The only downside is that it's much more difficult to play, and that falling off a bike is so well-realised that it feels like really falling off a bike-people who get motion-sick in first person may suffer.ĭid I mention that GTA 5 was also a cinematography tool? Unique to the PC version, Director Mode allows you to explore the open world as any character you want, in whatever circumstances you want, and then record, cut and remix those experiences into short films using a deep and accessible toolkit. Hell, few games of any type have managed it. Steal an open-top car and go for a cruise in first person, steal a plane, or just go for a walk at night in the rain: there has never been an open-world game that offers this great a variety of atmospheric experiences at this level of detail. It achieves a similar sense of physical presence to Alien: Isolation, but in a vast open world. It's not just a novelty alternative: GTA 5 is a fully-playable FPS, complete with detailed animations for everything from gunplay to getting out your phone. The amount of work invested into the first-person mode is further evidence of this. Rockstar have, quite literally, gone above and beyond the Call of Duty. This is what it looks like when one of gaming's most profitable enterprises reinvests that profit into the game itself. You'll find armoured trucks to rob, secrets to find, muggers to help or hinder, cults to encounter, vehicles to customise and collect.
You'll find cinemas showing funny short films and fully-programmed TV stations. Step off the main trail and you'll find fully-functional golf, tennis, races-even a stock market. Here, then, is the kicker: that forty-plus hour campaign with all of its flaws amounts to an optional fraction of the vast overall package. I encountered a fair number of texture errors in multiplayer, however, and many players have reported frequent crashes.
On a slightly better system, running a GTX 970, a mixture of very high and ultra settings could be used without framerate loss. Grand Theft Auto 5 ran at 50-60 fps on a midrange rig with most settings on normal or high. Graphics options DirectX version, screen type (including fullscreen windowed), VSync, camera settings for first person, third person and vehicles, population density and variety, distance scaling, texture quality, shader quality, shadow quality, reflection quality, water, particles and grass quality, post FX, motion blur, depth of field, anisotropic filtering, ambient occlusion, tessellation.Īnti-aliasing FXAA, MSAA, NVidia TXAA, Reflection MSAA Reviewed on Intel i5 760, 8Gb RAM, 4Gb GPU It feels incredible, a collision of pop-culture, atmosphere, music and play that is unique to GTA.
The rock station is playing 30 Days In The Hole by Humble Pie. It'd hit me: I'm doing 150 km/h along the Pacific Coast Highway at sunset. Then, inevitably, I'd be doing one of those rote activities-a heavily scripted freeway chase, perhaps-when the magic of that extraordinary world would creep up on me again. I spent a lot of my time with the campaign frustrated along these lines, bored of the same mission templates that I've been playing through since GTA III and making the most of the scant opportunities to play my own way, like Franklin's refreshingly open assassination missions. In the worst examples-insta-fail stealth sequences, sniper missions and so on-it's harder to ignore the shackles that are placed on the player in order to preserve the game's cinematic look and feel. In the best examples, you soak in the atmosphere and happily ignore the fact that you're only really being asked to follow the on-screen instructions. It's far richer in set-piece moments than its predecessor-drug trips, aerial heists, dramatic chases-and many of these look incredible even if they're light on actual interaction. There's much driving from A to B, a lot of conversations in cars, a lot of gunfights with hordes of goons who show up just to run into your gunsights over and over.
As it is this is a very long game with a lot of filler.