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Grand Theft Auto V Review
If you peruse the review history of Rockstar's entire back catalogue, you're certain to find the use of one particular phrase, more than once, every single time the company release a new game. GTA IV, Vice City, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3 and LA Noire and have all been "Rockstar's masterpiece" to someone or other, and what's a tad odd is that the reaction to GTA V has broken from tradition a little, with scant usage of that trademark phrase. This is unusual only because GTA V is quite clearly Rockstar's masterpiece.
It's bigger and better-looking for sure - and the writing is zestier than everything this side of Red Dead - but it's how the visual scale is mirrored by the grandiose plot that really makes it fly. GTA V doesn't open with a quiet driving sequence like GTA 4 did - although that opening was definitely the correct one for that particular story - instead throwing you straight into a flashback, which takes place in the midst of a bloody bank heist. Some of GTA 4's biggest moments revealed a strong debt to Michael Mann's film Heat, and that filmmaker's influence is only expanded upon here: via that same unmistakable visual iconography, a brilliant Tangerine Dream soundtrack and so on.
But as brilliant as they are, obviously GTA V isn't just about the heists. Those bits of business vary in quality - not very wildly, it should be said - and some of the bigger centrepiece moments will rank alongside the best (and most exciting) stretches of console gaming that you'll do all year. But arguably more importantly than that is that there's a renewed sense of craftsmanship and polish gifted to everything else too. Side missions (at one time the weakest part of any sandbox adventure) have a tendency to surprise and excite as much as anything in the main story.
The near-dead seriousness of its predecessor has been discarded too, in favour of something far larkier; in tone, it shares more with The Ballad of Gay Tony and Vice City than it does with either of the two previous "proper" GTA games. It even finds the time to steal a little bit from Volition's excellent Saints Row series. People seem to forget that GTA only introduced adaptable map waypoints in GTA 4 (after the first Saints Row had already done it) and here the nods are much more explicit. A handful of drug-induced action set pieces are liable to make you - if you've recently leapt off the Saints Row 4 bandwagon - confused about which of the two games you're playing. Trevor's bloodthirsty (and completely consequence-free) "Rampage" missions? Even more so.
So it's a more light-hearted outing than last time, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't occasionally go out of its way push the envelope: this is still Rockstar, after all. The must-discussed torture sequence is deliberately unpleasant (which is as it should be) but it's also fundamentally pointless and stands as the most flat-out boring part of the entire package. There has also been quite a bit of discussion in the press about the lack of a female protagonist: an interesting point, but also a curious one. GTA has always revelled in the broad unpleasantness of such a male-centric world, and everybody involved has always gotten it straight in the neck.
It's so big and broad that it feels like something that should've arrived at the beginning of a hardware cycle as opposed to the ending of one, and the complete dedication to providing players with endless variety can't be understated: this is a GTA potpourri, and every last aroma is appealing. Rockstar categorically haven't broken the mould here, they've just busted their backsides doing what they do best, as well as it can possibly be done on today's prevailing console systems. They've once again rendered the competition irrelevant.
10/10
Review By Chet Roivas
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