Looking Back, GTA 5 Really Isn’t All That Good

After explaining why Skyrim doesn’t deserve the hype, this curmudgeon who doesn’t like your favorite game is going to slaughter another sacred cow.

I’m not going to beat around the bush. GTA 5 is, flat out, a bad game. In nearly every way.

Obviously, not everyone at GameSkinny agrees, with some feeling that GTA 5’s PC release is a 10/10 masterpiece for the ages — so don’t go off on them for my opinion, but remember that I actually draw strength and sustenance from the all-caps screaming comments.

Reality and Chaos in All the Wrong Doses

I recently had the misfortune of reviewing Gungrave VR, a game where I constantly asked myself how a developer could manage to make the wrong design choices at every possible turn.

While GTA 5 doesn’t descend to that level of awful gaming hellscape (few games have that dishonor, thankfully), there are plenty of baffling design decisions that really take you out of the universe and highlight how this highly-anticipated sequel didn’t live up to its potential.

Let’s start with the amazing landscape that is the meticulously crafted parody city of Los Santos.

It’s big; it’s beautiful; and it’s a huge disappointment. 

Both story and gameplay flops mar the location. The biggest problem is easily the lack of interaction with the environment due to the missing interiors for all those beautiful buildings everywhere.

That’s an issue constantly plaguing these huge, open-world games, but it’s particularly noticeably here. It’s a shame the modding community is always relied on to fix this issue, rather than the developers being proactive and taking care of it before release.

For all its splendor, Los Santos is full of pretty boring activities.

While there is still plenty of humor and ludicrousness, you can tell Rockstar tried to take the series in a more grounded and realistic direction with GTA 4. With the fifth installment in the series, Rockstar got concocts the wrong combination of grounded reality and ludicrous insanity.

The absurd number of systems have very few elements worth your time. We could yawn our way through loading cargo containers, going to yoga class, and following the stock market. Riveting stuff to be sure.

Those “retirement simulator” elements then collide with outlandish cartoon characters and insane scenarios that creates a very odd juxtaposition of styles. 

Calling a taxi or even walking near a police officer can initiate World War 3 for no reason, which is admittedly hilarious the first time it happens. By the 80th time, however, you reach a point where you really just want to cross to the other side of town without ambulances and tanks being involved… please.

The bizarrely aggressive police always manage to show up and ruin everything from boring escort missions to the absolute chore of collecting nuclear waste from the ocean for no reason.

Awful Control Scheme — Walking or Driving

Homicidal police force aside, the overall difficulty overall is far too easy, and the hardest part of the game is simply battling the controls. In GTA 5, it’s hard to nail down a single culprit in the bad batch control scheme because there are so many contenders.

Take the bizarre, quick U-turn mechanic, which makes it difficult to go anywhere and results in frequently entering cover at the wrong location. I seriously had flashbacks of trying to turn around or see around corners in the original Resident Evil.

Then there’s how the game re-auto centers on the chase cam every few seconds for no reason, making chases more of a chore than they need to be.

Even basic stuff like attaching the flashlight to the shotgun and then turning the flashlight on are a patience-straining exercise in battling the controls and guessing the combination of buttons you have to press. This is not an intuitive system, to say the least.

Did you spend a silly amount of money on new wardrobes for the three main characters? That’s really too bad because they will switch back to their original outfits whenever you swap between characters for no reason, just to throw in another annoying layer of things to do.

Riches to Riches, with No Rags to Appreciate

On the subject of spending too much money, starting out with a mansion is a bad choice that’s too much of a shift away from GTA’s overall style.

GTA 5 really feels like an episode of an awful house hunting show where people are rich for no apparent reason. I’m a freelance baby seal puncher, and my wife gives professional thoughts and prayers. Our budget? A cool 1.2 million for a starter home.

The in-game economy for both single-player and multiplayer is all kinds of wonky (an issue facing Red Dead Online as well), but for completely opposite reasons.

In single-player, there’s no point in doing much after the first few heists since you’ll be flush with an unbelievable amount of cash. That’s the exact opposite of the other games in the series, where you start off poor and struggle to work your way up, with constant setbacks.

Becoming the top dog kingpin in previous games, like GTA 4, is a massive struggle. There are times when you can’t afford the ammo you need for big story missions and must complete other tasks to get ready for the next objective.

Here, everything is handed to you quite early on. Your crew will be millionaires before you know it, and the random open-world stuff just isn’t worth your time.

Of course, in online mode, the problem is actually the exact opposite, with a constant agonizing grind to afford anything (or you could spend real money to get a boost, which is obnoxious).

Possibly the Worst Characters in the History of Video Games 

Another major problem of starting off with an overly privileged rich guy quickly becomes apparent… there’s no one to connect with or care about.

“I’m rich and bored and have a perfect life, so I should start doing crimes to spice things up,” isn’t really a problem many people can relate to.

Michael’s interactions with his spoiled, obnoxious kids are painful to sit through, and often had me just wanting to put the controller down and go do anything else. I don’t watch TV shows about awful rich people on purpose, so it isn’t exactly a gripping arc.

These characters are all unbelievably whiny, which quickly becomes grating. Can you imagine Niko Bellic ever behaving like Michael or putting up with Trevor’s nonsense for even a second?

Speaking of everyone’s favorite insane drug dealer — and it’s probably because I’ve lived in an apartment building with shrieking meth-heads — but I didn’t find Trevor’s shrieking meth-addicted personality at all amusing or endearing. I’m not sure there’s ever been a video game character I wanted to see die horribly more than Trevor.

Which brings us to Franklin, who doesn’t have the obnoxious family of Michael or the all-caps screaming fits of Trevor to deal with but still comes with his own reasons to hate. For me, it’s the constant string of racial slurs that make me start wondering if Quentin Tarantino is hiding in the backseat wherever we drive.

Throwing out the racial slurs a few times for shock value or to showcase the nature of a character is fine, but eventually, it hits a level where it’s just unnecessary. To be clear, I’m fully opposed to censorship of any kind and think games, movies, and literature should say or show whatever they want, but there’s still such a thing as tact to keep in mind.

It’s clear the developers were trying to make a parody of southern California life, but they took it so far that there’s no way to empathize at all with any of these characters, and you start to hate the game world, which is a very bad thing for an open-world game.

Maybe We Can Learn a Lesson Here?

Bad characters, bad controls, bad economy, bad difficulty, bad story… 

Looking at Red Dead Redemption 2 now that we’ve had time to fully digest the experience, the areas where Rockstar has improved on the formula and the areas where they keep making the same mistakes really come into focus.

With ludicrously bad decisions like Fallout 76 marring the big name, open-world gaming landscape, it’s clear we need to be holding developers like Rockstar and Bethesda more accountable when things go wrong.

Whenever GTA 6 shows up down the line, the major mistakes made here need to be studied and hopefully not repeated. There’s a perfect 10/10 game hiding somewhere in this formula, it’s just going to take a little more effort to unearth than Rockstar has been willing to put in before.

Now its time for all of you to sound off — what entry in the GTA universe do you think is the best of the series, and what would you like to see done differently with the next game?