Marik Bentusi said:
What he describes is pretty much the perspective I got as someone that never played GTA. Aside from a couple hours in GTA2 with a dozen silly cheats enabled 'cause the missions bored the snot out of me.
I expected the whole sandbox thing to make for more organic "Fuck yeah" moments tho. 'cause otherwise the game looks like a collection of games I already have, just not done as in-depth or with the variety in setting.
So I really bet everything on that "organic gameplay" wildcard that, fickle as it is, apparently just didn't resonate with Yahtzee.
Can someone that actually played (and perhaps even liked) the game elaborate with something specific? "It had great characters" or "shooting the gun feels really good" wouldn't tell me a whole lot.
I could go on for hours on why I love this game.
I can customize the cars, characters, and even the guns which I know isn't new but I have only seen this kind of gun customization in farcry 3. Yeah COD multiplayer had it but I'm not a multiplayer person.
Yes you can play tennis, golf, and racing in other games but to say it's not as in depth is a bit of a stretch. It does have different environments but does that really matter with tennis? Bottom line, I love that I can take a short break from shooting and driving and play a pretty good tennis game without having to switch disks. If it was just "press a to hit ball" I could see your point but it really is a pretty well crafted collection of minigames.
The environment is fun to explore and it helps that there are so many vehicles to explore it with. The game is filled with these peds that have a name and personality and usually some message they are trying to spread. People call it "pointless" but I thought it was a lot of fun to see how the different protagonists would react to them.
The in game internet can be used anywhere with the phone and is a lot of fun to explore and play around with. The Stock market sounds boring but it's just a gambling system that's not easy to cheat with save exploits.
The physics are a lot of fun to play around with, tons of little secret things to figure out. You can flip people off in your vehicle, aim it at people, and they react usually by trying to pull you out of your vehicle and beat you down. If you hit B (or circle) after jumping you can do a prat fall type of thing. Sounds pointless, it is, but again it's a lot of fun.
Shooting feels good may not be a selling point but yes, shooting feels good. Despite what people may think, there is an art to designing a game to "feel" a certain way when you fire a gun. Compare it to something like Duke Nukem forever where it somehow feels like you are shooting pellets and you will get what I am saying. Even the starting pistol feels like it has a lot of power, which is how it should feel.
The three protagonists isn't just an excuse to play missions with different skins, each character plays differently beyond the obvious special ability differences or stat differences. Franklin can stealthily unlock a vehicle's door while the other two just smash the window and try to quickly hotwire the thing.
Stealth actually works in this game and can be used in a lot of missions although the game rarely reminds you (but I like when a game doesn't constantly hold your hand when it comes to alternate ways of dealing with situations) and the wanted system is the best I have seen in any open world game so far.
It feels like a "Drive" video game when you are trying to evade police. Instead of a "search circle" each cop has a vision cone on the radar but it's not about just staying out of the cone because you can be in their "vision cone" and still be out of sight if you are behind something. In other words, it feels like you are actually hiding from police and it helps that the police don't just rush straight to you but actually search the area of the reported crime and check various alleys looking for you, giving you plenty of opportunities to use different tactics, such as waiting for a cop car to pass before making a mad dash to the alley across the street or losing an army of cops for just long enough to switch vehicles before they find you (which can get the heart pounding when they are nearing your position and your character is struggling to get the car started) allowing you to drive away without an issue as long as you don't get too close to a cop car.
There is no "vigilante" side mission but you can play an actual vigilante by going around the city and hunting down thieves, muggers, and gangsters. It does a lot of the random pedestrian crimes and events that red dead redemption did.
Like I said, I could go on for hours. I love ZP but I wouldn't use his videos as a reference for the games I would enjoy. I like to have fun while playing a game, I like to put myself into a role (not just the one assigned by the developers) and see how it plays out.
It may not be your type of game, but personally I love games like this. I finding strange little details put in for pedestrian AI or the game physics that wasn't widely advertised.
I also like the challenge. You die quickly, meaning you won't have the long killing sprees that apparently made GTA famous. That may be a deal breaker for many but personally I got really bored in other GTA games when I just felt near invincible. The way it's set up here, it actually feels fun to go on the occasional spree because it's so hard to keep it going that managing to stay alive during a non mission police shootout for a few minutes feels pretty satisfying.
If you're not into this type of game I could understand that but personally I always loved GTA since I played GTA 1 for the first time and this is a collection of things I always wished a GTA game would do.
Keep in mind I haven't touched online, I don't have a gold account, so I don't know if there's anything on that end that would be a deal breaker. I play for single player, I have been playing obsessively for, I think, about a week and still only have about 30 percent completed. I feel like I got my money's worth and for a 60 dollar game that's extremely rare for me.