Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Review

Back in the hood

But it was not always like this. GTA III slipped out to zero fanfare, and worried PR types pleaded with journalists to not mention the violent aspects of the game, lest the British tabloids pick up on it and demand to have this 'sick filth' banned (only three years late, eh?). Even Vice City emerged a healthy shade of pink, with a mere handful of screenshots to tease us with in the run up to release. The same deal with Manhunt. And then suddenly Rockstar decided to go from one extreme to the other, literally bombarding our mail box with new shots, exhaustive documents going into meticulous detail about the various new features that have been shoehorned into the game. Then followed three preview events, but yet not one opportunity to wrestle the joypad off them; and no opportunity to review the game until the finished boxed copy was finally delivered just three days ago. It was akin to a starving man being forced to watch a culinary dish being prepared, cooked, tasted and savoured in front of him. "Look, smell, but don't taste. We'll give it to you when we're good and ready." Oh the agony.

Somehow we preferred the enigmatic media blackout of old. Leave the surprises to be discovered. Let the word of mouth spread the game's gospel. That's how the last two worked; did Rockstar really need to go to such lengths to effectively spoil a lot of the game's surprises? The game could have hit the shelves today with zero advertising and no reviews and still sold out. It's that type of game. The less we know about it, the more we want to find out what's in there. The pre-release media splurge was a novelty; we thirsted for every morsel to begin with. Of course we did. Everyone did. Towards the end of the campaign, though, we actually couldn't believe quite how much Rockstar was prepared to spill and we politely declined to attend the final preview event for fear of spoiling it for ourselves, never mind everyone else. The very charm of the GTA games was the element of surprise; the exploration factor. Ringing your mates up excitedly reporting on your progress and all the craziness you've come across. Comparing notes. Playing through San Andreas did reveal a few surprises, nevertheless. It's that sort of game. You could write an entire book on the game and still only find yourself skimming over certain elements of it.

Big is better

But we're not here to exhaustively run through the myriad of things you can do in the game, but more whether they're actually fun and whether the game's really what it's cracked up to be. The first thing that cannot be overstated is that Rockstar really weren't making it up when they said it was a big game. It positively redefines the concept of what constitutes an epic game. There is absolutely no question that San Andreas is in the region of twice as big as previous GTAs. Maybe even three times, depending on what lengths you'll go to. To even work your way through half of the missions alone would take more time than it would normally take to finish two average sized action-adventures. In value for money terms it's hard to imagine another game like it.

Pile on the extras and it's almost too much to comprehend. Pimping missions, Trucking, Driving school, Ammu-Nation challenges, Dating, Territory occupations, and more join the usual distractions on offer such as Taxi driving, Vigilante, Ambulance, Fire fighting and the ongoing quest to find hidden items; in San Andreas' case they're not as prevalent as you'd expect, but seek and you shall find.

As veterans of previous campaigns it's easy to come to hasty conclusions about San Andreas. Your expectations really don't help. What we perhaps expected was more of the same. Much more of the same, with tweaks, technical improvements and the benefit of an entirely contrasting set of scenarios, characters and, naturally for a game set in 1992, the soundtrack. What you don't expect or even particularly acknowledge at the time is how the game lurches dramatically in different directions, often throwing you completely off balance into the bargain, and not always in a positive sense.

From the streets

You start out, of course, in Los Santos as Carl Johnson - a twentysomething former Grove Street gang member returning to a less than enthusiastic welcome after five years in Liberty City exile. Soon it becomes apparent the game's much less of a clichéd GTA; it's about a low-down bum working his way up the crime tree, and far more focused on the ins and outs of gang culture, the relationships between the 'family' and restoring the gang pride of old. Soon, of course, stamping your authority on the immediate vicinity and taking out frustrations on the rival Ballas gang becomes the priority.

Ruling Los Santos proves to be an early highlight, and immediately sets the game apart from the other GTAs by virtue of its focus on dialogue, narrative and constantly going that extra mile to set the scene - not just via the between-mission cut-scenes, but through regular colourful exchanges as you're driving, and all manner of banter during each mission. As a cinematic experience it goes to inordinate lengths to get things right, with a quite staggering attention to detail providing endless opportunities to truly immerse the player in a convincing environment where every character, every pedestrian feels as part of the day to day life as you are. Check out the huge roll call for the pedestrian voice actors to see the crazy lengths Rockstar has gone to make sure the ambience of the environment matches up to the quality on show elsewhere.

Once again the voice acting and radio stations are simply incomparable to any other game out there. If anything, the musical variety is even greater than before, drawing on a greater diversity of genres, ramping up the DJ humour to almost genius levels of parody and providing an excellent template for the game that no other game has yet to come anywhere near close to matching. Even after 40, 50 hours, you're still hearing fragments of dialogue, spoof adverts and songs that you've somehow never heard. It's the sort of thing you'd be happy to pay money for on its own; that it's such a throwaway part of the game just goes to show how far Rockstar is willing to run with this excellent concept. Sure, the music won't always be to your taste, but somehow in the context of what you're doing it all fits, so you don't mind while the truly cringeworthy "All My Exes Live In Texas" or "Queen Of Hearts" play for the third time that evening, or, if you do, flicking to another of the ten stations is but a mere D-pad nudge away.

Pulp interaction

And as if the pedestrian voices and DJ scripts aren't enough, you get hit by the likes of Samuel L Jackson and Chris Penn making you realise just how good and how compelling gaming narrative can be when you're prepared to hire the right talent for the right price. The constant swearing might not be to everyone's taste, but when you've got a Rockstar game about hardcore gangsters, what does the audience really expect? In truth, some of it does veer a little into the realms of shock for the sake of it, and the way certain characters flit in and out of the storyline doesn't always make for a coherent, logical plotline, but for the most part they're enjoyable, amusing, and energetic, and a lesson to many publishers as to not only use as a plot device, but for pure entertainment and reward for the efforts you've put into playing some often intensely challenging missions.

Perhaps when we say challenging, we mean fascist, as it has to be said that certain areas of San Andreas will have even the most committed fan tearing their hair out to move on from. It's a series complaint, really, that has yet to be addressed. The odd tough mission here and there is fine, too - so long as the player doesn't have to play more than about 10 times. After that, the whole thing becomes a chore and you just want to give up. Worse still is the fact that some of the toughest missions in the entire game are held up as immovable barriers - parts of a linear obstacle course that must be overcome before anything else can move on.

Naming and shaming the countryside segment in particular, more or less all of these missions must be completed in order, and culminate in two particularly nasty point-to-point races one after the other; both set on twisting parthways on the side of a hill. The AI is fairly gentle, if truth be told, but actually not plummeting down into a ravine or into a stream proves a lot harder than many of you will have patience for. What adds to the growing frustration at the point of failure is the realisation that you'll not only have to drive back to the mission start, but if you've wiped out your car, finding another one of similar spec suddenly proves impossible without driving back into Los Santos. While Rockstar intermittently aids players with a 'Trip Skip' feature to avoid constantly replaying earlier sections of a mission, it's less useful than you think, given that most of the time you've lost all your weapons through dying, or, worse, you've got to spend several minutes getting back to the mission start. It's during this second portion of the game in the countryside that you really start wishing Rockstar could simply offer a mission-retry option. To not include such an option gives rise to enormous resentment, boredom, frustration and injury to inanimate objects. No-one really wants to waste so much time when playing a videogame, but Rockstar positively revels in forcing you to go though hoops to do the simplest things.

Falling down

It's somewhat fortunate then that after only ten missions of cross-country tedium you're back in the somewhat more familiar surrounding of San Fierro. Without wishing to drop any spoilers, the game really starts to go back to its roots, feeling much more like GTA III in structure and purpose after the fairly radical opening two sections. With its undulating terrain and the types of mission you'll have to perform, San Andreas marks itself out as very much an ever-changing game - a game that's almost impossible to judge prematurely because you never quite know where it's going to go next. Sometimes, though, even when you're admiring the brilliance on show, there are some terrifyingly badly designed missions to rile you up again. A special mention has to go out to the sadistic souls that designed the Zero remote control/shooting missions, which were neither fun nor playable in the traditional sense, unless you delight in having to learn entirely new and unwieldy control systems for things that have been more than adequately represented in other games.

Sometimes, though, the faults in San Andreas come down to pure technical issues. While it's true that the visuals are an improvement on Vice City, with far better animation and detail levels, the issue of sluggish frame rate regularly reared its ugly head in the middle of an intense battle or - in particular - fast driving in congested areas. It may well be pushing the PS2 for all its worth, but it comes at quite a heavy price and Xbox and PC owners will be looking forward to seeing such problems eliminated when their respective versions emerge next year - assuming Rockstar 'surprises' us with an Xbox announcement in the coming months, anyway. The age-old issue of targeting still hasn't been solved satisfactorily; although it's a massive improvement over previous versions, the auto-lock constantly fails to engage a nearby target, causing the player to suddenly be twisted 45 degrees away from their intended target for reasons we still can't work out.

Tom's perspective...

Blah. Blah blah blah. Blah di blah di blah di blah. It's all irrelevant. Rockstar's already won. You've already bought it. You're sitting at work knowing there's a copy on your doormat, or perhaps you're glancing excitedly at a plastic bag on the edge of your desk, the DVD-case-shaped contours beaming like the sun-kissed curves of the woman of your dreams. Or, lest we exclude, rippling like the abs of a great hulk of a man. It's ready to pleasure you in every conceivable way.

Said and done

And when you turn it on it certainly feels like Rockstar has conceived of more than ever before. The narrative is engrossing, the characters believable and well-acted - as Kristan rightly notes, not just in the expected confines of the cut sequences, but also on the streets, in the cars, as you dash around covering your Triad gang boss or talk to your pals on a mobile phone as you tear up Los Santos with a gaggle of gun-toting police bearing down on your back-bumper and motorcycle cops hanging off the bonnet. And there's so much else to do beyond the Final Fantasy-dwarfing depth of the single-player story missions. It touches every base, wraps its fingers around them and squeezes every last drop. It's the biggest, most extraordinary developmental accomplishment this industry has ever seen.

So much stands out. Being chased through back-alleys of Los Santos on a motorbike, jiggling your low-rider's suspension with the right analogue stick in time to a hip-hop beat, sneaking into a mansion and knifing guards, racing BMX bikes down the side of a mountain, pinpointing the gas tank on an SUV as enemies spray bullets at you and blowing them all to hell with a single bullet, the first time you get to wield a pair of machineguns at once, flying crop-dusting planes, jack-knifing a flaming lorry into oncoming traffic and leaping out just as it explodes, taking over the gangland street by street, blowing bloody doors off with satchel charges, rendezvousing with familiar faces. Not all is scripted. So many of the things you'll remember about San Andreas most fondly will be of your own design.

And that's to say nothing of the humour. Cluckin' Bell restaurants with their "F***-a-doodle-doos", leading blind men into fire-fights, demented wannabe rappers, comedy allusions to a certain controversial Grand Theft Also you might recall we didn't like, Samuel L Jackson on a bong, "We'll s*** on you from such a height you'll think God himself has crapped on you," virtually every radio advert in the entire game (we've a particularly fond recollection of the ex-army exterminators - "What the hell is that?" "That's my son!" "Looks like Vietcong to me!"); you needn't worry about spoilers. It's almost impossible to be hyperbolic about its merits. There's just so much of everything.

Roll your own

The much-trailed changes largely come off without a hitch, too. The RPG-style elements - bodybuilding, watching your weight, swimming, targeting, etc. etc. - they don't interfere, they just improve, albeit some more than others. One of our biggest concerns was that we'd spend so much time trying to keep CJ healthy that we'd feel like NHS nurses with shotguns. In actual fact, restaurants and burger bars are just a cheap and easy health top-up, and you needn't worry too much about beefing up beyond what's sensible; you'd have to make an effort. And besides, going to the gym isn't just worthwhile for health reasons; it'll teach you new moves, improve your speed and stamina and all sorts. Much is like this - and the stats influence the world around you and its reaction to you. Literally nobody will see and hear everything this game has to offer.

It's not perfect though. Admittedly we had no right to expect that, but it is still a little grating to find ourselves fighting against the camera (particularly while driving) and the targeting system after railing against both and hearing tell this year of how neither would be a problem. And the technical limitations of the PlayStation 2 do frustrate, at least until you come to anticipate them. The game tops out at 30 frames per second, and spends an awful lot of time stooped far lower, while anybody whose PS2 hasn't come out of shrink-wrap this week is going to see the close-up hi-res textures drawing a couple of seconds late from time to time, and there's also a case for complaining about the pop-up. Granted, it's hardly on a par with DRIV3R's utterly contemptible failings in this regard, but there are one or two occasions when a thin but immovable wall springs out of nowhere to block your path as you lurch across a car park in pursuit of a shortcut.

Then there's the question of pacing, frivolity, and difficulty spikes. The story moves on quite swiftly, and sometimes leaves clever ideas under-exploited. Capturing gang territories was proving quite entertaining, then all of a sudden we were booted out of Los Santos and had no chance of building up that side of the game. That's one example. There are weaker elements like the already-chided countryside section that splits Los Santos and San Fierro, and some of the side missions like the trucking and taking out drug couriers drag you all over the map - which takes an inordinate amount of time - for relatively insignificant benefits. And, it has to be said, completing the arduous advanced driving school only to receive a minor stat top-up was almost as frustrating as failing the same mission over and over.