Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

As I start writing this review, I have played San Andreas for 35 hours and nine minutes, and I have completed only 49.43 percent of the entire game. In that time, I have passed 76 missions, traveled 1,762,380 feet by car, walked 316,900 feet, popped a 612-foot wheelie, and gone up on two wheels in a car for 58 feet. I’ve shot a basketball and scored from 114 feet. I’ve bench-pressed 320 pounds and curled a 110-pound dumbbell. I’ve sprayed nine out of a possible 100 graffiti tags. I haven’t found any oysters or horseshoes. My sworn enemy is the Ballas gang. I’ve taken over three territories and lost one, and 158 enemy gang members have died over the course of the turf war. I’ve attained 198 wanted stars and evaded 124, and I’ve been busted just three times. Since I started, 262 road vehicles have been destroyed, as have two boats and 125 different planes and helicopters. I’ve started 1,044 fires and shot out 136 tires. I’ve spent $160,000 on property, $32,411 on gambling, $11,400 on weapons, $1,675 on clothes, $1,505 on tattoos, $1,300 on haircuts, and just $2 on food. I’ve jumped out of a plane twice, and I’ve dated two different women, with limited success.

I have not beaten San Andreas yet. This is something you need to know before I proceed. You could beat a majority of the games reviewed this month two or three times over in 35 hours and nine minutes. San Andreas is very different, though. It is a very big game. The term “big” really doesn’t do it justice. It’s huge, massive, colossal, stupendous, and somewhat humbling in its enormity. No matter what expectations you’ve developed based on the information that has dribbled out over the course of the past six months, you are wrong. If you’re expecting Vice City, only set in the ’90s and with some RPG bits, you are wrong. If you believe they can’t possibly push it as much as they have before, that it can’t really be that good, you are wrong. San Andreas is shocking, not necessarily because of its typically contentious subject matter (though there’s plenty in it to rub those of a conservative disposition the wrong way), but because of the sheer scale of the experience.

There are so many facets to this experience, I can’t possibly describe them all here, but I will attempt to outline what makes San Andreas such a significant game. Based on my current progress, you can extrapolate that it’s going to take me about 72 hours to score 100 percent. This would, of course, be true if the game were a completely linear enterprise. It’s not. Much like GTA3 and Vice City, you can “beat” the game by completing only the core missions that progress the story. There are people at Rockstar I’ve spoken to who have finished the main story but have completed only about 60 percent of the entire game. By just plodding through the story, though, you’re going to miss a lot. Conservatively, I would guess that there’s definitely more than 100 hours of gameplay here. The notion of a “digital sandbox” was bandied around quite liberally in the past in association with this franchise, but never has it been so apt. The game world is so packed with surprises that the enjoyment of just existing within it is its own reward.

Aside from its size, the other immediately apparent thing about the game is that it looks infinitely superior to Vice City. Environments are rich with detail and packed with effects, whether beautiful sunrises bleaching out your view or huge storms breaking with rain as thunder crashes overhead.

There are five major regions in the game, the three cities and two wilderness areas. Each has its own identity, vibe, and ambient beauty. Los Santos is a gritty urban metropolis; San Fierro is a hilly replica of San Francisco, complete with frequent fog; and Las Venturas is a flat, neon-soaked sprawl. The wilderness between Los Santos and San Fierro is lush and green and filled with swaying grasses, farmland, and forests. The land between San Fierro and Las Venturas, on the other hand, is a barren wasteland. As you move through the game, not only is the change in scenery indicative of your progress, but it also compounds your sense of achievement and provides a sense of relief as you complete one area and discover another.

The first eight or nine hours of the game take place in Los Santos and are very gang focused. You’re quickly drawn into the gangbanger lifestyle, and there’s an almost squalid feel to it. It’s a reactionary experience, and you soon start to develop feelings for the gang members you’re working with. There are characters you like and others you don’t, and the action unfolds in the tried and trusted GTA fashion. Multiple threads open up that pull you through the linear story, but they are presented in such a way that the illusion of freedom is always very convincing. The first couple of hours introduce you to the most obvious gameplay features, as well as some key players.

Very early on, you’ll notice that the combat system has been improved. If you’ve played Manhunt, you’ll know pretty much what to expect. Shooting is done with the aid of a lock-on system, as is hand-to-hand combat, and the lock-on is, for the most part, fairly reliable. Tap R1 to get a lock and then hit L1 to open fire. It’s fast and effective, and it rarely devolves to the frustrating depths that you’re no doubt very familiar with if you played Vice City.

Also, by the end of your second hour, you will have started to put your mark on your own personal CJ. You’ll have been introduced to the barbershop, the clothes stores, the tattoo shop, and the gym, as well as the restaurants in your neighborhood. That’s enough to be either fat or skinny, well dressed or a slob. You can even sport a huge moustache, if you’re so inclined. You’ll also start to notice that you’re forming quite a bond with the game’s hero. Examine this emotion further and you’ll touch on one of the least quantifiable, but arguably most significant, aspects of San Andreas: CJ himself. Without wishing to get all beard-strokey and film studenty, I think it has to be said that CJ is possibly one of the most well-developed and believable videogame characters ever made. He’s not a caricature, he’s not a superhero, he’s not a lone warrior out for justice: He’s just a guy. Sure, he’s a criminal, and he has a propensity for being particularly unpleasant, but very quickly, you start to notice that you really like him. There’s not the detachment that you have with Sam Fisher or Solid Snake or Ratchet. With CJ, you like him because you very quickly start to feel like you know him. Part of this is because of Young Maylay’s fantastic performance as CJ, but it’s mostly because his reactions are credible. When he’s making smart-ass remarks, they’re casual and not forced. When he’s dealing with a crazy character, his discomfort is tangible, and when you factor all of this in with your ownership of every facet of his development, you really start to notice a bond forming.

By the time you leave Los Santos at around the nine-hour point, a lot of things have happened. The gang activities have escalated to a point where they’re becoming almost oppressive, you will have witnessed a number of set pieces that are truly spectacular, and you will have touched on quite a few of San Andreas’ gameplay styles. Running, driving, shooting, drive-bys, sneaking, and variations thereof will have been supplemented with some on-rails shooter sections, object collection, DDR-style dancing, Track & Field–style button tapping, and several different kinds of racing. All of them are done in moderation, and none of them are so pronounced that you’ll become frustrated. If you’re lousy at rhythm games, you have to endure something of that style only twice in Los Santos. For me, bizarrely, the big hang-up was the racing. For someone obsessed with racing games, the fact that I struggled so badly with one of the major Midnight Club–esque races in the game utterly bewildered me. This was worsened by a returning GTA frustration—the repetition involved if you keep messing up a mission. The race in question was against a Mexican gang using lowriders (not the best-handling cars in the game), and the process involved tracking down a lowrider, heading to Cesar’s (CJ’s sister’s boyfriend’s place), following him to the race location, and then entering the race and having to win. The race itself weaved through a considerably large part of the city, and if I made a mistake, I had to go all the way back to the beginning of that process. By my third attempt, it was starting to piss me off.

Once you leave Los Santos, you’re actually quite glad to be away from all the gang-related crap that’s going on. Being dumped out in the middle of nowhere in a small town in the countryside has a dramatic effect on the way you feel about the game, and the sense of being in the open air is actually quite refreshing. The missions in the wilderness have a very different vibe, and the characters you come across are far less intense (for the most part) than the bangers in Los Santos. Missions in the countryside vary from small-town bank jobs to torching an entire field of weed, and these are interspersed with a lot of off-roading over beautifully rendered landscapes. I spent about six hours working through the missions out there, and just as the game clock ticked over 15 hours, I was approaching San Fierro and another major shift in terms of atmosphere.

There’s a strong thread of humor running throughout the game, but you really start to notice it once you’re traversing the hills of San Fierro. It’s here that you encounter your geeky sidekick, Zero, voiced to perfection by David Cross, and his excruciatingly difficult side missions (remember the RC missions in Vice City? They’re back, and they’ll kick your ass). You’ll also meet the Chinese triad boss Woozie (my favorite character in the game) and Jizzy, the proprietor of the strip club The Pleasure Domes. Your time in San Fierro feels more civilized than the time you spent in Los Santos, probably because you’ve broken away from the gang scene to a certain extent and become much more of a player in the broader scheme of things. You now own property, and as you accumulate funds, you can buy a number of different places around the city that provide you with easily accessible safe houses, as well as new business opportunities. Your legitimacy is compounded as you start to feel like you’re taking a side in a much broader story.

From the beginning of the game, you’re surrounded by “bad guys.” At first, they’re clearly the opposing gang members and the vindictive cop Tenpenny, voiced superbly by Samuel Jackson, but as you work through the San Fierro missions, the game’s not so much about CJ taking on the whole world, and you start to develop more of a sense of purpose. Gameplay styles continue to develop, and you get to play around in some cooler, faster cars and some awesome bikes. You also spend a lot more time around trains and planes (you can even jack a train, which leads to a train-driving minigame that will no doubt be very popular when San Andreas is inevitably released in Japan). It also becomes necessary to train CJ in the water, and you’ll spend a fair amount of time swimming, as well as tooling around on boats. It was also in San Fierro that I stumbled upon my first two-player rampage. Yes, you read that right. Rampages come in two forms, in vehicles or on foot. On-foot rampages allow both players to run on the same screen at the same time (it’s not splitscreen), with separate health, armor, and weapons. Vehicle rampages drop players into a vehicle, one person driving and the other shooting, with the objective of destroying a set number of targets in a limited time. It’s simple and effective, and it’s an especially nice reward if you’re playing the game with an audience.

The core San Fierro missions are all a lot of fun, and the eight hours I spent in that city seemed to fly by much faster than those spent in Los Santos. When you reach the Badlands, you’re again faced with a change in vibe…now you’re out in the desert: It’s very dusty and dirty, there’s a lot of off-roading, and eventually a lot of flying, which I found particularly difficult. I think this has to do with the sudden change in gameplay style. After you’ve been cruising around in off-road vehicles and running around shooting at stuff, the controls of a WWII fighter plane or an attack chopper seem spectacularly sensitive, and you’ll find yourself lurching around all over the place and failing miserably to meet any of the flying objectives until you become more subtle with the analog sticks.

Progress through the desert is extremely focused and driven exclusively by tasks set for you by Mike Toreno, played with typical ferociousness by James Woods. Some of the big gameplay surprises start to emerge out in the desert, and by the 25-hour point, when you leave these dusty environs to meet up with Woozie, who has now moved to Las Venturas, you’re really starting to wonder what else the game could possibly dish up. Surely, by this point, anything it’s going to do, it’s already done, right? Wrong.

When you arrive in Las Venturas, the first thing you do is walk into a casino, where you’re faced with a variety of different minigames, from roulette to slot machines. If you’re prone to video poker addiction, you’ll lose a lot of money very quickly at this point in the game, but it’s a nice break before the story suddenly turns into Ocean’s Eleven.

I really love the way the game develops through Las Venturas. Your sense of purpose is focused even further than it was in San Fierro, your relationships with the other major characters are firmly established, and there are some nice little surprises for fans of the series.

And that’s where I’m going to end this. There are literally hundreds of things about the game that I’ve not touched on, but pretty much all of them are as rewarding as the things I have discussed. All that remains is to tackle the question we posed at the beginning of this review: Is it really the best game ever made? Quite possibly, yes. Some of you may not like it. Some of you might be quite cynical about the hype surrounding the game. I’m sure some of you will think that I’m being sensational and overstating its quality, simply because we have the exclusive and we’re obliged to do so. This is not the case. Before I played it, I was thinking that perhaps this story would be more interesting if we were able to say “Grand Theft Auto loses its cool, San Andreas is actually crap,” but the truth is it’s spectacular—it sets the bar so high that it leaves a lot of games in the dust.