But while the franchise has lost the ability to shock it remains the most immersive spectacle in interactive entertainment. And with the profane and hugely enjoyable Grand Theft Auto V Rockstar Games has produced the best plotted most playable character driven fictionally coherent entry in this 16 year old series.
The game is set in an immense parodic vision of Southern California a West Coast counterpoint to the caricature of New York City in Grand Theft Auto IV (2008). While Los Santos the game s version of Los Angeles and its surroundings exist in an alternate reality it is also a contemporary one that evokes and satirizes the anxieties of 21st century life. There s a fake Facebook (LifeInvader) a fake Twitter (Bleeter) a fake Apple (Fruit) a fake Kickstarter (Beseecher) a fake 50 Shades of Grey ( Chains of Intimacy ) even a fake Call of Duty (Righteous Slaughter 7 a first person shooter game that advertises itself with the tagline The identical art of contemporary killing ).
Grand Theft Auto V is still an action game about hoodlums and thieves we start with an extended bout of cop killing and proceed to a series of increasingly ambitious heists. But the structure feels more logical than before. Your character doesn t arrive as an outsider in a new city and start carrying out the requests of people whose only purpose is seemingly to delay him. Instead the events flow from situations and desires.
For the first time there are three controllable characters instead of only one Franklin a repo man on the make loses his job Michael a witness protection retiree miscalculates after finding his wife cheating on him with her tennis instructor and Trevor an oddly lovable psychopathic meth dealer and gun runner learns that Michael his onetime partner faked his death 10 years ago.
I ve got an imbalance Michael tells his psychiatrist. One minute I m one person and the next minute I m another person.
A retired or newly unretired bank robber Michael is examining his struggle to control his criminal impulses. He might as well be analyzing the dissonance that afflicted Grand Theft Auto IV. That game s protagonist Niko Bellic would fret in animated sequences about the costs of his life of violence. But under the control of many video game players Niko would subsequently embark on acts of gleeful creative murder that belied the story the game wanted to tell about him. Were these two men the one in the story s animations and the one manipulated by the player really the same person
With the three character structure of Grand Theft Auto V Rockstar finds an answer to that riddle.
That seamlessness between narrative and interactive is something that we have worked on everywhere said Sam Houser the sometimes reclusive co founder of Rockstar Games who agreed to be interviewed after I had spent more than 45 hours inside the game s world.
Most video games are about repeated actions about mastering a skill and exploiting it. Grand Theft Auto games are about variety. There s the array of content including radio stations D.J. d by the likes of Bootsy Collins entire TV shows with names like Republican Space Rangers and a fake Internet. And there are the missions the characters execute encompassing car boat and plane chases paparazzi ambushes train robberies and triathlons. Failure in the new game is less frustrating than in previous iterations since a generous checkpointing system means that players don t need to restart a mission from the beginning if they don t get it right the first time. There s even an option to skip the action sequences after repeated attempts have gone awry.
For all that the game does right it has a genuinely problematic aspect that is not its enthusiasm for violence or sex but its lack of interest in women as something other than lustful airheads (notwithstanding a late game cameo by Mr. Houser s mother Geraldine Moffat a British actress of the 1960s and 70s). One of the only young women in the game not oversexed and under read is sucked into a jet turbine.
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