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Written: Nov 27 '01 (Updated Nov 10 '08)
Product Rating:
Pros: Killing people... oh, and jacking vehicles.
Cons: The dialogue from the city's people kind of becomes too redundant.
The Bottom Line: Grand Theft Auto III leaves much room for hours and hours of gameplay. Parents: be aware that this game is also one of the most violent titles in existence.
ChromeKiller's Full Review: Grand Theft Auto (GTA) 3 for PlayStation 2
Genocide, mayhem, anarchy.... With these tools of destruction from within the social system of life, Rockstar Games and DMA Design are taking their creative genius and turning it inside out to show everyone what makes a dangerous thought real. It's Grand Theft Auto III, the cult classic smash from the PlayStation days, back again for the third time. It's a sequel full of everything that you've previously received; but this time, it's back for something more lifelike and entertaining than what was originally possible.
The first two titles in the series of Grand Theft Auto, while they made an abundant amount of PlayStation owners overjoyed were still violent to the core. Rockstar and DMA are taking the next step up in their design to create the ultimate (and I mean it) blood bath title. Grand Theft Auto III is even more sickening than the likes of any Resident Evil created before it. You kill, and can be killed. Bear warning: if you're someone who's not old enough to smoke a cigarette, drive a car, or even purchase a gun, you're probably going to find more than enough violence, sexual content, and foul language than you have ever heard or seen in an R rated film that's inappropriate for you.
Your story is fairly simple. You're a nobody crook, together with your gang in the copious Liberty City. Together, your team and yourself are going to rob a bank. The thing that you're not aware of, however, is that the plan isn't going to operate as smoothly as you'd expect it to. You know that so-called girlfriend of yours? She wants you out of the way with the gun that she's going to point in your direction. The good news is that the bullet won't kill you... just get you caught. With your arrest in place, an escape plan from within the criminal organization is about to make way, and free you and the truck full of criminals: one of them being 8-Ball, a bomb supplier. So, here's where the game comes into play. You're free from arrest, a badass guy with unlawful intent. What are you going to do? What anyone else would do of course - whatever you want!
Grand Theft Auto III lets you be the bad guy. It's a story about gangs, mobsters, hookers, and even the law. For whatever your sick mind tells you to do, you can do it! Are you in the mood to run over a few pedestrians? Steal a car, any car, and take them out. Are you a pickpocket? Then exterminating any random individual on the street will reveal the goods! Mind you, there actually is more plots to the game than just the regular murderous romp. The game sets you up with missions. Your suppliers are often a mob boss head figure, or the like. As progression exceeds in the game, your reputation grows. More illicit men will want to hire you then for bigger, better, and much more challenging jobs.
The most attractive part about Grand Theft Auto III is its gameplay. Its more fun than a barrel full of monkeys... giant ones! Honestly, if you have ever wanted to own a game with hours, upon hours, upon hours of doing nothing but exploring a city full of bad people doing bad things, and you - the one who gets to interact with them all - you can actually spend a whole entire day just driving around the city and squashing people with a truck. Other times you may find a weapon like a baseball bat, a 9mm handgun, or even a hidden and dangerous tool, like the shotgun or bazooka, to take on the city's streets with rampage like your business is the only one that matters. Really, sometimes it's just too easy to make a person bleed in the game.
More so, stealing cars is another larger chunk in the gameplay, and the game itself. You don't just title a video game Grand Theft Auto for nothing. When running up to any car, whether it is a station wagon, a pickup truck, or even a Mafia Sentinel (watch out; the driver gets angry and fires in your getaway), there is plenty of choices in the fast and slow car selections. Some types of vehicles serve for special purposes. For instance, you'll discover loads of side missions to cruise on through, like, becoming a taxi cab driver, a fire man, an ambulance medic, or the ever elusive police outlaw. Using either one of the mentioned vehicles allows the player to access objectives where you can pose as any of the chosen few, act out their jobs, and thus, you can earn extra cash for your continuously growing wad of loot.
Moving on, for the game's graphics, they too are excellent... even though they don't maximize in entirely what the power of what the PlayStation 2 can really pull off. The graphics actually aren't that bad at all. Fluidly, the character animations are real, with each and every person coming after you (or not) are lifelike. The surroundings of the game's world is equivalent to if you were in a real city. Cars all imbue the correct details that you'd expect them to have. There's blinking blinkers, popping hoods, and the rest. If you were to crash a car into a building, the dents appear, well... dented. Furthermore, the cars all smoke and eventually burst into flames if damage repeatedly came intact with the vehicle. Real-time weather effects are another part of the outstanding visuals. Rain pours down, thunder and lightning can be seen in the grim sky above, as well as heard. Plus, the time of day changes with the event swiftly.
But, the true power of Grand Theft Auto III is really known to show from how the game can pull off so many places and so many different people all on screen at once. Tall and short buildings, alleyways, and more cover much of the capacity to what goes on inside the game. Strolling by any of Liberty City's much expansive locations, there is dozens of individually generated humans that also are placed in a myriad of social classes. You've got your street police, old women, fat guys, regular guys, normal women, hookers, pimps, gangsters, thugs, and many, many more who all share a variation in animation from both shape and attitude. Liberty City owns a large majority of sections in its Crime-opolis to explore. Certain locales hold in them a specific "type" of person. Head into Chinatown, and walking the streets are the Triad gang who dress in blue clothing, each one clinging a weapon to his own. This area in particular reveals that anything can happen. Sometimes any random Triad thug may take out a group of people with their pistols. Sometimes two civilians can start a fistfight in the middle of the street. The cool part is that you're not actually the one who provokes these instances (even though you could). Any other placing, like the Red Light District (the policemen part of town) will be overrun by prostitutes and their masters. Grand Theft Auto III's an exciting game to adventure into and to find out what's inside.
Sounds also are very much keyed into the game. Guns blazing; cars smashing; people badmouthing. Standing in one spot for any amount of time, the individual persons that pass you breathe their own speech full of comments. Generally, there are hundreds of preprogrammed sentences from which each of the city's people speaks. What you, as the criminal in the game, do often at times even, is make what the people who take notice have a reaction to your criminal doings. Kicking and punching any person to the ground, you'll listen as one passerby recites the disregard that you have for others. Pulling a gun out and shooting it in any direction, sure enough, people run away and scream. Every moment in the game there's a side effect to what happens, and to who says what. As was mentioned before, there are those singular people who live in a social class. From the Italians to the street gangs, to the city hustlers, there are different languages spoken for each and every one of them. Pimps and hookers proposition passing people. Stooges comment on how they're too drunk. Thugs let others know that they're coming after you with a threatening speech. Liberty City is an imaginative world full of creepy, crawly, rotten people.
But as the saying goes, repetition is not always a good thing. The first run through the game is great, and as progression exceeds, those one-liners from the city's people become said again and again too often. This method does become irritating, slightly. I guess that's why there's the possibility of taking each and every person out of the picture, if you know what I mean. The game's main characters, too, have voices to be heard. It's nice to hear that the game's main cast, as well as the nonessential ones, all carry voices that match their persona, with each one having their role fit to the very touch of perfection.
Last, but not least, in every other placement of the game's qualities, there's the occasional roaring car fire, gunshot, explosion, and steel scratching up against one another in a car chase. And these sound effects are also well done, each time. One of the game's most impressive standpoints is its interaction with how you can change a radio station in any car that you choose. Are you disinterested in the sounds of pop or classical listening? Change the station to a more interesting and harder beat. Do you hate music period? There's a Talk Radio station that awaits your arrival. If for some reason you don't have your ears on, you'll certainly be missing a listening experience that's truly fantastic.
Features? You want them? You've got them! During the course of action, there is actually 100 secret packages to collect in covert locations around the world... or, city, I should say. The best cars in the game themselves can be hidden away from the player's eyes, and actually exploring the city can be enjoyable if you were to look for these beauties. For example, located right by 8-Ball's auto shop, there's a Banshee (a vehicle faster than the speed of light) trapped behind a set of windows. Driving a separate, and preferably a poorer choice of car through the glass will release the Banshee's scream to freedom. It's up to the player to discover the secrets of the game, if that is your style.
Let's just say that Grand Theft Auto III is made up from the mind of a killer. What you hear, what you see, and what you do is actually real in a sense that breaking the law is wrong, but fun. Similarly to life, if you've ever had the need to pull a car jacking, rob a person, kill a Mafia boss, or blow up a cop car, then all of the above is optional, enjoyable, and doable. Fans of the first two will die from the shock of the game's massive entirety. Newcomers will die from its insanity. And me? Well, I'm invincible. Whoever you are, whatever you do, Grand Theft Auto III will make the days last on forever from the sweet smell of kicking butt, one lowlife at a time.
Crime does pay. The hugely successful, highly controversial Grand Theft Auto franchises moves into 3 dimensions in the dark and seedy underworld of Li...More at eBay
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