There are times when I look at Los Santos and think 'why would you even think to build that?' This is, appropriately, a thought that I often have about Los Angeles. In GTA 5's case, the tone is different: baffled wonderment as opposed to baffled, y'know, despair. Rockstar have created one of the most extraordinary game environments you will ever visit. I look at it and I wonder at the vast expense of effort required to render every trash bag in every back alley just so. I marvel at the care evident in San Andreas' gorgeous sunsets, in the way that sunglasses subtly alter the colour balance of the world, in the artfully-chosen selection of licensed music designed to accompany your experience. Everything about Los Santos demonstrates the extraordinary amount of thought and love poured into it by hundreds of developers over many years. The abiding irony of Grand Theft Auto 5 is that everybody who actually lives in Los Santos hates it there.
This is the most beautiful, expansive and generous GTA game and also, by some distance, the nastiest and most nihilistic. Rockstar went through a phase, in Bully, Grand Theft Auto IV and the sadly console-bound Red Dead Redemption, of framing their protagonists as anti-heroes. GTA 4's Niko Bellic did some terrible things, but he had a downtrodden charm that helped you like him as you piloted him through the underworld. He was surrounded by people who were larger-than-life but ultimately, beneath the surface, people. Among those people were some of Rockstar's better female characters—Kate McReary, Mallorie Bardas, The Lost and Damned's Ash Butler.
Grand Theft Auto 5 does away with all of that, deliberately but to its detriment. Its trio of protagonists occupy a city full of vapid, two-dimensional caricatures, and they flirt with that boundary themselves. Michael is a middle-aged former bankrobber, unhappily married and on the edge of a breakdown. Franklin is a young hood, purportedly principled but willing to do almost anything for money. Trevor is a desert-dwelling, meth-dealing psychopath with a homebrew morality that sits uneasily alongside his capacity for violent cruelty and sexual aggression. The campaign explores their relationship through a series of heists and misadventures as they clash with every L.A. stereotype you might imagine—the bored Beverly Hills housewife, the corrupt fed, the bottom-rung fraudster, the smug technology exec, and so on.
Against this backdrop, it's only Michael, Franklin and Trevor that appear to have any kind of internal life. I get the impression that this is deliberate, part of the game's relentless skewering of southern California and indicative of Rockstar's waning interest in romantic anti-heroes. Trevor's introduction, in particular, amounts to a particularly explicit 'fuck you' to the characters and themes of Grand Theft Auto IV. GTA 5 is heartless in that way, and as a result I found the narrative difficult to care about. It is ambitious, well-performed, and the production values are extraordinary—but it is also derivative and brutishly adolescent, set in a world where the line between criminality and the rule of law is blurry but where it is always hilarious that somebody might be gay.
It's an R-rated episode of The A-Team where the 'A' stands for 'asshole'. The campaign's best moments come when your cigar-chomping master strategist, insane former military pilot and talented driver come together, and when you're given the power to choose how to use each of them. These heists are set-piece missions where you pick an approach and perform set-up tasks in the open world before setting out on the job itself. In the best of them, which occur later in the campaign, it really does evoke the satisfaction of having a plan come together. Perhaps you position Trevor on the high-ground with a rocket launcher, Michael on foot with a stealth approach, and Franklin in an armoured ram-raider. With a button press you can flick between the three, dynamically orchestrating a crime caper on your own terms.
It is also in these moments that Rockstar's most ambitious storytelling takes place. Your choice of character, crew, and even certain in-game actions have subtle effects on the dialogue. In an early heist, a crewmember dropped part of the score but, as Franklin, I was able to retrieve it—a side-objective that I'd set for myself but that was subsequently reflected in a later conversation between him and Michael. This is another example of Rockstar's extraordinary attention to detail, and if the rest of the campaign respected your agency in this way it might overcome its weaker moments.
As it is this is a very long game with a lot of filler. There's much driving from A to B, a lot of conversations in cars, a lot of gunfights with hordes of goons who show up just to run into your gunsights over and over. It's far richer in set-piece moments than its predecessor—drug trips, aerial heists, dramatic chases—and many of these look incredible even if they're light on actual interaction. In the best examples, you soak in the atmosphere and happily ignore the fact that you're only really being asked to follow the on-screen instructions. In the worst examples—insta-fail stealth sequences, sniper missions and so on—it's harder to ignore the shackles that are placed on the player in order to preserve the game's cinematic look and feel.
I spent a lot of my time with the campaign frustrated along these lines, bored of the same mission templates that I've been playing through since GTA III and making the most of the scant opportunities to play my own way, like Franklin's refreshingly open assassination missions. Then, inevitably, I'd be doing one of those rote activities—a heavily scripted freeway chase, perhaps—when the magic of that extraordinary world would creep up on me again. It'd hit me: I'm doing 150 km/h along the Pacific Coast Highway at sunset. The rock station is playing 30 Days In The Hole by Humble Pie. It feels incredible, a collision of pop-culture, atmosphere, music and play that is unique to GTA.
Performance and settings
Reviewed on Intel i5 760, 8Gb RAM, 4Gb GPU Graphics options DirectX version, screen type (including fullscreen windowed), VSync, camera settings for first person, third person and vehicles, population density and variety, distance scaling, texture quality, shader quality, shadow quality, reflection quality, water, particles and grass quality, post FX, motion blur, depth of field, anisotropic filtering, ambient occlusion, tessellation. Anti-aliasing FXAA, MSAA, NVidia TXAA, Reflection MSAA Remappable controls Yes Gamepad support Yes
Grand Theft Auto 5 ran at 50-60 fps on a midrange rig with most settings on normal or high. On a slightly better system, running a GTX 970, a mixture of very high and ultra settings could be used without framerate loss. I encountered a fair number of texture errors in multiplayer, however, and many players have reported frequent crashes.
Here, then, is the kicker: that forty-plus hour campaign with all of its flaws amounts to an optional fraction of the vast overall package. Step off the main trail and you'll find fully-functional golf, tennis, races—even a stock market. You'll find cinemas showing funny short films and fully-programmed TV stations. You'll find armoured trucks to rob, secrets to find, muggers to help or hinder, cults to encounter, vehicles to customise and collect. This is what it looks like when one of gaming's most profitable enterprises reinvests that profit into the game itself. Rockstar have, quite literally, gone above and beyond the Call of Duty.
The amount of work invested into the first-person mode is further evidence of this. It's not just a novelty alternative: GTA 5 is a fully-playable FPS, complete with detailed animations for everything from gunplay to getting out your phone. It achieves a similar sense of physical presence to Alien: Isolation, but in a vast open world. Steal an open-top car and go for a cruise in first person, steal a plane, or just go for a walk at night in the rain: there has never been an open-world game that offers this great a variety of atmospheric experiences at this level of detail. Hell, few games of any type have managed it. The only downside is that it's much more difficult to play, and that falling off a bike is so well-realised that it feels like really falling off a bike—people who get motion-sick in first person may suffer.
Did I mention that GTA 5 was also a cinematography tool? Unique to the PC version, Director Mode allows you to explore the open world as any character you want, in whatever circumstances you want, and then record, cut and remix those experiences into short films using a deep and accessible toolkit. As crude and exclusionary as the out-of-the-box campaign can be, the option to take this world and make something else out of it is always there, available whether you're knee-deep in the narrative or cruising south Los Santos with a dozen friends.
Right, yeah: GTA 5 is also an ambitious online game, a sandbox for deathmatch, racing and inventive co-op with MMO-lite progression features set in a world that is an order of magnitude more detailed than any of its contemporaries. The traditional multiplayer options alone amount to a feature-complete additional game. You can build your own tracks for races or use one of Rockstar's own, and configure your lobbies to account for different times of day, vehicle sets, weapon options—even radio stations. I've raced sportscars through the financial district, jetplanes through a windfarm, bicycles down through the hills below the Vinewood sign. There's also an attack-and-defend siege mode, regular deathmatch, and a hide-and-seek scenario that pits on-foot fugitives against hunters with sawn-off shotguns on motorcycles.
Freeroam is the glue that binds these various experiences together, offering GTA 5's full open world (albeit with a reduced pedestrian count) for up to 32 players. You can rob stores together, murder each other, set bounties on each other, even pay to send mercenaries after one another when you reach the right level. Your progression is expressed through your expanding selection of customisable weapons, the vehicles you claim and make your own, the apartments you buy where your friends can hang out to drink your booze and watch your TV. As elsewhere, it's the details that make it: on the TV, for example, you can watch police chases live. These aren't pre-recorded shows—you're watching footage of actual players, actually on the run, presented from the point of view of a news chopper complete with Fox News-parodying ticker.
These strengths culminate in heists, multi-part co-op missions similar in structure to their singleplayer counterparts. I've always loved asymmetric co-op, particularly the way that interdependency within a team creates moments where you get to shine both as individuals and as a unit. Heists are fantastic for this. I've had missions where my only job was to wait in a helicopter to pick up the ground team, but it feels amazing: I'm nervous for them, focused on what I'm doing, waiting for that one moment where I bring her in low and sweep them away with the score—a payout that feels earned in a way that videogame rewards rarely do.
Two major caveats hold me back from saying that GTA Online is good enough to justify your purchase on its own: co-op is rubbish with strangers and it's littered with bugs and connection issues. Reviewing the game on a midrange rig, the singleplayer mode was relatively stable. Online, I've had the world load without textures, crash outright, and every variant on lag, matchmaking bugs and disconnections. I understand that it's nowhere near as bad as it was when it launched on console, but it could be much better.
GTA 5 as a whole survives these problems because it is such a reliable generator of moments that transcend the script, the bugs, and its sometimes-galling linearity. This is particularly true of multiplayer, where the presence of other people injects energy and meaning into the open world. I've got as many examples of this as I have had play sessions, but here's one: having spent a chunk of my ill-gotten heist cash on a high-speed motorcycle, I break into the airport to see if I can reach top speed on those wide, flat runways. It's rainy and overcast, the rest of Los Santos lost in thick fog. I reach the chainlink fence at the edge of the tarmac and turn, and there, right in front of me, is an eminently-stealable private plane.
I hop in and take off with no greater plan than 'get into some trouble'. Ahead, on the map, I can see another player in a helicopter. I give chase, which takes us across the map and into the wilds of Mount Chiliad. Then, from a gully on the mountainside, a tracking rocket explodes upwards and blasts the helicopter and its pilot out of the air. There's another group of players up there, making their own fun, taking pot-shots at anyone unlucky enough to wander past. I buzz them, close, dipping down into the gully and over a ridge to avoid missile lock. On my second pass, they hit me. Smoke and flame pours from my engine and the prop slowly dies. I lower the landing gear, point my nose down the mountain, and attempt to glide her down to the freeway. It works. I feel no small amount of pride as I touch down in heavy traffic. Slipping from the cockpit, I cast about for something to do next. Then I am hit by a truck and die.
This isn't something I can repeat and it relies in no way on cinematic motion capture or cynical dialogue. It's an experience that stands alone, happily gamey, a moment immune to the cultural critique you might apply elsewhere. Moments like this are what push Grand Theft Auto 5 over the threshold from 'impressive' and into 'essential'. Like the city it both loves and hates, there are rough parts of town and people who will piss you off—but there's also the beach, the country, the skyline, the way the lights of the city play off the surface of the road in the rain. It's these ever present things that remind you why so many people might choose to spend so much time in this place. Rockstar did not need to build something this absurdly complex, this quixotic in its attention to detail, but I am glad that they did.
It may be the sixth proper game in the series, but Hitman (2016) is likely being held to the standards of just one of its predecessors. Hitman: Blood Money has become a cult hit since its release in 2006, its methodical and creative assassination gameplay serving as a benchmark for a different take on the stealth action genre. Blood Money refined developer Io Interactive's sandbox sensibilities into something both approachable and sophisticated, honing the ideals of experimentation and improvisation that the series had been building until then. While 2012 saw a follow-up in Hitman Absolution, Io's turn toward a more cinematic, action-driven bent for series protagonist Agent 47 alienated fans who wanted more of Blood Money's puzzle boxes.
From a design perspective, this new Hitman feels like a response to those fans, and their desire for a more perfectly realized system to experiment with their more murderous, Rube Goldberg-ian impulses. But for reasons best speculated on elsewhere, Io Interactive is once again adding a new, impossible-to-ignore variable to the equation: Hitman isn't releasing all in one piece. Instead, the game has been separated into "episodes" scheduled to be released throughout 2016, each one a proper chapter as would be expected in previous Hitman titles. This review will follow the series as it develops, with updates as each chapter arrives detailing the current state of the game.
Episode One — March, 2016
Hitman's first episode is a promising start for the game. It opens prior to the events of its predecessors, as Agent 47 is inducted into the clandestine International Contract Agency, or ICA, and meets his handler and confidante throughout the series, Diana. The ICA immediately subjects 47 to a battery of training scenarios to ascertain his field competency in completing assassination assignments, an opportunity Io smartly uses to serve as Hitman's tutorial.
Io has always struggled introducing its systems to new players. While many games take place in an open area, allowing players to screw around without issue, Hitman has numerous overlapping systems that allow for improvisation and creative play that depend almost entirely on the reaction of NPCs to make magic happen. With so many opportunities, it's vital that players understand exactly what 47 can do, and how the world will react to his actions, and in that respect, Hitman does particularly well.
Of course, with the game's defaults enabled, this can feel like overzealous babysitting. Hitman allows you to disable almost any UI element and information supplement you prefer, even walking through each type in the tutorial and giving an option to disable them. But without tweaking those settings, Hitman feels a little aggressive in telling players about the different options available to them. The in-game UI taps them on the shoulder with important bits of information and providing waypoints on the screen leading to vital mission intel and targets often before the game has even established what they're for.
What they're for, ultimately, is killing. Hitman is a game with a narrow focus: Kill your targets. The goal is simple, but the complex world that exists around that target is Hitman's appeal. In that respect, this new game so far seems poised to top Blood Money or any other game in the series for that matter. The game's prologue missions feel on par with previous games in the series regarding size and scope, but Paris, the first chapter, feels bigger than almost any previous level in the series, with what seemed like more than half a dozen possible ways to complete its objectives.
Exploring this episode —€” a fashion show in Paris complete with a runway you can experience firsthand —€” felt like the realization of Blood Money's often clumsy attempts to build a world on hardware that wasn't truly capable of it. Wandering with deadly purpose through hundreds of partygoers inside a massive mansion, Hitman has moments of true disassociation from the obvious systems that dominate most stealth games. It feels organic.
This organic sensibility does add a new layer of complication to the series. You can tamper with objects and sabotage various bits of equipment and machines, but you'll often need tools found around the world to do so. Where a crowbar or wrench may have been a level-specific prop in previous games good only for mayhem, here, they're necessary to complete certain tasks. I felt forced to make use of the environment much more, and this was a good thing.
This is important, as Hitman has an involved challenge system practically daring you to try every possible strategy and dig through every level as thoroughly as possible. The breadth of stuff in the prologue and first chapter are in keeping with series tradition, but something feels forced about how heavy-handed Hitman is about the things you should do and see.
I can't help but feel this is in place to make what Hitman is bringing to market feel more full than it actually is. I felt a bizarre disconnect finishing the first chapter of the game knowing there wouldn't be another episode for ... I'm not sure how long, actually. Io is trying to push a cliffhanger-laden story with the game that sets each episode up as part of a vast global conspiracy, but right now, Hitman doesn't feel episodic —€” it just feels unfinished.
This isn't just due to an unceremonious end once you complete the Paris mission. There are numerous rough spots in Hitman's presentation, including a "Russian" general who switches accents intermittently and some quest triggers that didn't work in the review build I played. Other than the aforementioned accent, everyone in the game is speaking English, regardless of setting. More damning, menus in Hitman are very sluggish — pausing the game to save, load or do anything else can often take 30 seconds or more.
And, finally, and maybe most obviously, Hitman is a strange, difficult to qualify value proposition right now. You can get just the prologue and first episode for $15, with a $50 fee to upgrade to the full "season," and, like other episodic games, you can go episode to episode if you want to. But with a game that very much feels like a AAA game cut into pieces, this all seems a little surreal.
Luckily for Io, and, well, for me as a fan of the series, what it has finished is a very promising start. Even discounting the next episode, the return of Contracts mode, which allows players to create their own custom assignments for other players to attempt, signals that players will have a fair amount to do. And the Elusive targets Io plans to introduce to the game over time could be an exciting experiment in "event" programming, if all goes well —” and we'll update this review once the first Elusive contract goes live. In the meantime, there's enough in Hitman now to suggest Io might be making the game that Blood Money hinted could be possible. And the hard part now is waiting to see if Io can make good on that.
Episode two — April, 2016
With the first new chapter added to Io's new Hitman after the game's launch, it's becoming clearer where the game's strength's lie — and where old annoyances remain.
Sapiens is evocative of some of the Hitman series' more classic, "big" levels, especially Hitman 2's Bazaar and a plethora of scenarios in Hitman Blood Money. It avoids the massive crowds of Paris for surface area, and while it's not better than Paris, exactly, it is different enough. I felt a greater sense of discovery, though for whatever reason, Sapienza feels more miserly with its secrets. It was only on my second play through that a number of possible solutions to Hitman's murder puzzles presented themselves, and I'm glad I did — the game was much more fun after some additional experimentation.
I'm not sure how much of this opacity was due to online issues I suffered while trying to play the game. Io's insistence on making online games and offline games separate means any run through a level when not connected to the internet isn't scored in any way, shape or form — no contract rating, no points, nothing. If the game disconnects, progress in a game started online is unavailable.
This is annoying.
More annoying is Hitman's tendency to overshare with some information while withholding other, score-critical moments. For example, I silently eliminated both of my targets and destroyed their assassin virus without being seen or heard, leaving no trace, but somewhere along the way, a non-target died, and I had no idea until I finished the level and was severely penalized. Reloading a mid-level save seems pointless, considering I have no idea when or where the person in question died.
Hitman has always had some variation of this problem, but previous games were much, much smaller, with what felt like less waiting for targets to wander huge spaces to arrive at specific points at specific times. It was easier in Hitman Blood Money to fail quickly and restart a mission — a successful run would take minutes. in Hitman (2016), it's becoming clearer that missions are just going to take a lot longer. With that in mind, a small, unnoticed, unmarked mistake is a much bigger annoyance, and a lot more wasted time.
Otherwise, many of the issues present at release continue. There's a slight messiness to presentation, and the universal presence of English no matter where the game takes place is distracting. Load times are much faster and saving a game is no longer the huge time commitment it was at launch, though menus still take far more time than they should.
As it stands, however, these things aren't deal breakers. Hitman may be showing the growing pains of a game learning to tailor its feedback to a much bigger playspace than the series has seen before. As it stands, that growth is leading to a game that feels just a little more at home with each episode
How amazing that a turn-based game can feel so urgent. In invisible, Inc., I have as much time as I need to position my agents just so, but I’m always paying attention to the security level at the top right of my screen. That meter tells you when security will be heightened during your heist, and it’s a vital part of what makes this stealth game worth the gray hairs it causes.
It’s tense and challenging, yes, but Invisible Inc. is also simple, elegant, and always logical. It introduces new concepts in a slow drip, giving you plenty of time to work out the details. The titular spy agency is violently infiltrated, initiating a time-sensitive series of global heists and sneakabouts, each of which you control from an isometric perspective in the style of strategy games like XCOM. You begin with a duo but steadily add imprisoned agents to your roster as you spring them from holding cells. Ultimately, you take up to four agents on missions, which typically involve obtaining sensitive data from a terminal, grabbing ill-gotten credits, and hightailing it out of there.
Who needs trophies, when stealthy success serves as its own reward?
Of course, it’s rarely that simple. There is the draw of credits, for one, which you spend on leveling up your agents’ skills as well as on gadgets like weapons (both ranged and melee), augments (implants that offer passive bonuses), and other useful objects. Ranged weapons don’t come with unlimited ammo--they must be recharged with a one-use charger when they go empty--and agents you rescue don’t have weaponry on them. Other mechanics further complicate your economic considerations; needless to say, credits are highly valuable, and while you could engage in a straightforward infiltration, safes and terminals lure you from one room to the next. They have gravity, and escaping it requires superhuman resolve.
But that pesky security meter is always climbing. When it arrives at the next level, security cameras that you hacked into might reset, or additional guards may be deployed. With every agent action, you must weigh a number of possible consequences, each of which is informed by multiple factors. You order Agent Prism next to a door and peek through it to reveal a patrolling guard. If she were closer, you could predict the guard’s route for the next turn, but that’s just not working out. Do you open the door and risk alerting the guard so you can set up an ambush? And what about that security camera in there? Do you activate Agent Decker’s stealth rig and send him in knowing that the rig has a six-turn cooldown, or do you use your portable AI program Incognita to hack the security camera but use up all of your power resource in the process? You need power to fire your weapons and hack terminals, so this isn’t a decision to take lightly.
The game lets you adjust all sorts of variables before beginning a new campaign. Here's a time attack variant.
Easier difficulty levels give you a limited number of chances to rewind a turn if you don’t care for the outcome, and the easiest difficulty also lets you restart a mission if it goes awry, albeit with a new procedurally-generated layout. Losing progress with a rewind or a restart feels like its own kind of failure, and this negative reinforcement ensures that even easy mode can be stressful, even when you know you can call backsies.
Should you lose any agents, they’re gone from the current campaign for good, unless you revive them with medigel. This requires not only having the healing kit on hand, but maneuvering another agent into a potentially disastrous situation. Brilliantly, however, your downed agent may be taken alive by the mysterious enemy organization, which leads to a jailbreak mission. The captured agent may represent an acceptable loss: you have a limited number of in-game hours before the final mission is initiated. Feel free to let Agent Decker languish in his cell; you’ve got to think about the greater good (if money and revenge can be considered the greater good, anyway.)
You might be more inclined to rescue a captured agent--or to mourn her if she bleeds out during the heist--if you’ve developed a connection with her. Unit perma-death is another mechanic that invites comparisons between Invisible, Inc. and XCOM, but I was never attached to any given agent. There’s a little flavor dialogue between agents here and there, but it’s too brief and sporadic to engender any emotional response.
Central is married to her work.
The cool-future visuals and angular character designs are decisively slick, but the vaults and offices you infiltrate look more or less the same as you progress. You know you’re in Australia or Brazil, but there’s no audiovisual hook to remind you of the international stakes. Strolling guards always mutter the same handful of bland responses when alerted, and the tilesets don’t evoke the locale. In Invisible, Inc., I regretted losing agents not because I mourned the loss of a comrade I’d trained and groomed, but because I’d lost a flesh-and-bones tool from my toolbox.
Nonetheless, this emotional distance is merely a minor issue. I don’t care much about Invisible Inc.'s throwaway story and its last-minute grasps at meaningful themes, or about my agents’ personal backgrounds. Like the game, my efforts are focused on getting the job done, emotionally disengaged but intellectually centered. I bask in the stylish cutscenes and the sharp voiceover, but my attachment is not to the agency or its people but to the sheer pleasure of a successful heist.
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