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Grand Theft Auto V review

GTA V is a stunning achievement because it does everything so well.

Grand Theft Auto truly was the first blockbuster game of the modern gaming era. GTA III, launched to almost universal acclaim in 2001 on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox reinvented how we play games and reset our thinking about what we might find in games.

There had been big world games before GTA - and plenty since - but none had been so well-executed or offered the variety DMA (now Rockstar North) and its hugely talented team could cram into a disc.

GTA sets itself apart from the rest of the herd by being a fantastic piece of storytelling before anything else. Many games that want to be anything like GTA forget that the story can't just be a series of set pieces with the story shoe-horned in around them. Their disregard for story is reflected in the lacklustre voice-acting and direction.

GTA games are always funny and always well-acted and written. The story holds you, rather than being an inconvenience.

Grand Theft Auto V yet again challenges the status quo. Its world is truly massive, surely the biggest of any game, but with a rich environment full of people and buildings and cars. You could conceivably fill weeks roaming around and finding plenty of little things to do without ever touching the main game.

The main game is as controversial as ever. Australia's newly-minted R rating was almost made for games from the Rockstar stable. The team has never been far from controversy and has often pointed to Australian censors' inability to understand the genre.

The fictional city of Los Santos joins Vice City and Liberty City as a fully-formed urban environment, completely devoid of any sense of morality.

You can cheerfully mow down pedestrians with your car or motorbike, randomly assault passers-by and, as part of the story, rob jewellery shops, slaughter rival gangs and spend a lot of time up to absolutely no good at all.

The game itself is much the same as before, but with a refined set of gameplay mechanics. Its slick execution is the result of a rumoured budget of $245 million and five year development. The wealth of experience that came from working on GTA IV with both the PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles means that Rockstar has pushed them to their limits in their twilight years.

The cars are, as ever, a wonderful mixture of real cars but with fake names and just enough tweaking to keep the lawyers away. Each of them has their own very distinct handling model, from floaty, long-travel suspension on the Range Rover Sport-like Gallivanter Baller through to the flat-everywhere Voltic by Coil, a rip-off of the Tesla Roadster.

From Trevor's falling-apart redneck truck, through to Gallardo and R8-esque machines you can steal from the street, there's sixty years of carefully filtered automotive history lying around Los Santos' many streets.

Go to the airport and you can drive a tug or fly a plane. You can jump in the water and hijack an array of boats, grab your scuba gear and go diving or, if you're feeling green (or short of time) catch the tram or train around.

In and out of game missions, you can race through the streets of the city, from densely packed narrow streets through to the mobile-home populated, wide open desert of Sandy Shores. Street furniture, such as lights and park benches will either fall over when you hit them or, if they're a little more stout, stop you in your tracks.

The variety of experience is worth the purchase, let alone the fun of playing the missions. That variety is further enhanced with a 16-player online mode where you can co-operatively rob a bank or race through the streets.

The three main characters in the single-player mode - Franklin, Michael and Trevor - are hardened criminals in their own right. Each has a rich back story and an even richer line in dark humour. Trevor is particularly amusing as he is rolled-gold nuts and gets all the best lines.

The three characters are deeply flawed and have poor impluse control - Michael catches his wife en flagrante with the tennis coach, so pulls down what he thinks is the man's house. It turns out to be owned by a gangster who then appears at Michael's house with a baseball bat and a demand for $2.5 million to fix the house.

These character flaws are integral to the story and allow for spectacular missions. The ever-present police add to the challenge as they're far more persistent in this iteration - and less stupid.

GTA V is a stunning achievement because it does everything so well. It is absolutely not a game for children - the bare breasts in the strip clubs and the already-infamous torture scene see to that (not to mention the extremely colourful language, horrific storylines and unrelenting violence).

For car lovers it's a game of Eye Spy as you try to match the various in-game cars with their real world counterparts and gravitate to the one closest to your own tastes. The game is a hilarious free-for-all with a dark sense of humour and sense of the ridiculous. It engages the brain not just for problem-solving but with its epic, blockbuster feel.

Hollywood should rightly be terrified of the increasing revenues of video games, because games like GTA V show how much better than a movie a video game can be.