Michael, a retired heist man who changed his name and escaped the game, now living out the rest of his days in upper class misery with the most annoying wife and kids you’ll ever see. While switching between characters to perform different parts of missions is very cool, I would have loved to see Rockstar try and revolve an entire game around Michael.

Michael’s mid-life crisis story is decidedly anti-GTA throughout the first quarter of the game, but he descends into the same gun-toting airhead routine that compounds Franklin and Trevor. Rockstar surely could have done more with his story had they put the same amount of focus on it as they had, say, John Marston’s, in the critically-acclaimed Red Dead Redemption. Our protagonists’ motivations are almost always completely unfounded and they are surrounded by a cast of characters that exist primarily to make you do things for them. This is a problem that has always nagged the series, but in GTA V, it stands out more than ever, because the characters present are either ones we’ve seen time and time again, like Franklin’s hood friend Lamar, or they are just, well, boring, like antagonist billionaire Devin Weston. With the exception of perhaps Michael’s family and Michael’s therapist Dr. Friedlander, the large cast of characters that surround our protagonists’ is as underwhelming as the series has ever seen. The story, meanwhile, is long and tedious, and descends to a conclusion that one could see coming within the first five hours. But by the time Franklin faces the final “decision”, the player has long since stopped caring, because they know all the characters are mere rag-dolls, and all the stories that the game nebulously dips its toes into will remain unfullfilling.

The missions, and there are a lot of them, range everywhere from being eyes-popping-out-of-my-sockets awesome to brain-numbingly terrible. The best missions revolve around heists, which are planned out by your crew’s braniac, Lester, a character who reminded me, weirdly enough, of Bentley from the Sly Cooper series, in both purpose and appearance (Bentley is a turtle, by the way).  There are two options for pulling off these heists, a more direct way and a more subtle way, but the game includes a nice “Replay Mission” feature so players can do both. These missions and the preparations you make for them are thought-out, well-paced, and most of all, rewarding. They also integrate “Hollywood” moments into the game better than most—whether it’s jumping a motorcycle onto a train, parachuting down onto the top of a skyscraper or escaping a fleet of police in an attack helicopter.

At the other end of the spectrum are the trivial missions, and, as expected, you do some pretty stupid things in GTA V, like towing cars around and hunting deer. At times you want yell at your character, “Franklin, you’re a fucking millionaire, why are you wasting your time looking around a junk yard for a dime bag of pot?” But trivial isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because, as much as we complain about doing trivial things in the real world, we do them anyways—and we choose to keep doing them, a sentiment reflected in many video game worlds––GTA V included. Trivial tasks are not leaving video games any time soon. In fact, as gamers, they are often something we cling to in search of more content.

No, what’s perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of the game’s level design is the inclusion of a Private Military Company known as Merryweather, because Merryweather simply gives the developers a means to throw us into nonsensical gun battles that go on for far too long. While Rockstar has improved leaps and bounds in terms of shooting and cover mechanics, they still remain a weak point for the series, and most of the action scenes digress into stale arena battles in which you stay in one spot as waves of Merryweather soldiers attack you. These gun battles come from a video game era past, in which enemies were not so much intelligent, scheming opponents as irritating gnats, buzzing around your head without rhyme or reason. Merryweather soldiers are just gnats.

Perhaps my inability to accept GTA V for what it is comes at the fault of its predecessors, in that I had an expectation it would be as progressive as those games were or as Red Dead Redemption was in 2010. Am I being overly critical? Perhaps, but one must be critical of a series of such stature. Was the overall single player experience a disappointment? Yes. Is it still unbelievably fun to go on a mass killing spree, then hop in your Rapid GT, weave up and down streets and ally-ways to try and escape the numerous SWAT teams and police helicopters on your tail? Hell yeah. The old ways are still there, and they’re still fun, but a series must remain active and not get too comfortable with what it has accomplished before. This is an affliction that hampers many series, but one that Grand Theft Auto had avoided until now. Unfortunately, GTA V is its first static entry, and we’ll have to wait for the inevitable GTA VI on the next generation of consoles, which will be the fourth generation the series has spanned**, to see if Rockstar is able to take this series any further.   

Grand Theft Auto V

Rated M for Mature

Playstation 3 & Xbox 360.

Developed By: Rockstar North

Published By: Rockstar Games

*The first time was in 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

**The first Grand Theft Auto launched on the original PlayStation and Windows Computers in 1997