Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

"Rockstar Games has created yet another masterpiece."

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the fifth game (not counting the London, 1969 expansion for the original) in the highly popular and successful Grand Theft Auto series, created by Rockstar Games. The original 3-D GTA (the first two and the expansion were played from a top-down 2-D/3-D perspective), Grand Theft Auto III, was the game that put the series and Rockstar on the map, becoming one of the highest selling games ever released for the PlayStation 2. It was the first game that ever allowed people to live the life of a ruthless criminal with ties to the Mafia, the Yakuza, and other gang organizations in a real, live, breathing, and moving 3-D world loosely based off of New York called Liberty City. There was a huge amount of liberty and freedom in the game, letting you do nearly anything your mind could imagine. The game was such a hit that it won the Game of the Year award at the 2002 Game Developers Choice Awards.

It was only expected that there would be a follow-up made to the game, and Rockstar did just that in October 2002. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the prequel/sequel to III, sent you to Vice City (a city based off of Miami) as a man named Tommy Vercetti who had just been released from jail and gets caught up in a drug deal gone wrong. The game, as with its predecessor, was a huge hit and generated millions of dollars for Rockstar Games, but there were a few people that were disappointed with the game. It was, by no means at all, a bad game, but when compared to Grand Theft Auto III, which completely re-invented the series and brought fresh, new amazing gameplay and really made a huge effect on how future game would be made, Vice City was kind of a let down. There were many new things added in the game, such as the ability to buy residential and commercial properties and the ability to ride motorcycles and fly airplanes and helicopters, but there was nothing that really altered the gameplay between the two. When it was announced that Rockstar planned to release another Grand Theft Auto game, people were unsure if the game would be the exact same thing as III and Vice City. Well, two years later, in October 2004, after months of hype and anticipation, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released. Rockstar Games did not disappoint.

San Andreas is by far one of the best games ever released. Not one of the best Grand Theft Autos, but one of the best games period. Rockstar Games realized that they had to make the gameplay substantially different from the previous two games if they wanted to make another huge dent on the gaming industry and they did. It's not a complete re-invention of the series, like III, but it's a huge facelift.

You play as Carl "CJ" Johnson, who returns to San Andreas for his mother's funeral after fleeing to Liberty City five years ago when his brother was murdered. Two crooked cops, Frank Tenpenny (voiced by none other than THE Samuel L. Jackson) and Eddie Pulaski kidnap Carl soon after his return and frame his murder, throwing him back into the gang world of Los Santos, San Andreas that he fled the state to get away from.

Carl meets up with his brother, Sweet, his sister, Kendl, and their friend, Ryder, at the funeral. After being chased by a group of people part of the enemy gang the Ballas (one of the many enemies of Orange Grove Families, Sweet and Ryder's gang), Sweet convinces Carl to re-join Orange Grove Families to help clean up their neighborhood, which has been steadily declining into a slum and take over Los enemy gang turf. The story will take you all around the state of San Andreas, and as a result of that, you will meet and work for many interesting people, but you will eventually end up back in Los Santos to help rid the city of its corrupt police force.

If you've ever played any Grand Theft Auto before San Andreas, you'll instantly notice some of the many changes and additions Rockstar has made for the game. You can now ride bicycles - in fact, the very first vehicle you ride on WILL be a bicycle. There are many new cars available, and the collection of motorcycles and planes has been expanded greatly. When you first start out, you will be limited to some of the crappier vehicles, but as you progress, you will gain access to new locations, and with those new locations comes newer and better vehicles.

The gameplay has been enhanced and altered greatly. Your character's health is no longer measured in numerical units - you now have a health and armor bar that is depleted as you are harmed. Some would argue that this is one the worst changes in the game, as you cannot survive nearly anywhere as long you could've in the previous games, but that's up to debate. Besides, that's not too much of a problem now that you can eat food. Yes, that's right - you can now go into fast-food restaurants and order a meal. In fact, eating is pretty much a requirement, as if you keep Carl going without food for a very long time, you will start to lose some health. Make sure you don't eat too much, as eating affects your physical appearance. The more you eat, the fatter your Carl becomes, which, in turn, causes Carl to run slower and can ever cause a fatal heart attack.

You also have a number of other stats for your character, including muscle strength, sex appeal, and respect. These stats fluctuate based on how you play the game. Killing any fellow gang members will cause you to lose respect, making it harder for you to recruit more members for your gang, while murdering a cop or an enemy gang member will gain you respect. The higher your respect level, the more people you can recruit. Your muscle strength goes up as you exercise, which is made possible with the addition of gyms. You can choose from a wide variety of exercises, such as riding an exercise bike or lifting weights.

One of the other changes you'll notice as soon as you start playing the game is the difference in the map size between Vice City and San Andreas. Vice City and III followed a city-based system, meaning each city had their own special districts that were combined together to make a city. San Andreas follows that same pattern, except this time, three cities are combined to make one large state. You will notice exactly how small Vice City is compared to San Andreas when you look at the size of the paper map that comes with the game. A few months prior to the release of the game, one of the developers stated that the city of Los Santos was about one-half or two times the size of all of Vice City. Los Santos is less than 1/3 (~30%) of San Andreas. This means that about five or six Vice Cities could fit into San Andreas. That should give you a pretty good idea of exactly how massive San Andreas is. If you ever go back to III or Vice City after exploring all of San Andreas, you will feel very restricted in those cities as those maps will feel very minuscule when compared to San Andreas.

There are three main cities and each of the cities has a less populated suburban area. Rockstar has done a great job at making each city look like a striking resemblance to the city it is based off of. Los Santos Rockstar's Los Angeles 1992, is a mix of upscale, extravagant neighborhoods (Vinewood, Rockstar's take on Hollywood) and hard, gang-infested areas such as Ganton (based off of Compton) and East Los Santos. Los Angeles' famous beaches, Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach, are represented by Verona Beach and Santa Maria Beach, complete with the amusement park. The famous Watts Towers are emulated in East Los Santos, and you can see a re-invisioning of the Los Angeles International Airport, south of the Hispanic-dominated neighborhood of El Corona. The northern area of Los Santos, out of the city limits, consists of miles of countryside, littered with towns and farms every few miles. This is where you'll find the smaller towns, such as Blueberry and Montgomery, and the more rural vehicles, like pick-up trucks.

Travel west from Los Santos and you enter the southern San Fierro countryside, home to the highest mountains and hills in the game, including the great Mount Chilliad. Navigate through the highways here and you'll lead yourself to the city area of San Fierro, an impression of San Francisco. The famous Haight-Ashbury district is known as the neighborhood of Hashbury (Rockstar's got a sense of humor :P). You'll also find the three most famous bridges in all of San Andreas here: the Kincaid Bridge (inspired by Scotland's Forth Rail Bridge), the Garver Bridge (inspired by the Forth Road Bridge, also in Scotland), and of course, the Gant Bridge, San Fierro's Golden Gate Bridge.

Travel northwards on the Gant Bridge and you'll end up in the Las Venturas desert. You can find the Sherman Dam, Las Venturas' Hoover Dam, and the Abandoned Airfield here. Take the highways east and you'll find yourself in beautiful, bright, neon-lit Las Venturas, the final city which is a perfect imitation of Las Vegas, complete with casinos and hotels. The cities are all inter-connected by highways and bridges, so traveling from city to city doesn't take more than five minutes.

You now have a huge selection of customization options. You can change pretty much anything you could ever dream about changing for your character, to make them look more like the way you'd want them to look. You can alter CJ's hairstyle by going to a barber, giving him cornrows, a high-top fade, an afro, or even pink hair. You can change how CJ looks by going to any of the many clothing stores that are located in San Andreas. Each of the stores have their own unique clothing style, so you can mix-and-match to make a very different CJ. Rockstar really wanted to give players a lot of control over their character this time and they did a great job at doing that.

You no longer have to be a lonely criminal - you can now have a girlfriend in the game. There are six different girlfriends to choose from, and you can have as many (or as little) as you want at any given time. Each girlfriend has her own likes and dislikes. Some of the girlfriends like chubby men, others like 'em well-dressed. Some of the girls love eating at fast-food restaurants, others will be insulted if you even think about taking them to one. The point is that if you are planning on dating every single girl, you will have to find out what they are attracted to, as one girl will hate something about you that another girl absolutely adores.

One of the main attractions of the Grand Theft Auto series has always been how much liberty you get when playing the games. You progress through the game by completing missions for various bosses, specific tasks and objectives that can be anything from going to a house party to stealing a combine harvester from a farm filled with blood-thirsty rednecks to breaking into a secret government facility to retrieve an experiment. Unlike most other games, in which you are immediately thrown into completing another objective after finishing one, San Andreas allows you to complete the game at your own pace. You can do five missions in a row and then go take a break and explore the city for a little while before taking on another mission. The game does a perfect job at letting you do whatever you want at your discretion.

One of the things that makes San Andreas such a great and appealing game is the fact that there is a wide variety of tasks available that will help you make a little extra money. This game has something to appeal to every gamer, from the action junkie to the racing fanatic. Many of the GTA series mainstay side missions, such as "Vigilante" (in which you chase criminals around San Andreas and attempt to bring them to justice - meaning killing them in any way possible) and "Firefighter" (in which you help the citizens of San Andreas out by extinguishing fires before they are killed) return, along with many new jobs, such as driving cargo around as a trucker or conductor of a train. Of course, why do any of that that when you can participate in some very fun and exciting street races? Or maybe you're more into biking. Well, then you can take part in a bike race down Mount Chilliad, the highest structure in all of San Andreas. Be careful not to fall to your death!

Something I found very interesting and useful was the addition of schools in San Andreas. You can now take courses in various schools that are scattered all around San Andreas to help hone your skills in driving, riding a motorcyle, boating, and flying. You get a grade at the end of each course, and depending on how high you score, you either get a bronze, silver, or gold in that class. I recommend completing all of the schools as you will be rewarded by receiving some of the rarest vehicles in the game.

Rockstar really wanted to immerse you in the game, so they started adding little extras to make the game seem a bit more lifelike. If you've played any previous GTAs, you'll know that the cops seemed to only go after you; whenever you committed a crime, the cops would try to kill you, but if anyone else did the same exact thing, the cops would look the other way and pretend nothing happened. Well, that's no longer true in San Andreas. You will witness cops chasing after bad guys that aren't you, either on foot or by vehicle. You'll see cops beating down and even shooting old ladies for accidentally bashing into their car. That's one of the things that makes San Andreas such an interesting game - you never know what's going to happen next. You can be walking down the street and all of a sudden, the sound of gunfire will explode through the air. You can be driving down the Julius Thruway South in Las Venturas when a plane crashes out of nowhere.

An added extra for this Xbox port of the game is the Replay feature, which allows you to watch the last few seconds of gameplay. It's a nice extra that I've used pretty often, but it's nothing big. There's no sound in the replay and the amount of time it records seems to be random and unpredictable. One moment, it'll record six or seven seconds; the next, only two. But it's still useful for reliving those "I can't believe that just happened" and "WTF just went on a few seconds ago?" moments that seems to be very common with the game, so I guess it's good.

Before I get started on the graphics and sounds department, let me just say this: there is no loading time when traveling between cities. In the previous GTAs, you would be greeted with a short loading screen as you traveled from island to island. This time around, you can travel from city to city without any interruptions. Now, when you consider exactly how large San Andreas is compared to Liberty City and Vice City and when you consider how much is going on as you play, not having a loading screen is quite an achievement. Now, onto the graphics.

For a game that is as huge as this one, the graphics are beautiful. They aren't Resident Evil 4 or Halo 2 quality, but they are good enough to make you go, "Wow, I can't believe they look like this." The characters move with fluid motions and everything has been designed with a gritty, early '90's West Coast style. The draw distance has been improved greatly and so have the weather effects. The frame rate is choppy when there's a lot of stuff going on at once, but that's understandable. The graphics won't be winning the game any awards, but they definitely deserve a mention.

The soundtrack is excellent and fits the mood of the story and the game perfectly. All of your favorites songs from the early '90s are there. Rockstar has included a radio station for basically every genre of music to make sure that none of the game's players would be disappointed.

You will end up playing this game for a while, especially if you are planning on getting a 100% game. The rewards you receive will more than make up for the frustration you will endure as you work towards reaching that goal, however. I'll leave those for you guys to find :D

To wrap this review up, let me just say that San Andreas is one of the greatest games ever released. I have never seen so much stuff packed into one game. There is enough material in here to satisfy any gamer for months. I recommend that every gamer, casual and hardcore, purchase this game if you have not already as you will definitely not be disappointed.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 02/13/06