Goondu review: first few hours with Grand Theft Auto V

This morning, the first thing that struck me after waking up from a night-long jaunt in Los Santos was how tired I was.

About a decade ago, I was roaming the fair Vice City in one of the most popular Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series. Today, I find myself barely scratching the surface, after finding my way around GTA V and its city during the first weekend after its launch.

Part of the reason is the sheer scale of things. If GTA IV’s Liberty City and its predecessor GTA Vice City seemed big and open, the world in GTA V is massive by comparison.

If you’re bored with a mission, you can go play a round of golf, watch a movie or take a selfie with your smartphone’s Snapmatic app. That’s when you’re not terrorising innocent bystanders or flying a plane for kicks.

In the first hour of playing, I had killed more than 30-plus people (mostly “vehicular, the stats say) and got 30-plus wanted-by-police stars. I also provoked several street brawls. Fun stuff, just like before.

In GTA V, Los Santos is Rockstar Games’ replica of Los Angeles, and it’s complete with your usual too-rich-to-care neighbourhoods and run-down ghettos. Each has its own interesting inhabitants, and each is free to explore from start.

That’s one big difference from previous games. While you had to unlock certain areas of a map previously, now you can just drive around and explore. Once you’ve been there before, the area shows up on the map, so it’s easier to plan routes.

This also means you have the skills to do a lot of cool stuff without having to pass several missions. For example, you can fly a plane or commandeer a tank if you wish, pretty early on in the game.

You might need to avoid the police while you’re doing so, since you won’t have much money to buy powerful weapons yet, but you can fly a plane and drive a tank without having to go through several missions to “unlock” these fun things.

That doesn’t mean the game is easier now though. Police are harder to shrug off, it seems. You can’t just get out of a car when they lose sight of you to make a wanted star disappear, for example. And when you get three wanted stars, the police chopper comes along to fire down on you pretty quickly.

Still, the biggest change is the characters involved. You get to play one of three characters – retired gangster Michael, who has a dysfunctional family, boy in the ‘hood Franklin and former robber and perennial redneck Trevor.

All three have great back stories and of course, are caricatures to satirise, GTA-style. So massive is the game that after several hours playing, I’ve only started getting to know the Trevor character, before the three go off in missions together.

In some, you can switch between the characters involved. For example, during a bid to shake off pursuing enemies on the road, you can freely choose to drive (Michael) or shoot back (Franklin).

Each character has his own strengths, so you may want to decide who takes on what role in a mission. Michael, for example, can slow down time in a fire fight, and his flying skills are better than his counterparts.

The action sounds rather fun, but you have to be pretty adept at the Xbox or Playstation controller, which I’m not. For the Xbox version, which I’m playing, switching between characters means holding a button and selecting the character with another. It just feels a little awkward during an intense mission.

The other thing you’ll find changed in GTA V is the combat system. No longer are your targets “hard locked” when you aim. That’s a good and bad thing.

Good, because you won’t have to switch between targets when you accidentally target the wrong person; bad, because it takes time to aim now. Time for me to improve my Xbox controller skills even though I’ve mostly played my games on the PC all these years.

All in, I’ve been very impressed with GTA V so far. The city is so big yet looks seamless to travel through. Okay, you have install about 8GB of files when you pop in the disc the first time but it’s fascinating how Rockstar has managed to squeeze more out of console hardware that’s several years old.

The graphics are acceptable as well. In fact, they are pretty good for a console that’s going to be replaced in a few months by a new version. You can now clearly see people giving you the finger when you hit their cars on the road.

What I’m a little unsure of is how big a jump GTA V is over its predecessors, in terms of the overall experience. As a single-player game – the multi-player GTA Online world opens on October 1 – GTA V is bigger, has more things to fiddle with and is no less fun than before.

Yet, I feel a certain sense of deja vu in some early missions. The usual chase-after-a-bad-guy-on-a-bike ones will feel a little old for folks who have played through the same in the past.

But maybe I haven’t even scratched the surface yet. More complex missions are to come, with more places to visit and more cars to hijack. I should still expect to enjoy the wanton mayhem in Los Santos in the days to come.