Having played it a lot since release, GTA San Andreas has left me in two minds over what I think about it. On one hand I think that it's a brilliant game just like GTA3 and Vice City, but on the other hand it's still flawed and many of them are the same flaws that have been around since GTA3.
One of the main complaints about the game is the graphical problems and I want to get those out of the way by saying that they're not that bad. Yes, there is pop-up and fade-in. Yes, the game can look plain. Yes, the animation is ropey in places. But yes, the PS2 is old hardware and this game is putting a lot of strain on it. The map is huge and there is no loading between areas, so I think we can forgive them for the occasional flaw. I was annoyed on one mission when my plane flew into a hillside that popped up a few feet in front of me and caused me to fail the mission but that was the only time the graphics affected my enjoyment.
My main complaint is that this game is essentially the same one you played twice before. Many of the missions are carbon copies, the frustrating mission types that people have complained about since GTA3 are still in there, and you can't help but feel that they've just changed the setting and thrown in a few token new abilities. No matter what some might tell you, being able to swim isn't a big change to the formula.
The game world is very big and can take a good twenty minutes to cross by road, but the three cities are definitely smaller than Liberty City and Vice City so I can't help but feel like we've exchanged one huge city for three small ones and some pretty empty space. It's also allowed some missions that have just plain obnoxious amounts of driving and although there's a "trip skip" feature that lets you miss out the driving on a second attempt I personally preferred to reload the save so that I didn't have to find my arsenal of weapons all over again. Either driving for twenty minutes again or finding a ton of expensive weapons again isn't a good choice for a game to give you.
The audio in GTA games has always been strong and San Andreas is no exception. As you'd expect from a game set in the urban ghettos of LA in the early 90s there's a lot of rap here but there's still the chat station (with Lazlow), rock station (hosted by Axl Rose of Guns N Roses), classical station, and whatever you'd want to listen to. The voicework is of extremely high quality with some rappers and the likes of Samuel L Jackson and James Woods, as well as some returning talent from previous games. I don't like the whole rap culture but I didn't find it annoying in the context of the game and could avoid most of it.
Overall it's a great game and worth getting if you enjoyed the others, but those who don't like the games aren't going to change their minds and I hope that the next in the series will be more of an upgrade.
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