Developer/Publisher: Rockstar Games Released: September 2013

Played on: PS3 (also available on 360)

The ending credits of GTAV send a camera sweeping through the streets and landscapes of Los Santos – uptown shopping districts, rundown ghettos, sunny beaches, sprawling freeways, huge mountain ranges, glitzy rich suburbs, bullet-ridden shacks in the desert – all depicted with minute attention detail, bathed in stunning sunlight. Rockstar’s fictional LA-inspired city is truly impressive, completely believable in its design and awe-inspiring in scope. Los Santos is more than just a location to drive your stolen car around, if you ignore the game’s missions you can still partake in a dozen outdoor activities that you’re too lazy to do in real life like golf, hunting, parachuting, triathlons, and a tennis mini-game that is more fun than most dedicated tennis video games I’ve played in recent years. The NPCs that populate the world all seem to be living their own lives and behave in completely believable ways (if a little aggressively) and the limited interior environments you can explore have the same staggering level of detail and personality the outdoor environments have. Los Santos is probably the most accomplished sandbox ever created in videogames.

I was never a Grand Theft Auto fan, though. The games were always fun and impressive, but I was never as excited as everybody else seemed to be about them. I had no intention of checking out GTAV but the combination of unavoidable marketing images and an incessant buzz from podcasts and friends found me staring at a copy of the game in JB Hifi on the day of release. I bought it, caving to commercial urges. Despite some reservations I have about the game, the 40 hours I spent with the single-player world were great fun. Following this huge buzz and 32.5 million copies sold, I don’t think anything I say here will contribute anything new to the conversations around the game, but it was fun to be playing it at the same time as everyone else. GTA is truly a phenomenon in gaming culture.

After a few hours, GTAV allows you to switch between 3 different characters at almost any point in the game. This is a fantastic mechanic that keeps the pacing fresh and doesn’t lump you with a single, unlikeable character for an entire game. It makes the game’s 3 unlikeable characters more tolerable as you can leave them in a moment when you’re sick of them. Switching to a new characters zooms the camera out to a Google Earth style view then finds what your selected character is upto at the time, occasionally with hilarious consequences.

Franklin is a decent enough character, but is fairly bland. His unmemorable story arc can probable be summed up in one line; “Franklin lives with his aunty in the ghetto but then moves out to a fancy house on the other side of town.” No spoilers there, this happens pretty early on. There are attempts to build Franklin’s motivations by introducing characters from his past, but they don’t stick.

Michael is probably the best written of the trio, an ex-bank robber living a Hollywood Hills lifestyle with a dysfunctional family, a complicated legal status and a verbose, hollow shrink. Despite his failings and how easy it is to abhor his family, you can’t help but feel for the guy.

Trevor is a psychopath. He swings from tearful outbursts of emotion to violent rampages. The developers do a good job making his character complex and even likeable, but there are enough moments in the game to remind us that he is a despicable character. His tendency towards violent and antisocial behaviour seems less modeled on anything in reality and more on the playing habits of gamers – randomly stealing cars, attacking people for the slightest of infractions, foul-mouthed, violent and sleazy – Trevor is the embodiment of the Grand Theft Auto player. I often felt conflicted playing as him, enjoying his sick delight and knowing it was also my own. Trevor is the most honest character in the game – he never deceives his comrades and you always know where you stand with him – and he is the most honest in a meta-narrative of the game itself, he is Rockstar acknowledging the nature of the world they’ve created and the activities of the players within it. On this level it’s kind of brilliant, but also completely unsettling.

My customised Trevor taking a selfie. My rule was that all three leads must have huge beards.

In general, Rockstar have created a cynical, sick place in Los Santos. Almost all the dozens of characters in the game are deplorable and the city’s billboards and radio DJs decry a society with a shiny veneer and a rotten core. There was a fair amount of controversy around a torture scene that takes place in the game, which seems an odd thing to focus on in a game where in the space of 5 minutes you can massacre a dozen civilians, steal a plane, then fly it into a strip club. The torture scene seems like Rockstar staying true to the world they’ve created.

I’m not sure if any of this self-awareness actually contributes to the game. It is constantly poking fun at its subject matter and sometimes hits the mark, but often the satire feels lazy. Still, the constant sense of humour that permeates the game makes it a lot more fun to be complete asshole running around Los Santos.

The missions and side-missions in the game are really fun. They are generously checkpointed and feature a great driving and cover-shooting mechanic. My only major frustrations came from flying missions, which I sucked at. But overall the main missions are great fun, well structured and rewarding. There are “heists” which you have to plan for and execute with some degree of choice which is great, and the missions get fairly epic by the end of the game, requiring you to switch between all three characters for success.

You do come to care for the three leads by the end of the game, and while some of their buddy moments feel forced, they are still more memorable than the overall story. Thankfully the core of the gameplay cycle and the characters are strong enough to push the story forward, which doesn’t outstay its welcome but does feature some strange and unnecessary divergences.

The best moments are often emergent ones – hiding from cops because you wanted to swim in a neighbour’s pool, plunging to your death after dirtbiking off a cliff, repeatedly driving an SUV into the military base to try to steal a tank but dying moments from victory. Sometimes I would simply drive around listening to the radio full of perfectly curated licensed music. My favourite station kept changing as the game went on. The sandbox is a rich one and I can imagine many are still playing with it.

I tried GTA Online a few times (when it finally started working after a troubled launch) and was put off by the number of jerks inhabiting it. On the few occasions I rode with friends we had a lot of fun, particularly in deathmatch, but most of my mates are on 360 and the appeal of playing with strangers just wasn’t there. I haven’t checked back in since last year (had to delete and make space on my PS3’s paltry HDD) but it seems like the buzz around it has dissipated…

My avatar in GTA Online. A complicated creation tool makes it hard to create someone who looks… normal. Still, that sunlight is pretty!

I’m really not sure what it means that 32.5 million people own this game. Is it the appeal of a sandbox where you can live out your violent crime fantasies? While I very much enjoyed my time in Los Santos, I haven’t felt compelled to return since reaching my 72% completion mark, and have instead spent many more hours in my utopian Animal Crossing world.

Verdict: A humorous, remarkable world with almost too much to explore and do, a great variety of gameplay mechanics and challenges, some memorable characters with interesting missions, and incredible visuals and music. Unremarkable story and the game’s overall moral vacuum can wear thin. (To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest a game needs to be moral, just that I got sick of playing a jerk surrounded by jerks.)

Should Bradley play this: He already has, and he really liked it. Which frustrates me, because he never got into Red Dead Redemption which plays similarly but is a much better game.