Power Hour Reviews are a new NYMG feature in which we spend one intense hour playing newly released games in order to get a sense not only of game mechanics and characterization, but narrative as well. Let us spend our time first, so that you don’t have to waste yours.
Welcome to Grand Theft Auto V week here at Not Your Mama’s Gamer! Okay, not really, but with a game as meaty as GTAV you can expect to see quite a few posts from us ladies as we explore Rockstar’s Los Santos in all its glory. If you listen to the podcast you’ve already heard Sam and Alex discuss their initial feelings on the game and how much potential it has for us to talk about; there are racial issues, gender issues, issues concerning homosexuality, and oh so much more!
I was lucky enough to call “dibs” on GTAV before any of the other ladies, *cough*Alex Layne *cough, to do my Power Hour Review for the month of September. After excitedly choosing the game I realize how much of a task I had set before myself; this game is dense. There is a lot going on within the first hour of play and it can be wildly different from person to person depending on what missions you decide to do and how strictly you adhere to the main quest line.
With that being said, I decided I would play an hour of GTAV and try to learn as much as possible about what’s new in this game vs. the older iterations and where the story line would take your characters. I also decided that I would play an hour of multiplayer to give some insight into what that would be like as it is such an anticipated new mode for GTA. Jokes on me because I didn’t realize multiplayer wouldn’t be available at launch. Boo Rockstar, for teasing me and then letting me down when I didn’t properly do my research.
Now that I have done my research, GTA Online will be available on October 1st so get your friends ready! The online world will take place before the events of GTAV and will allow for 16 players to rampage through a portion of the Los Santos map. IGN has a pretty good list of the online features here so check it out!
When you boot up GTAV on the PS3 it performs an install to your hard drive right away. This takes forever. I couldn’t believe how long it took my brother to get the game installed and running when he initially put the disc in; we went outside and threw sticks for the dogs until they were exhausted and came back inside and it was STILL INSTALLING. Hopefully your PS3 is faster than ours. Rockstar had some issues with the install to play feature for Xbox 360, which is the entire purpose of the 1st disc in the pack of 2, and told 360 owners to skip installing until they can get a patch out. I forgot this information and ended up installing the game to my hard drive and have yet to run into any issues, but there is a solution out there for those of you having problems.
Okay, so you get the game started and are immediately posed with a mission where you control Michael during a robbery gone wrong. This allows Rockstar to not only assimilate you with the new features of the game, but gives you a decent enough background of two characters that will help to build the story they have created. For the most part controls are exactly the same, a contributing factor to that may be because my control settings were set to “Default GTA.” One thing that they introduced right away that I found very beneficial is aim assist. Holy crap is shooting normally bad in GTA games. Rockstar changed this mechanic up in Red Dead Redemption and kept what worked for GTAV. Characters have a “Special Ability” that allows you to slow down time enough to take aim and shoot what matters (relatively speaking, of course!) which is almost identical to Red Dead Redemption minus the marking targets and then shooting. You slow down time and shoot in the same action. The aim assist occurs just like and Call of Duty game, entering in and out of you aim will lock your cross-hair on the nearest “enemy.”
The aim assist is definitely one of the greatest improvements to the game; I remember getting very frustrated at quite a few missions in GTA IV because of how difficult it was to walk, shoot, and dodge bullets. Another improved upon mechanic in the game is the save feature, or lack thereof. GTA games are notoriously bad for making you start at the beginning of a mission even though you died right at the very end. It sucks because you end up playing a mission in its entirety over and over and over again. A nice thing about GTAV is that when you die mid mission there are save points within each mission that allows you to continue from a point much closer to when you died. I almost cried when I realized this as it has been one of my biggest complaints about the series as a whole.
Sticking to the story line allows for a large amount of cut scenes, as is Rockstar’s fashion, but it seemed to me like they happened more frequently as I wrote “cinematic” about 12 times on my play notes during the 1 hour of playing. The first character you play is Franklin, a younger black male who is trying to enhance his life by not participating in the “ghetto” antics of his cohort Lamar. I won’t spoil any of the game play for you but I played enough of his missions to get me to the point where he encounters Michael, the character you played at the beginning of a game. During my one hour of play I did not get to experience switching from Franklin to Michael, but they do allow you to switch characters during the initial robbery scene at the very beginning of the game. The mechanic feels awkward in a spur-of-the-moment action scene, I kept forgetting which button would allow for me to switch, but I imagine it is much smoother when switching from character to character outside of action scenes.
The same mechanic that allows you to switch characters is also where you’ll find your character’s skills. This is a new feature for Rockstar and one that I am very interested to learn more about. Alex Layne had mentioned in the podcast that your players have different driving abilities and this is where you’d find them. Your characters can increase their abilities by going to the shooting range or driving more efficiently, all of which benefit you in the long run for missions (or so I’ve been told). One thing that I would recommend for increasing your driving ability is to stick to the highway; it’s much easier to maneuver around cars at high speeds and in doing so your driving ability will go up really quickly.
Since this is Rockstar’s largest map yet I would advise you to take some time to just enjoy the scenery. I didn’t allow myself to in the hour play time, but they spent a serious amount of time making this map look like a replica of Los Angeles and I recognized quite a few spots while driving around that I had seen during my trip to LA two years ago. This is actually something I would like to explore more in another post because it allows for them to almost present an augmented reality aspect of the game. Something to look forward to!
All in all this game is exactly what I expected and so much more. I found the mechanics to be very similar to previous GTA games and improved upon in the places where it counts. The language and content of the game is just as offensive as before; this is definitely not a game to play around children or (if you’re like me) around your parents! Definitely a game to pick up if you are a fan of the series (in which case, why haven’t you already??) and one to pick up if you like open world RPGs (if you can get past the offensive content). I can’t wait for the articles and hopefully podcasts to come of this game.
What do you guys think so far? I think we’ll be talking about this game a lot, feel free to add your voice to the discussion!
