Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition
Has there been a game released in the last 20 years that's been more influential than Grand Theft Auto III? From its establishment of the open-world sandbox fundamentals to its critical role in reshaping videogames into a more attractive medium for mature audiences, GTA III's shadow still looms large over almost every facet of the artform. If any game deserved a definitive edition that allowed fans to relive that revolution without squinting to ignore ancient graphics, it's this.
And yet, series creator Rockstar Games has decided to pay tribute to this modern gaming monolith and its two equally acclaimed PS2-era sequels, Vice City and San Andreas, by producing a collection of re-releases that cuts more corners than a Yakuza Stinger in a Liberty city street race. At best this trilogy is ill-conceived and half-finished; at worst it's straight-up broken. If this half-baked Definitive Edition is anything to go by, I have to wonder if Rockstar reveres its own games as much as the rest of us do.
There are some positives, mind you, but almost every welcome addition is implemented at the cost of some sort of buzz-killing compromise. It seems so antiquated that my original playthroughs with each of these three games were done with a paper map unfurled across my lap, so it's very convenient that you're now able to just hit pause to scan the full map of each game world and drop waypoint markers to your destination, like modern gamers would expect. However, you can't override waypoints that are automatically created during a mission, like if you wanted to take a detour across town to an Ammunation or a Pay 'n' Spray perhaps, and the pathfinding can often get confused as it continually recalculates over the course of a journey, at times resembling something closer to a hastily scribbled signature than the shortest possible route .
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Similarly, the "GTAV-inspired modern controls" promised in this collection's marketing have been applied somewhat unevenly over the three individual games. Weapon switching is improved across the board with the ability to use a shoulder button to bring up a weapon wheel, but auto-targeting feels far snappier in San Andreas than in GTA III and Vice City, and while you can circle-strafe while locked on to an enemy with a lighter weapon equipped, heavier machine guns and the like still root you to the spot and force you into a manually first-person perspective regardless. The auto-targeting in GTA III and Vice City proved to be particularly sluggish whenever I found myself up close and personal with a group of enemies, which was fairly frequent given that enemy AI wasn't designed to use cover and just rushes you more often than not. Thus in both games I found myself, reliant on the use of sniper rifles to thin the herds from a distance rather than run headlong into yet another spasmodic shootout .
A mid-mission checkpointing system has been implemented to good effect in San Andreas, allowing you to restart with all your health and weapons and skip the early setup phase of certain missions. That resolves one of the great complaints of the early games in the 3D series. Yet in GTA III and Vice City, choosing the option to restart at a checkpoint just boots you back to the very start of the mission no matter how deep into it you were when you died. So if, like I did, you die a number of times trying to outrun the cops at the end of the 'S.A.M.' mission in the lead up to GTA III's climax, you still have to drive from the construction site to the boat jetty, take the boat to the end of the airport runway, wait for the plane to arrive, shoot down the plane with the rocket launcher, collect all the packages, return to the mainland, and then try and escape the police, over and over again. It's odd that one game allows you to literally cut to the chase while the other two force you to repeatedly bring the car around and warm up the engine first .
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