5/5 ★ – Ilory's review of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

I first played this game in 2021, and i had to drop it because i was stuck in Zero missions(thank god i found out they are optional); i remember not being the biggest fan of the game. Now,later, i can’t stop thinking of the scale of a game like this released in 2004. Not only the game’s map is big, but it includes 3 of the biggest cities of Usa, which allows for a great diversity and makes the sandbox much more fun. Driving around Las Venturas, kr using planes in the Mojave desert, doing races in the forest, gang rivalry in the suburbs of los santos exc. San Andreas greatly improves from Gta 3 and Vice City, by first giving the player a lot more freedom, by how you want to ride(with a plane, driving a car, getting on a boat or egen using a bycicle),how you want to customize yourself, and if you want to be more fat or muscolar. It also adds tons of new weapons and while the system is not perfect, i had a lot if fun shooting in the game, thing i couldn’t say for Gta 3 and for the case of Vice City, some weapons were good and others were not. The story is another great improvement, not only because it adds political themes like police corruption, the government not doing anything to help poor people or colloborating with criminals, but also because it’s full of charismatic and memorable characters( my favorites being Woozie, Cj, Big Smoke, Tenpenny exc). Like i said before, the scale of this game is big, which allows also for a great variety of missions, which is greatly appreciated, but at the same time it suffers from the R* mission structure, in which some missions are too hard because they are not greatly balanced(i am looking at you, Learning To Fly, Noe…)and you are not fully free to approach the mission; for example, picking a specific car which has no story use, or killing an enemy in a specific way with an rpg. It’s a big contrast with the open world, which gives a lot of freedom and somethibg Rockstar suffers to this day. The driving system is also greatly improved from the predecessor, and it’s much more manageable. So yeah, that’s it for my playthrough of the 3d trilogy, which, apart from this game, i find very overrated. While Gta 3 and Vice City struggle to be good games, Gta San Andreas is probably one of the highest points of Rockstar, which set the standard for the Rockstar we know today.