Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

The Good
San Andreas is the logical next step in the growth of a series that continued to expand in size and variety. Suffice to say that this game absolutely dwarfs its already very impressive predecessor in size and content.

Like the previous games, San Andreas has a huge, open-ended world that you can explore to your heart's content. Unlike them, San Andreas has three large cities instead of one, and a lot of wilderness between them. The presence of countryside makes the open world seem more coherent and immersive, adding a sense of breadth and scope and re-defining the very concept: indeed, the playground here feels more like a real world than ever before in the series.

Everything in the world of San Andreas is detailed and created with love and attention. There are diverse neighborhoods bustling with activity, memorable landmarks and little atmospheric spots you'll be seeking out. One of the most fulfilling experiences for me was climbing up Mount Chilad, standing on the top, gazing at the beautiful world beneath, and then jumping down on a motorcycle.

The game's many story missions are an absolute triumph of inventive design - which is particularly remarkable considering the fact that the earlier games weren't exactly repetitive themselves. San Andreas has plenty of ridiculously fun missions ranging from simple races and chases to challenging, hardcore shooting levels and often hilarious arcade-like scripted events of all sorts. The amount of vehicles you can commandeer in this game is truly mind-boggling: from simple bicycles to war planes, from monster trucks to tractors, trains, and everything you can think of that has wheels or can fly. And don't forget fun equipment such as a jetpack on top of that.

The gameplay is generally more fleshed out and even more varied than in the two previous games. First of all, the interaction with the world was significantly expanded. You can finally swim. You can also dive and hunt for oysters. Another important addition is climbing. Don't see a way into the house? Climb over the fence. Climb onto the roof, maybe there is some weapon there. Or just go and jump on the roofs for fun.

Another interesting addition is the new RPG-like system. Run around a lot and your stamina will increase. Ride a bike and you'll gain better bike skill. It's a simple, effective mechanic, and it works quite well. People who disliked it may have not grasped the meaning of this system. Don't you think it was annoying to fail a mission in the previous GTAs, ending up in a hospital without your weapons? Most people just reloaded, to spare themselves the trouble of getting new weapons and going back to the starting point of the mission. In San Andreas, this feature finally has a meaning. You can fail a mission several times, but you can always gain something from it. You might gain muscle, maximum HP, weapon or driving skill, which are all saved. It's like leveling-up in an RPG - you can return and redo a hard mission, having more of an edge in it each time you try.

But there is a lot more. You can customize your protagonist's appearance, changing his clothes and haircut. You can also eat to gain health. If you eat too much, you'll become fat. You can exercise or simply run around to lose weight. But if you become too thin, you'll be exhausted. And no, you don't have to eat regularly to keep your character alive, as some people say. It is just attention to detail and design generosity.

As always, there are plenty of things to do outside of the main missions. You can be a taxi driver, get an ambulance and care for sick people, become a vigilante cop, break into people's houses, gain territory by starting gang wars, participate in races, and more. Some of those minigames return from the previous GTAs, some are exclusive to San Andreas. The best of those exclusive ones is probably the dating. You'll be able to have girlfriends in the game. You can take them to dinner, drive them around, give them presents, and build up your relationship. Finally, if you do everything right, the girl will invite you to "have coffee". As everyone knows, the official version of San Andreas was censored; the developers already programmed a whole explicit sexual minigame, but removed it from the final version. Luckily, you can download the "hot coffee mod" from many places. I don't quite see why game developers have to remove fairly meaningful sexual content from a game that focuses on killing other human beings - which, apparently, is quite alright to present in a digitized form.

The ability to download the mod is not the main reason why you should get the PC version. First, the graphics are much better than in the console version. Second, the controls are way more fitting. The console version has idiotic "auto-aiming" that makes shooting sequences a total mess. Every enemy takes several shots to kill, and more often than not you won't be able to target the enemy you want to kill first. In the PC version, it's very simple: just target with the mouse and practice headshots.

The game's story is long and deals with a wider variety of themes than just the rise to power among greedy gangsters. The presence of family and friends make the protagonist seem more humane, though some missions do everything they can to overturn that assumption. The more down-to-earth atmosphere allows introduction of more believable characters joining the ranks of totally grotesque figures that surpass the wacky madmen of the previous games. The main villain is appropriately repulsive, and there are interesting moments in the story when the issues of trust and betrayal are brought forth.

Much of the dialogue is marked by careless, profane humor that distinguished the series - but it is also quite well-written. Voice acting is top-notch as well. There are weird characters with totally crazy lines, and sometimes the whole thing almost feels surreal. The game's script goes absolutely over the top, making mean fun of everyone and everything. Of course, there are also very funny pop culture references, And some of the stuff they say on the radio is absolutely hilarious.

The Bad
There are some problems with the pacing. The game is very long, and the story is just "smeared" over dozens of missions, most of which don't advance it at all. Which brings me to the next flaw: all the so-called "story missions" of the game must be completed. All of them. If you miss one, you won't trigger another one, and so on. You can often choose the order in which you want to complete the missions, but that's it.

Problem is, many of those story missions have nothing to do with the story, and the inclusion of some of them into the canvas of the narrative feels forced. Much of the material here turns the main character into a schizophrenic with mutually contradicting values and more than a vague personality. For example, during one of the missions CJ rescues a girl he has never met before from a house he himself set on fire. On another mission he has to drown two people he barely knows. You can do those two missions in a row if you so wish. This kind of jarring ambiguity could have been avoided if the game let you choose the missions you actually want to do.

Obviously, GTA games can't afford being too squeamish because of their very concept, but San Andreas can cross the line between understandable gangster violence and pure murder. There is a mission that forces you to kill an innocent valet, even though knocking him unconscious would have been a more plausible solution. In another mission you must bury a somewhat hostile worker alive in cement. I find this kind of black humor unnecessary in a game where violence is already easily glorified.

Again, the ability to choose your own missions among those often gratuitously violent escapades, the right to skip any or all of them and just stick with the gangster wars for the mandatory story missions would be welcome. The plot suffers from that as well, being actually involving only in the beginning and in the end, with the largest chunk of the game dedicated to absolutely disjointed activities in a deranged theme park.

The Bottom Line
San Andreas is more than just its series taken to the most radical heights: it is a massive sandbox adorned with incredible gameplay variety, a giant that throws fun at us with royal magnanimity and from a seemingly inexhaustible source. It may not be the deepest and most thought-provoking experience, but it is one of the most purely entertaining games I have ever played.

The Good
San Andreas has beautiful graphics, from the sun rising to every single rain drop falling it looks amazing. The vehicles are incredibly realistic with bumpers, doors, headlights and windows can all be broken. There is a lot of missions that will keep you hooked and plenty of side-missions. It has a soundtrack for everyone's taste and the True Grime billboard is hilarious.

The Bad
The incredible amount of glitches like falling through the floor, the unmarked pay n' spray and if you kill someone when they're on the floor they stand up and suddenly fall. The missions are a bit too long, hard and sometimes boring.

The Bottom Line
If you can afford one game, buy this. It's the greatest game ever made.

The Good
The Grand Theft Auto series is always one of the best sandbox games out there and you could probably lose hours in this game by just driving around, fighting gang members and police officers. I used to play a lot of Vice City and I know how great it feels to take down helicopters with the rocket launcher and fight off hundreds of soldiers afterwards before driving off in one of their tanks. The fun of dicking around has remained intact with this new installment and with new additions it only got better.

If you ever get bored of the same boring old town there is the option to take a car and head straight for the countryside. This redneck-infested land full of farms and tractors is a very welcome refreshment and home to some of the most insane missions in the entire story mode. The best thing about it is that like in Red Dead Redemption it is different enough by removing a lot of the buildings, but it stays interesting due to the rough and dangerous nature of the outside world.

There is the option to play this game with a friend, allowing you to tear up Grove Street with not one, but two crazed murderers. The trick is that there are these symbols which allow you to have a second player join in, this will have both of you on a shared screen (so you can't move too far away from each other) and both of you play like you normally would alone. The fun thing is that it doesn't limit your options too much, you can still use cheats and do all the stuff you'd otherwise do alone.

The Bad
I am usually the one defending video games, but I have to admit that San Andreas is as racist as it can possibly get. You take on the role of Carl Johnson, a black ex-gangster who returns to his city to join up with his old gang again. I swear almost 90% of the characters in this game are black and every single one of them uses more than three swear words in every sentence they say and every single one of them is either using drugs or constantly talks about gang violence and murder like an eight year old after watching a Mission Impossible box set. There is simply nothing dignified about any of the characters, you are in no way any better than the people you are trying to kill and, like other reviewers have pointed out, the things you are ordered to do border on the psychotic.

Every single mission within the story mode has to be finished in order to complete the game, there is not a single one you can skip or reserve for later, you have to do every mission within a chapter to unlock the next ones. Most of the time it doesn't even make sense, such as the missions from OG Loc which all involve stealing stuff for him or killing people he doesn't like to boost his rap career (that he doesn't have). There are like four missions and none of them help the gang and he never does anything for it in return.

This also adds the problem that you are naturally not going to be good at everything, especially not in a game with such a broad supply of mechanics. You might be good at gunning down people, but a sniper might be too much for you. Or you might be really good at sneaking, but suck at driving. The mission where I decided I had enough of this game was in the earlier mentioned countryside where I had to race over the rocky terrain against insanely fast cars that I couldn't steal anywhere in the area. I think I managed to drive like eleven cars into the water at one godforsaken turn before I banished the disc to the back of my collection.

If you fail a mission you don't just start it over, hell the option is not even given to you. If you die during a mission you are transported to a hospital where they take a part of your money away and ALL your weapons. So if you died during a very tough mission with lots of combat, you'll get to eat shit when you have to do that all over again with maybe the starting pistol and a SMG if you are lucky. However, if you simply fail the mission because a character escapes or a friend dies, you will simply have to drive ALL THE DAMN WAY back to the location where you started the mission.

The auto-targeting was probably what caused the most deaths that I encountered. In the heat of battle it is very likely you are going to want to quickly switch between targets, but the targeting system has no sense of priority and will assume that after murdering one of the twelve gang members firing at you, you will be in a rather cruel mood and switch to a random NPC located somewhere behind a wall. I suppose you could say that I should aim myself than, but that doesn't work very well either.

A game should really be ashamed when missing textures and rendering problems are not the exception, but the standard. I am not really one for graphics, but roughly 70% of the time there is always something wrong with this game and its textures. Sometimes they get all blurry, sometimes they are somewhere they shouldn't be (too high or too low) and sometimes they are just not there, leaving me walking on thin air or hitting a wall at full speed that appears five seconds afterwards. It looks terrible, it creates huge problems for gameplay and it shows the developers took no time to polish this game at all.

The game is rather determined to make you date some of its characters, but as you might have expected after reading the first problem I mentioned none of the characters are really likable and this includes the females too. At first I wanted to ignore these missions altogether, but then the game would throw me to death with notifications telling me their status with them had decreased. I tried to ignore it, but when I arrived on the countryside I was FORCED to do missions with one of most despicable characters ever, each and every single one of them was a "date" in its own psychotic way. I felt insulted to be saddled up with this stain of a character and then I was even forced again into hearing one of those off-screen "sex-scenes" that is just two minutes of female moaning. This is sickening, this is displaying a lack of respect for the female race and for the personality traits she had been given (won't spoil) and this can't be justified solely by pointing at the rating on the box.

Finally and fatally, there is a severe lack of pacing. I already mentioned that the story is stuffed with missions that don't have anything to do with it, but to top it off the few missions that do have something to do with them are very repetitive and show little to no progress. You just go around robbing places, killing a few enemies and going to a few meetings until the chapter ends with one or two missions that actually change the world around you. After robbing a military base I couldn't see any gang-members using new guns or after doing a drive-by on some local enemies I didn't notice a decrease in enemy presence, so why did I have to do them? I tell you why: It is too pad out the game as much as they possibly could.

The Bottom Line
San Andreas could be a pretty decent game if it would focus on what made Vice City so much more edible: organized crime, dignified characters and humor that relied on absurdity rather than on swearing. Instead the game suffers heavily from psychotic and immature design and writing that displays a severe lack of respect for the problems it addresses and gives enemies of the industry more ammunition against us. I have nothing against a game that wants to play to the violence crowd, but at least Vice City did it with a sense of restraint.

If you are in dire need of a ton of violence and you are one of those people who skip every cut-scene and enter entire lists of cheats before firing at a single enemy than this game is quite edible due to the fact you will miss all the idiocy anyway. Anybody with a sense of self-respect and with an intelligence higher than that of a plank should stay far away from this game and try Red Dead Redemption instead.