GRAND THEFT AUTO V REVIEW

I have played Grand Theft Auto 5 roughly about 20 hours and in that time I have rappelled over a building to kidnap an FIB witness, flew an airplane and a helicopter, stole a washed up rocker's gold tooth for an elderly British couple, introduced my drug laboratory to a Chinese businessman's drugged son, and worked with a paparazzi chasing after a Lindsay Lohan-type actress trying to outrun the cops... and then stole her pink sports car after she got arrested. Just because I can.

And that's the greatest thing about this game. You can literally do anything. One of the jobs I'm about to do next is to blow up a cargo ship and steal whatever's being guarded inside it using a submarine!!! 

I guess this is the dawn of this generation's games. After 2013 it's all about the PS4 and XBox One. But the business is still strong for the PS3 and 360 as evidenced by this game's release. Just goes to show that it's going out with a bang.

So going back to GTA, this is Rockstar Games' best outing for the series. It is a culmination of all the leaps that they've done over the last few years, combining all of the strengths of all of their previous releases and adding a few more and then giving us a truly remarkable story to make this a genuine masterpiece.

Unlike any other game, GTA5 stars not just one, but three protagonists, almost all trying to make their lives better but keeps getting entangled with the criminal underbelly of San Andreas. Michael is a retired thief, Franklin is an up and coming gangbanger and Trevor... uhmmm the human equivalent of the Tazmanian Devil. 

Technically, this game is truly outstanding. There are no load times, the graphics is crisp, gameplay is pretty easy to get used to (except flying fucking planes), the voice acting is superb, and the script is sublime. It's funny, full of very interesting characters, and a boatload of things to do. In the 30 hours that I played this game I never had nothing to do. Simply driving around, you encounter random things that eventually may become integral to the overall story. I towed cars, I saved a construction worker whose truck got stuck under pipes that fell, raced an ex-lover and then met a lot of strangers and freaks.

Of course, this won't be a GTA game if you don't do the usual activities like assassinate, steal cars and intentionally or unintentionally murder a fuckload of San Andreas citizens. One welcome addition to the game are heists. These are elaborate crimes that needed multiple activities to pull off. I have only done one, a jewelry store heist, wherein I needed sleeping gas, hackers, an insecticide company van and a few reliable motorcyclists to do the job perfectly. It was an exhilirating scene seeing the plan work out. Now I'm about to start my second heist the one with the submarine and all that shit.

My initial worry for this game was that it would be difficult to play what with all three characters, I thought it will be confusing and difficult, but it actually isn't. The transition from one character to another is seamless and everything from the previous game improved. Shooting is better, even doing drive by's are easier now. Driving is still a bit wonky, but I think it's because of me. The only thing I was having trouble with is flying a goddamn airplane. But I finished that, so hopefully it'll be a bit easier.

This early, I'm already thinking of what game to crown as 2013's game of the year. I think it's going to be a really really REALLY hard decision which one is going to win with the quality of the games that came out. 

But I'm only 30 hours in... and I'm already leaning towards this game to win.

RATING: 10 out of 10 stars