3/5 ★ – philip_acquaro's review of Grand Theft Auto III – The Definitive Edition.

Started: March 9th 2024 Beaten: March 23rd 2024 This game is a testament to how far Rockstar has come. I cannot begin to tell you how insanely outdated this game is in almost every aspect. Even as someone who loves and collects so many old games. The controls when moving on foot are sluggish, slow, and unbearable at times and it doesn’t help that stamina runs out in mere seconds. Shooting or using any of the guns for that matter feels impossible due to the lack of precision or accuracy in hit detection or when aiming. All guns don’t target or lock on and others lock you in tank controls or prevent you from jumping. You can’t swim or even go halfway under water without dying which can be a serious problem when getting on and off of boats. Controlling said boats or planes takes a lot of patience and I think you get the gist of what i’m trying to say, it’s aged terribly in a lot of what it tried to do in it’s first attempt at open world GTA. I did experience this on the widely infamous definitive edition that some despise but I didn’t find playing this version an issue. While some character models look hilariously bad, most of them are fine and the game appears to just be an upscaled port rather than a remake. Luckily a pretty huge chunk of this game consists of driving around in cars which actually does control really well and is a lot of fun! However, it also begs variety as when you do this for tons of missions or for very long play sessions it gets extremely repetitive and made me super burnt out of the game in general which is why i started to take long breaks throughout this month playing it, well that and college too. One other gripe was that there are absolutely no checkpoints in this, meaning that if you die in the middle or at the end of a pretty long or difficult mission, you’d have to restart from the very beginning which can happen super often due the nature of this game making it so easy for a disaster to happen. In terms of what I liked, the characters are entertaining in their campiness and I loved the soundtrack in this game, lips 106 and head radio were my favorite radio stations as well as chatterbox since it can be really funny. It’s also hilarious how cops react to you breaking the law. Many times, you can get away with running over crowds of people or breaking several traffic laws and they won’t bat an eye, but if you so much as tap a cop car, the police will send thousands of cop cars ridiculously hunting you down with tons of them flying toward you at every angle. So many of these goofy/campy parts in the game like the voice acting, the jokes on the radio station,and the pure chaos or absurdities are what make this game for me and adds so much to the charm of it. I haven’t played any of the other Grand Theft Autos other than 5 as I’ve grown up playing that one online with friends for nearly 10 years now. Knowing that the next entries have improved a lot of what this game set out to do, I’m looking forward to beating Vice City, San Andreas, and IV in the future whenever i’m in that GTA mood again, but for now I definitely need a break from this series after this one