GTA V received over 3 million dollars in pre-orders. It made over 6 million dollars in day 1 sales. Grand Theft Auto V was probably the most anticipated game in the last 5 years, and everyone scrambled to get a copy. But does it live up to the hype?

GTA V is a huge game. I don’t mean that the game box is big, I mean the environment is huge. The biggest open world map in GTA history, and it’s proven by the amount of time it takes to drive it, but I’ll get into that later. To deal with this massive map, the game is 2 discs. One disc is just an install, to help with the graphics loading and little things. The second disc is what you actually put in to play, and you can’t install it to the hard drive because of issues with the 2 discs conflicting with each other and making the graphics wonky (I actually tried this, it’s a slight issue, and with an older 360, it’ll make your fans run like a jet engine.) You can install the second disc to a 360 formatted USB drive or some sort, if that’s the route you want to take. Otherwise you can just pop in the disc and play as is.

Starting up the game, you have about a 5 second window to press A, to go into online mode, or story mode. Your option will be in the lower right corner, and you better decide quick, because if you don’t you have to wait until everything’s loaded to be able to pick again. Once the loading is done you’ll start the game, and you’re thrown right into the thick of things. The story starts off hot and heavy, and acts as a sort of tutorial at the same time. You learn your shooting, your taking cover commands, and driving. Once you finish the opening mission you get into the main story, which occurs 10 years later.

Once you get into the main story and get the use of all the characters there are a lot ways you can go in completing the game. You have the main story missions, and a lot of side missions that will accentuate the story. There are a lot of character specific missions, and you can find these by their color coding in the map. Orange = Trevor, Green = Franklin, Blue = Michael. This info will help you go through the missions a little easier, but the order of the missions is completely up to your preference.

The story, on the whole, isn’t that great. A story of three guys who, through fate, have somehow found each other, and must work together. While this is a rather simplistic way of describing the story, it’s pretty much what it is. All in all, GTA5’s story is an RPG, with an emphasis on friendship. I know it sounds weird, but if you really break it down, this is exactly what it is. Grand Theft Auto 5: The Power of Friendship. And it’s through the game mechanic of switching between the characters in certain battles where this “friendship” is emphasized.

The gameplay is amazingly smooth. From the driving to the fighting, everything’s pretty crisp. There were a few…complications in some parts of the controls during certain battles, though that could have just been me. The cover shooting is pretty nice too, as you can get an auto aim out of the cover sometimes, which makes the battles a little easier, sometimes a little too easy. The car handling is nice too, as you can see a difference in how all the cars handle, from a sleek Lamborghini ripoff, to a big Semi-Truck. I have a little gripe with the flying controls, as I could never even out the plane enough to fly straight without having to mess around with the stick to keep the plane from moving, or crashing into a mountain. The phone system is also a nice touch, as I enjoy calling a cab when I didn’t have a car available, and no traffic was running on the road near me.

There were still quite a few problems with the online play, but the little I did play of it seemed good. It’s a completely separate story, where you can play as a character that you make. You can do missions in a crew of people you know, or a thrown together crew of people who are all doing the same mission. It seems cool, and I think the majority of the re-playability of this game will be in online, once you finish all the missions in story mode.

The sound in this game is pretty crisp as well. From the sound effects to the voice acting, to the radio in the car. I love the radio in the car. There’s enough variety that everyone should be able to find something to listen to during the long drives to missions that are far out of the way.

My only gripes about this game are with the story, as I couldn’t really relate to any of the characters, and it seemed to put more focus on Trevor than Michael or Franklin. The story started out a little slow, also. But once you get all the characters together, and do a few heists, the story picks up and kind of sucks you in.

Overall, I enjoyed this game a lot. The story’s kind of slow at the beginning but once you get moving, and you start the big jobs in story mode, and the story starts getting hot, it’ll suck you in, and you’ll be a little disappointed once you’re done with it. I’m sure there’ll be some DLC to come out for this, and that’ll be some interesting stuff.

Gameplay

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Sound

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Grand Theft Auto V Screenshots