Video not playing/not visible? Click Here

Grand Theft Auto (GTA) V has been making a lot of news since its release, some good, some not so good. GTA V broke some records of most sales in 24 hours and fastest game to reach $1 billion in sales, 3 days. So, what made everyone flock out to the store to buy GTA V within days of release, including me? Let’s find out.

First of all, the first reason why I ended up buying it was because of how colorful the world was. It reminded me of the good ol’ days of GTA Vice City, which was my favorite GTA game until this one. The last few GTA games were very brown and boring, but GTA V feels like you’re driving around a normal city. Speaking of driving, you can actually drive in GTA V! I remember getting so frustrated with the driving in GTA IV that it felt unplayable to me. I understand that they were trying to go for realism, but the driving mechanics in GTA V feel much more realistic.

I was a bit apprehensive of playing as 3 characters at the same time, but Rockstar made it work. There were points where you were just playing single storylines for each player, but there were others that made it feel much more like a Real Time Strategy game where you had to hop between each character to help the other ones out. That caused for some really intense missions. All of the characters seemed to have been very fleshed out. Each had a distinct personality, and everyone I’ve talked to has a favorite that they play as. Mine was Michael. I’ve put in 30+ hours into GTA V’s single player, not many games can claim that from me, and I’m still playing it. It is just that fun. However, there were some points that made me feel very uncomfortable. I won’t go into them as most of them are story based, but they existed. Another thing that really frustrated me was that I had to restart the entire game after playing for 20-ish hours. I must have played some missions out of order (not sure how), because I was stuck playing as Franklin, but the mission that was supposed to trigger wasn’t triggering.

Now, most of you have heard about GTA V’s multiplayer issues (not connecting, losing characters, losing single player progress, etc). Luckily for me, I only wasn’t able to connect. However, it took nearly 3 weeks after launch before I could log in. Rockstar has been very upfront with these issues, which I appreciate, and they wanted to pay all the players back for their patience. What did they do? They gave everyone who played during the month of October $500,000, calling it the “GTA Stimulus Package”. I have to say that they followed through. I got mine yesterday (as of writing this). GTA V’s multiplayer is different from previous iterations of multiplayer, but it still is a GTA multiplayer. There are missions that you can go on with other people in your multiplayer session, and these are mostly fun with a few boring missions. However, there is still a free roam area where people drive around and shoot you, which is really annoying when you’re in an Ammu-nation buying guns for missions. Also, the character creation is terrible. I understand what they were going for, but it’s not deep enough, and it ends up with tons of people looking identical to another person.

Due to how many issues GTA V had with their multiplayer, I have decided to give 2 review scores. I didn’t feel fair taking points away from an otherwise great game just because Rockstar had issues with their online servers. But, those issues did, and still do to some degree, affect my experience with it.

I give GTA V an overall score of… 6/10
However, I give the story mode of GTA V a… 9/10

I’m Blurryphoenix, and I’ll see you in the next review