It's hard to review a game that feels so old. Yet, it's hard because once you get the hang of it, you just won't stop playing.
If you played Vice City, imagine it's Vice City only ten times bigger, it took me all the summer vacations to get to the third island, and it still seems far from ending. But don't get me wrong, the missions shouldn't be all that long, once you start passing missions you will advance really fast, but in between you'll want to go out with a girl, to find some insane stunts, to drive carelessly, to hit someone, to search new weapons, to win big in the casino, to fly a plane... There are so many things to do that you will rarely focus on the missions.
The story this time around is far more complicated than GTA3's kill anything in sight or Vice City's kill your treacherous family. There are strange twists and lots (and I mean LOTS) of characters for you to know. For you to get an idea of just how well made the story is, there's a cop you meet on the very first cut scene who I have longed to kill since his very first line.
Music is varied and it has something for every taste, and even if you like some kind of overly strange music you can put your own tunes and hear them in radio fashion or just one after the other. As always I liked the talk station the most, but I just love the country music one, the host is... hillarious.
Among the new things for those who didn't play San Andreas in any other console are the addition of tons of vehicles (including bikes) and the addition of the... character creation. You can choose from hairstyles, clothing and tatoos to make your main character just like you want him to be. You could go eat tons of pizzas and go for the computer engineer look, or you could go to the gym and tatoo yourself and go for the gangster look. Customization is quite interesting if only for aesthetics.
Now, the game has one problem that really annoys me, to the point of turning it off. If you have an ATI video card, every 5 minutes the video system (or something) will crash. The newest ATI drivers will fix the problem somewhat, but it still crashes once and again.
All in all it's a very enjoyable game, one of the most complete and biggest games ever. If you are a fan of Vice City or GTAIII go for it, if you are not, give it a chance, you won't feel disappointed.
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