GTA V - Lets Do Some Experiment In The Game

Having actually already acquired even more than a billion dollars in sales to end up being the biggest entertainment product launch in history, Grand Theft Auto V doesn't require anyone else to sing its praises. Too bad, though, because I will include my voice to the swelling chorus.

There's nothing experimental about GTA V, and in some cases it sticks too snugly to its established but maturing formula of dropping players into a digital city and letting them run amok. And yet regardless of this, GTA V is an interesting, amusing, uneasy, typically unusual if occasionally flawed piece of entertainment.

Set in and around the city of Los Santos, a through-the-warped-looking-glass satire of present-day L.a, GTA V introduces us to three men whose lives are linked by the pursuit of the almighty dollar. There's Michael, the former bank burglar living in a luxurious witness defense program with his entitled teen children and unfaithful wife. There's Franklin, who desires a way out of the dope-slinging inner city gang life set out in front of him. And there's Trevor, a meth-cooking, sexually omnivorous sociopath who is Michael's previous partner in criminal offense, and who makes an unwanted reappearance in his old pal's world. (And who, in among the video game's lots of running jokes, turns out to be Canadian.).

It's through the eyes of these three anti-heroes that gamers experience the stretching environs of Los Santos, from the downtown high-rise buildings to the hillside estates to the rugged, forested mountains. The scope and detail of this world, and the opportunities it provides for adventure and chaos, are shocking. There are banks to be robbed, cars to be taken, cops to run away from and bad guys to chase down. There are triathlons to compete in, flying lessons to carry out and reasonably durable tennis and golf games-within-a-game. There are UFO parts to discover and a Bigfoot to hunt. There ares yoga. Frickin' yoga.

That does not suggest GTA V is best. Its troubles range from finicky little things like twitchy helicopter flying controls to much larger concerns, such as unsettling littles viciousness that don't always sign up as satire, or the still-unsolved challenge of preserving any sense of plot urgency in a game where gamers are complimentary to desert the story and spend hours skyjacking blimps, tooling around in a submarine or taking in-game smartphone selfies and publishing them online.

This is Rockstar at the peak of their really specific craft, and GTA V is a better game than 2008's Grand Theft Auto IV in nearly every quantifiable means. It has more intriguing characters, a more varied world and even more opportunity for those one-of-a-kind emergent gameplay minutes that have actually defined the series given that 2001's groundbreaking Grand Theft Auto III.

It's an astonishing technical task, a video game constructed from hundreds of thousands of tiny digital parts that somehow mesh together in a way that finds a balance between realism and fun, between creative social commentary and unapologetic puerile nonsense.