This review will mainly be focusing on what I consider the main mode of Grand Theft Auto V, the Story Mode.
It's funny to think that, despite being two disparate games in terms of theming and time period, both Red Dead Redemption 1+2 and Grand Theft Auto V share a lot of my praises and criticisms for how they're designed. I haven't reviewed RDR2 yet, but that's because I haven't finished it - it's so laboriously long and stretched out that, in the time it took me to beat GTAV, I was only at the halfway mark. Chalk it up to me taking my time with it more perhaps, but I at least have to give credit where credit is due: one of GTAV's best qualities is that it knows not to outstay its welcome and keep the plot moving along. And it does so with a stunningly realised world, polished shooting mechanics, tight movement controls, an exceptional score with fantastic licensed music choices, a memorable well-performed cast of criminally assholistic rogues and a tangled spider's web of a story which unfolds into a mess its trio of leads have to clean up alongside set-piece gun battles, chases and heists which mark the highlights of the game's manic mayhem. Needless to say, it's fiendishly fun, at least when you're in the middle of a gunfight, sprinting in your vehicle of choice across the sprawling landscape or listening to beleaguered sarcasm-laden conversations and radio shows that, while not exactly subtle, are sharp-witted and satirical in their own loud, obnoxiously on-the-nose GTA kind of way.
And though this sun-soaked metropolis is clearly constructed with care and lavished in detail, none of it really stuck with me as much as other games have. Yeah, I've memorised whole swathes of the city's layout and can maneuver it with ease but at the end of the day, that's because the map, much like that of RDR1's map, feels like it's just a world for you to travel from mission point to mission point. Perhaps that was just because I blazed through the story without fully taking my time to stop and smell the roses. And besides, there's still plenty of extracurricular content outside of the main story missions, some of which I have done. But to me, a lot of this side stuff is just backdrop or tedious checklists to fulfill an otherwise pointless and bigger 100% checklist of stuff you haven't done. Sure, you get some cool rewards like figuring out a murder mystery, meeting eccentric individuals or building and unlocking a new car, but none of that really piqued my interest as much as the story did.
I've thrown a fair bit of criticism at GTAV now and that might sit ill with some people, nor do I consider this review to be holistic or representative of how much content there is in the game - it's only representative of my own experiences with the title. But I want to make it abundantly clear that I still had fun with the game while its story lasted (even if parts of it, i.e. the subplot about the character Stretch, aren't as well-developed or thought out as the rest of it). I say this even though I think that a lot of the game rests heavily on Rockstar's well-established archaic design choices: the world being a vessel for mission points, little deviation off the beaten path during missions, the borrowing of RPG-lite mechanics from prior titles like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and so on. Hell, its story borrows directly from pop culture as a key part of its world design (not really a bad thing at all, but worth mentioning regardless) plus the tacked-on multiple endings with only one feeling canonically satisfying.
Overall: I'd recommend Grand Theft Auto V for story lovers (if you don't mind taking in the
sights now and again while you speed towards the next mission) or completionists and multiplayer fanatics who want to sink their teeth into
an enormous open world game with plenty of things to do. And though the game strips stuff from a whole lot of other games wholesale, it's hard not to like it at least a little bit.
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