Intro :
Most of the experienced gamers will remember the good old GTA games that were already available years ago. The top-down view of a city with one little dot with hair to represent your character. Even then the games were extremely playable, especially due to the mission-system the games used. Well, be assured that GTA3 is exactly the game you would expect it to be! It has the same adrenaline pumping excitement but expands on this by making your entire surroundings 3d, and not just normal 3d, no.. Very nice 3d!

Playability:
As I already said, gta3 has all the same style missions you were used to from the previous two games: hitman-missions, stealing certain vehicles, protecting people, etc. The cool thing is that now you won't just have to keep your eye on the road, but also watch out for lowerings of the ceiling and other things like that. Another new aspect of gta3 is the ability to fly a plane (very hard!!) and to go cruising in boats!!

Also, the police in this version seem a lot smarter, especially the FBI! If you are a true badass you will soon find helicopters and tanks following you. But, with the help of the good ol' bazuka you can take care of them no problem.. Until they kill you, because no one gets away from the cops in this game. At least not once you get more than 3 badges lit. (Remember the badges from the first 2 games? They show you how "wanted" you really are.)

Controls:
You will have probably played gta3 on a ps2 before so let me explain to you that the controls for the pc are a lot different. For starters, you can now use the mouse to aim, and there's no auto-aim to help you (or mess you up). Of course there's also an option to keep the original ps2 controls on, which is especially handy if you happen to have a controller which you want to use.

Graphics & Sound
Oh boy, if you are used to the ps2 version of this game you will be in for a real surprise. The pc version looks so much better it should have made the news. The lighting effects the makers have used are simply ground breaking. I was seriously shocked the first time I drove through mist in the dark with traffic lights changing colors, you'd almost say you were running the game in more than 32bit color hehehe.

Then there's the motion-blur they used.. Yes, you read correctly, motion-blurrr!! This is the FIRST game I've seen which uses this, and it makes the game look just that little bit better. It is especially cool in the cut-scenes!

Now about the quality of the textures. The main characters of the game are very high detail and look great. Cars themselves don't look all that nice at first, but once you see how the engine handles reflections you will realise this game is very advanced, even when compared to other modern games which weren't ported from some other system.

Of course I shouldn't forget the audio. You only hear music when you are driving a car and select a certain radio station. The game has several so you won't get bored with the music too quickly, especially since they included mp3 support! All you need to do to play mp3's in the game is copy them to the /mp3 directory and select the mp3 radiostation.. Now you can enjoy your own music without running winamp or some other player which slows down your system in the background, excellent!

Hardware Requirements:
GTA3 is a little buggy, so it runs better on one system than the other, which makes it a little hard to determine the minimum specs. I run it on a 700mhz with 256mb ddr and a geforce2mx400 64mb card, and it seems to run pretty decent at 800*600*32. However, I've heard a lot of people with top-of-the-line systems complaining it didn't run good at all, so it really depends on the quality of your hardware as well I guess. Patches are being released of course, but if you have a slower computer than mine (videocard is most important of course) and don't have A-quality hardware I would be a little cautious buying this game. It would be better if you can get your hands on a demo to test it first for a few hours.

Let Downs:
There is NO MULTIPLAYER!! I can't believe they decided to cut it out at the very last moment... It would have been soooo cool! So, if you were primarely waiting to buy the pc version because it would have probably had multiplayer you can forget about this version. This is probably something they will come out with in GTA4 (when/if they make one) since GTA3 was rushed a bit. Don't forget the pc version was released over a year after the ps2 version.

GORE:
Yes this game has gore.. wonderful gore.. Well, there's not so much gore if you only use small weapons, but once you break out the big momma's you get later on in the game be prepared to watch limbs fly, and that's exactly what I mean! Grenades in a group of people seems to really blow people to pieces the way you would expect, very impressive dismemberment.

PARENTS SHOULD BE WARNED: THIS GAME CONTAINS QUITE A BIT OF GORE!!

Conclusion:
A great game, one of the 3 games I have ever finished, and I own over 40 games.

This is comparitive to the excitement I felt while playing Max Payne, the greatest game ever made in my opinion.

Recommended: Yes