4/5 ★ – jake84's review of Grand Theft Auto V.

I didn't complete Grand Theft Auto IV. For a guy like me who reviewed games professionally for 11 years, that's not exactly something I'm proud to admit. The game itself wasn't a bad at all, but what I didn't like about it (besides the fact you had to earn money that you basically couldn't spend on anything, which is never a fun thing to do - shame on you, Rockstar!) was that I didn't care one bit for the protagonist. Well, there was that and the excruciating "hang-out-with-your-annoying-friends"-moments. Niko Bellic was an anti-hero as he should be. Nothing wrong with that in a game like this. But there was also something (even more) off-putting about him; he seemed vague, a bit slow like a mindless thug, he was unmotivated and, perhaps worst of all, not somebody you wanted to root for; he was pure brawn, no brain, lacked charm and personality. Grand Theft Auto V half makes up for past mistakes; in all fairness the hangout-thing is really optional and downplayed this time around. But the three main characters you get here are a mixed bag. They consist of small time hood, Franklin, old school gangster, Michael, who's made a deal with the government to go into some sort of witness protection program, and lastly the already infamous and straight up Canadian psycho, Trevor. The latter is the biggest offender here, but he's probably going to divide the GTA-audience - as in 95 percent pro, 5 percent con. I belong in the minority; I personally think he stands out like a sore thumb - like something from the Saints Row-series, which I completely loathe as one thing of modern entertainment I find no redeeming value in and can actually see with that title why people would think games made you dumber and/or more violent. Rockstar seems to go in the "shocking" 90s direction with this guy, constantly finding cliché ways of making him as unsympathetic, despicable and unappealing as possible: He has sex with a teddy bear, a biker's girlfriend, masturbates and vomits every chance he gets and sometimes inexplicably pops up in a lady's dress(?). He punches half the people he meets, SHOUTS ALL HIS DIALOGUE and has the outdated "Rampage"-missions of the trio. He's by far the least likable character here, including the so-called villains, and he is downright impossible to root for. The tone in the game is the most realistic in the GTA-series yet, making him even more of a glaring annoyance. For instance, when you root for a guy in a gangster film, it is usually because he is the least corrupted of the gangsters. But, as I said, 95 of the GTA-audience will probably find him delightful, seeing that here's a character where it's actually encouraged to act as vilely and destructively as they normally would play. The actor playing Trevor (Steven Ogg) is the weakest of the three, and can very conveniently turn him into a psycho or a clever guy when it's needed to move the story forward. Trevor shouldn't have been a playable character, or perhaps he should have been a bonus character when the game ended. Bro dudes will probably adore the fella, going "oh shit, man, the shit this guy does is wack! He's all I ever wanted to be!" and make him their profile pic on Facebook. But suffice it to say I felt my IQ drop rapidly (as well as my gaming experience) every time I had to switch to this guy to move on with the story... ...Which brings me to the story. My God, the story. You can barely even call it a story. The conflict - or tension, if you will - between him and Michael is milked beyond any bearable threshold, as if the game didn't have any other important themes than betrayal. I've always had a problem with Rockstar's cutscenes and dialogue, mainly due to the actors in motion capture suits overacting while gesturing wildly, which directly contributes to my complete lack of understanding or paying attention (it was even a problem for me in Rockstar's masterpiece, Red Dead Redemption). I'm beginning to think it's intentional, because the plot is frankly a big inelegant mess, with characters conveniently popping up, talking and acting alike and then something about not one, not two, but three government organizations. One of which is called FIB, most definitely not the FBI... I recently asked a friend of mine to explain me the story in this game because he told me that it was the best in the series. He told me "it's a story about three friends". Hardly. Besides, that isn't a story, that's the three main players, at best a setup. In every TV series, game, movie, even music to a certain extent, I will claim that the basic narrative rule "somebody wants something badly and has severe trouble getting it" has to be applied before the audience or player is engrossed enough to root for or care about the protagonist(s), even if it's Daniel fucking Plainview. And that one rule isn't applied here. It could even have been about revenge - the easiest starting point for any action-/gangster-story - and they don't even use that; it's a giant piece of nonsensical storytelling. The listless Michael does it for money, but he already has money, living in a mansion in pseudo-Hollywood. I guess he does it for the excitement, then? Sorry, that's not enough motivation for me. Franklin does it for respect and to make a name for himself - thin, but better. And Trevor... who knows about him? But this does, however, give way to a bunch of heists, undoubtedly the game's highlights and main selling point. Still, the game gives you the imaginary option of taking out one of the three main characters when the ending finally comes around, but it's not an actual choice, when you think about it. Why would it be a big deal for the three guys to take anybody down? They've killed 300 people at least, another 200 shouldn't be a problem. It seems like Houser (writer of anything Rockstar-related, really) has nothing new to say, covering it up with a lot of guns. That brings me to a scene in the game that describes most the problems I have with this game. Trevor is torturing a guy for one of the organizations, I forget and don't really care which one, while Michael is scoping out a party in a villa with the intention of taking out a national threat. A terrorist. Trevor has to torture the guy to get a description of the target, but why? I killed seven or eight pedestrians driving to the location, then why is a villa full of fifteen suspects not an acceptable amount of collateral damage? It's GTA V's own fault, painting itself in a paradoxically and morally bankrupt corner like this, because playing the game made me think this way. As I mentioned before, the heists are the most successful draws here. But heists, in the traditional sense, are supposed to be something you planned to perfection - never do they play out perfectly and sometimes you haven't been told beforehand what happens; suddenly to your surprise you are rocking Gatling guns and bodysuits or racing through subway tunnels on motorbikes. To keep you guessing and surprised perhaps, but wouldn't it be much more satisfying to execute a heist without so much as a single shot fired? At least have the option? And when you at one point have to dig in and fight off wave after wave of SWAT teams, switching between the three characters, using rocket launchers and taking down helicopters, I kept thinking, "This isn't a heist. It's a small war playing out in pseudo-Los Angeles." The so-called satire displayed here can hardly be called "satire". Remember Arrested Development? Now, I love that series to death, but to be honest it dropped the ball one time: With the "Girls with Low Self-Esteem"-tapes. It's subtle as a chainsaw commentary on the Girls Gone Wild-phenomenon, more an outright parody. Satire shouldn't hit you in the face with a hammer and then cram a shitty piece of paper that has the inscription "Get the message?!" down your throat. Nobody says "I make terrible movies. Now go watch mine!". In GTA V everybody does exactly that and it's not the least bit funny, but Rockstar apparently has to make it this obvious, this unsubtle, to let the average gamer get the joke. Or maybe they just made the mistake of making them so obvious, that they underestimate their audience. "Okay, you hate it, therefore I hate you," you might be thinking if you've even gotten to this point, which I seriously doubt. "But what's up with the considerable score, then?" Look, the reason I'm being a little harsh with Houser & Co., is because this cost 265 million dollars to make - making it the single most expensive piece of popular culture entertainment ever, only rivaled by the third Pirates of the Caribbean-movie, budget-wise. But I'm not saying this is the Avatar of gaming history. No, for that, this is just too superbly crafted, polished (in a good way), too entertaining, technologically superior, and the level of detail is almost unreal - or too real. I'm not talking about the graphics here, they're more than impressive enough when the environments and locations are taking into account. But just in the way the city of Los Santos goes about its business, a pulsating metropolis, nice, little touches all over the place, not all of them are genius (for instance, the cursor on your laptop is giving you the finger - 12 year-olds, rejoice!), but all of them are impressive. For crying out loud, there a three games in one here - one on land, in the ocean, and one in the air. The soundtrack is unfortunately the least successful the series has seen for a while, but that didn't bother me as much as some faults with the physics and especially the car physics. But those are minor errors. The fifth installment in GTA-franchise is probably the best yet - alongside GTA: Vice City, of course. The story is a complete mess, and I kept waiting for it to really begin, then suddenly it was over, but the game itself is just so impressive. The sheer scale of it is awe-inspiring and truly next-level to behold.