It’s perfectly possible to be doing well in a mission only for a random car to careen into you at full speed, or to get caught in the middle of one of the constant firefights between opposing gangs. shooting tyres out, car chases often turn into a game of explosive bumper cars. Since there’s no way to do locational damage to cars, e.g. Battering the other vehicle into submission is an option, but GTA3 has a very severe car damage system – that is, after taking a certain amount of bumps or bullets, your vehicle will abruptly burst into flames, explode and kill you instantly if you don’t escape in a matter of seconds. There are many missions where you have to chase down cars and trucks, which can often be frustrating as you’re only able to shoot from your car in a straight line from the passenger side. Though I enjoyed the blast from the past from my adolescent years, the game’s comedy mileage for newcomers may vary.īut it’s GTA3’s gameplay that feels the worst for wear. The simplistic satire, shock humour and goofily cynical storylines can feel a little dated by today’s standards. The characters who give you missions are a colourful mix, including a crooked cop who meets you in a park bathroom, a Tony Soprano-esque Mafiosi boss who is constantly being berated by his mother and a bisexual Yakuza woman with a penchant for bondage. Switch on the radio and it’s immediately full of venal, self-obsessed DJs and commercials advertising absurd products that’ll likely do more harm to the buyer than good. In a stroke of luck, he ends up escaping jail and is out on the streets again, finding new illicit work and ultimately moving towards getting revenge on his deranged ex-lover. Set in a parodic version of New York, Liberty City, the mute protagonist Claude is betrayed by his psychopathic girlfriend during a heist and subsequently gets sent down for the robbery.
Grand Theft Auto III was released all the way back in 2001, and it absolutely typified the edgy humour that was the style at the time. Now we finally get to find out: is Rockstar up to the task of polishing up these vintage pieces and making them accessible to a whole new generation? It’s a tall order to remaster them without souring those perfect memories so many of us have. These games went beyond quality vehicular-based crime simulators to becoming true cultural touchstones of the early noughties, which practically any game-playing millennial will remember with great fondness. From the cinematic cutscenes to the vast variety of vehicles, all the way to the gigantic maps full of sidequests and activities, each new title was inevitably greeted with, “well, there goes my social life for the next few months.” Booting up a title from The Trilogy for the first time, though, was like stepping into a living, breathing world. GTA 1 and 2 were simple top-down affairs that were immensely entertaining but felt distant from reality. For those who weren’t there, it’s hard to describe how mind-blowing the first 3D iterations of Grand Theft Auto were.