12-Nov-2004 As we write, we're still half-immersed in images of San Andreas. The blazing sun straining through the Los Santos smog. The tips of trees looming out of the fog as you glide over the forests in a plane. The winds of San Fierro ripping at you as you stand at the top of its tallest building. The come-hither neon glow of the Las Venturas strip. The far-away drone of cars zipping down endless highways. We can feel it tugging at us, trying to pull us back in. If you can feel homesick for a place that doesn't exist... then we do.
It's as if developer Rockstar North has listened to every fan's request to make this Grand Theft Auto the best ever. Every single fan, from the sober gurus who offered heartfelt criticisms of the problems with shooting, to the insane crowd bawling for more crazed and bloodthirsty missions, to the idealistic masses who wanted an extra layer of realism on top of the already immersive GTA universe. They've tried to give everyone what they wanted, and they've succeeded.
But it doesn't end there. Because the folks at Rockstar North had a few ideas of their own. Two players? It's true. We'll tell you how it works in a bit, although you can't play normal missions with a co-op buddy. In-game girlfriends? Hell, yeah. Base jumping? You're on. Read on, and we'll explain all. But to begin with, understand this: San Andreas offers the most complete, enchanting, immense and rewarding single-player experience ever seen in gaming.
Hood Vibrations It all begins in Los Santos, probably the most finely drawn of all three cities in terms of detail and character. Carl Johnson's just got in from Liberty City. His mum's just died. His mates think he's a coward. All your first missions will be spent proving them wrong.
Don't expect much money from these early missions. They're favours for your crew, ever so slowly driving up your respect levels. After money, respect's what you're after in San Andreas. For the first time, respect is an actual statistic that can be viewed with a quick press of the L1 button along with stamina, muscle, sex appeal and more. And when your respect level is high enough, you can enlist gang members off the street to join you at any time. The more respect you earn, the more men will follow. Marching down the street with a posse of hard-ass gangstas behind you feels oddly empowering.
In any other game, this would be a revolutionary piece of gameplay. Here, it's no more than one facet of the whole amazing experience. We doubt you'll spend more than ten per cent of your total game time with a posse, but for some things, like winning new territory and protecting your hood, it's invaluable.
WIth a crew, you can start a turf war by shooting some rival gang members on their territory (marked in a different colour to yours on the huge in-game map), and surviving the slew of oncoming enemies. The more territory you take, the more money you make. Again, for most games this would be a major advance in gameplay, but for San Andreas it's just another day in the hood. As the game moves on, you're suddenly transported from the dangerous sprawl of Los Santos to a tiny town at the foot of a half-mile tall mountain. It's impossible to think of a more different environment to Los Santos than the countryside. It's all rolling dirt roads, expansive freeways, forested hillside. Anywhere you can see, you can visit, but you'll have to scramble over untold valleys, canyons, streams, rivers, waterfalls, rocks, cliffs and almost every natural obstacle you can think of. So it should come as no surprise if you tumble off your bike and end up in a creek at the bottom of a ravine. Which, of course, you can now swim out of. By this point we'd passed beyond amazement into a kind of trance of wonderment.
Sleeping With The Fishes Once the initial euphoria of swimming has worn off, you'll find it's a useful but not particularly exciting mode of getting around. Diving's a bit more interesting, but spotting shoals of fish, dolphins and the odd shark can't exactly equal throwing a monster truck round a forest. Still, we're immensely glad it's made it in here, rounding out CJ's world in a way the other GTA games could never do.
Then it's on to San Fierro. Contrary to its colourful sub-cultures, San Fierro is actually composed of washed-out greys, reminding us of Liberty City more than anything else. But the similarities end there. In contrast to that stony East Coast metropolis, San Fierro exudes a cultured, iconoclastic feel, complete with hippy districts, a stoner population and of course those massive hills. Still, we felt it came across as a little cold compared to the family-oriented vibe of Los Santos. Although the missions in San Fierro are, if anything, more entertaining and inventive than the ones in Los Santos, the relationships made here seemed a little less solid. So it's good to find that as you progress throughout the story, your old homies pop up again to advance the plot.
King of Hearts As you might have gathered by now, the immensity of San Andreas is far from open to begin with. It's more like GTA III's sequential island unlocking than Vice City's relatively open-plan environment. Except of course, each city and area is the size of Vice City anyway. Still, when you finally reach Las Venturas after tens of hours of solid mission play, it's like a shining reward. It's the game's biggest playground, filled with diversions and rewards for all your hours of toil. Not that the action's over when you reach Venturas, not by a long shot. In fact, the plot broadens, although it would be a massive spoiler if we said how. What we will say that it all leads to some truly big-budget action sequences.
It's only at this stage that you'll really have the freedom of San Andreas, including the (squeak!) new aircraft. And what monsters they are too. The dodo, which also makes a guest appearance in a slightly spruced-up form, looks like the flying Robin Reliant it really is compared to some of the airborne behemoths we've flown. Once you're in the skies, you'll never look back. And since the whole of San Andreas is your oyster, you can now pop down to the airport, pay $500 and get a relaxing trip to the city of your choice. Told you they've thought of everything.
Fit And You Know It The food and fitness aspects of gameplay add to the fun without making your life more difficult. Spend hours at the gym, tapping away at the buttons to press weights or use the exercise bike, and you'll end up slim and muscled. Getting fat isn't as easy as you'd think, either. All the running around in the course of normal missions means that your average CJ's going to move through the game with less body fat than Lindford Christie and nearly as much speed. You'll soon be sprinting for far longer than Mr Vercetti ever could. And don't worry about missing meals, because you'll rarely feel the lack of energy and if you do, a quick trip to the fast food restaurant is usually only a quick slouch away.
Far more important is your choice of clothes and tattoos. In two games, no two CJs are going to look alike - even with exactly the same choice of body art and gear, the chances are that your accessories, haircut and even your build will be utterly different to your mate's version. Considering you'll have to play through a hell of a lot of the game to open up the best clothes shops, choosing your look is not something you can do once and then forget about. Almost every safe house has a wardrobe for changing your clothes, so true completists will want to buy everything so they can alter their outfit at will. While clothes will alter that sex appeal stat, as will the cars you drive, it's mainly all about adding to your respect.
You The Shizzle, Nizzle Graphically, it doesn't look like much has changed from the earlier GTA games at first. Maybe the colours are deeper and more muted than the pastel paradise of Vice City. Maybe houses look a little more realistic. But the more you play, the more you appreciate the little touches. You'll notice that when the camera zooms near a car, you can read the number plate. The steering wheels aren't made of pentagons any more. And shining paintwork reflects the sun in a whole new way. Look closely, and you'll notice even more. Reach top speed on the freeway, and your surroundings will subtly blur, a little like Burnout 3. Stand on top of Mount Chiliad and you'll realise you can see far into the distance, past winding roads and shadowed valleys. We're not trying to say that you won't see the usual broad strokes of the GTA canvas, like hills drawn with a handful of polygons from far away or trees suddenly growing leaves as you approach. But within the confines of the PlayStation2 hardware, what's been done here is nothing short of magnificent.
Even the skies are different in each place. In Los Santos, the ochre smog blankets the horizon and bathes everything is a diffuse, oppressive orange glow. Make it out to the country, and suddenly the air is clear. You can see for miles across the terrain with your camera's zoom lens, the wind snaps through the trees, and birds flit overhead. San Fierro seems perpetually overcast, with nasty squalls whipping in from the ocean to start torrential rainstorms. But Las Venturas lies under a baking hot, pure blue sky, and when you leave it for the desert you can watch the sun set in a blaze of purple over the silent, towering mesas.
Killing In The Name The thing that's changed least in all of this absolute delight is the core gameplay during missions. Running, shooting and driving are augmented by unusual vehicles and oddball locations. Stealth missions like burglary are genuinely new however, and by keeping it simple and not giving CJ a complex set of stealth controls, you never feel you've been thrust into a different world. Essentially, pressing R3 puts you into a crouch, but CJ can then creep along hunched and extra quiet until you press R3 to stand up. Targeting someone while you're creeping will let you perform a gruesome stealth kill when you're close up. Dark shadows will hide you, but there's no meter to tell you how well - it's just not needed. It may feel a little rudimentary compared to, say, Metal Gear Solid 2, but if every action game incorporated stealth elements so well, we'd be clamouring for more of them.
The incredible variety of new terrain means otherwise normal missions are invested with a romantic, adventurous sheen. And of course when we say normal, we're talking about chasing helicopters with bikes to shoot them down, torching marijuana crops with a flamethrower, shooting down swathes of model airplanes from the sky, crushing dynamite boxes with a giant truck, destroying a building site and encasing the foreman in cement, and so much, much more. In essence, there's barely a duff mission here. Of course, when it comes to straight-ahead chases, we've been evading police for three PS2 games now, so it's bound to be a bit less engaging. Ah, who are we kidding? We still get a giant buzz from escaping from the law, especially now there are agile cop bikes in the mix.
Crucially, CJ can shoot much more effectively than before, with R1 auto-targeting nearby enemies - not innocent pedestrians. Add in superior controls for free aiming that resemble a first-person shooter, and you've got a recipe for very quickfire gun battles. It soon becomes clear that this isn't a driving game with action elements. This is a fully fledged, go-anywhere, kill-anything kind of a game, which just happens to be bigger than anything we've ever played before. It's PS2's greatest adventure title, in fact.
Two Cool And we still haven't got to the two new features that are bound to cause the most excitement and hilarity. You rescue a girl from a fire - a fire you started moments before, in fact - and suddenly her house has an intriguing yellow icon by it, indicating she's up for being picked up and taken out on a date. One trip to Well Stacked Pizza later, and you see the entirely odd words on screen 'Press L1 to kiss'. And you can indeed embrace your newly found girlfriend, and continue to take her out to increase her devotion to you. Or not. Because this is GTA after all, and if you choose to ignore the girls you go out with in favour of more shooting and driving, nobody's going to punish you. You have freedom, in other words, the very concept that runs deep through the heart of the series.
As you drop off your lady back at your house, you see an odd icon at her door. Something like two stick-men standing next to each other. Go up to it and... you're requested to plug in a second joypad. Suddenly your mate next to you is controlling your girlfriend and you're free to run around together, the screen pulling back when you separate. You both get in a car - oh my God! - and the player riding shotgun has a small reticule he can use to target anything he sees, leaning out the window to shoot. And in those first few seconds, the Grand Theft Auto world is broken up, whirled around and put together as something amazing and new. See the 'It Takes Two' box for more details, if you can stop your hands trembling...
He Got Game There's hardly a type of side mission from GTA III or Vice City that you won't find squirreled into some corner of San Andreas. But there's a bewildering choice of much more than that. Burglaries, fun and wince-makingly tense as they are, are only the tip of the iceberg. Become a valet and park posh folk's cars (or steal them for yourself). Spend a lifetime in a quarry with a whole Tonka toy chest of construction vehicles, working to clear rubble and protect it from invading criminals. Spend another lifetime or two on the baize tables of Las Venturas, gambling your hard-earned cash away on everything from the obscenely addictive video poker and blackjack to the big one, roulette.
If all this doesn't impress, there's loads of others. Shoot pool for money in bars - in what's basically a complete pool game within the main game. You can even play with a friend if you have a second joypad. There's dance mat style grooving games in here to impress your (in-game) lady friends, and a genius variation involving low-rider cars. We could spoil all the pastimes in San Andreas for you, but half the fun is finding them yourself in areas you though were almost empty. We'd go so far as to say that side missions will take up half your total play time.... or more.
Safe As Houses Rockstar North has also come good on its promise to increase the amount of buildings you can interact with. Each big city has safe houses scattered all over the place, ready for you to lay down a few grand to purchase. But there are also a host of places to buy in the small towns too. Having burglary missions gives you the final piece of the jigsaw, meaning that although you can't enter any house, it often feels that way.
The other general thrust has been to make everything that little bit smoother to play. Cars now seem to take a substantial amount more damage, meaning accidental prangs won't worry you as much and you'll be able to stick with your ride for longer; perfect for keeping your modded car in peak condition. And in a genius, generous move, when you replay longer missions which involve you driving for miles to get to your first encounter, the game will enable 'trip skip' to take you to the target, saving meaningless minutes of driving. And as we've said, the targeting system is no longer your greatest liability in a fight, although it still takes a bit of getting used to. All in all, this is the slickest as well as the biggest GTA yet.
Me And My Homies CJ himself is what holds together this crazed crime wave. He's a truly great character, with memorable lines and believable motivation. If the hero of GTA III was nothing more than an anonymous hoodlum, and Tommy Vercetti was a lonely psycho with a money fixation, CJ feels like part of a network of family and friends.
On the balance, most missions throughout the game aren't taken on for money (although you may well be rewarded with lots for the later ones). They're favours for friends, risking life and limb to do anything from helping a buddy get a record deal to sorting out casino gangsters. It's odd, but you start feeling that CJ cares. Maybe he's even a bit of a pushover. Of course, then he'll shoot some innocent through the head and you'll be reminded that he's a stone cold killer on top of everything else. But it makes a big difference to the way you react to events.
Maybe it's because Rockstar North has added subtle interactions between CJ and his world in so many ways. A tap of the directional-pad will fire back a positive or negative response to any chat on the street that's directed at you. Does it change anything about the gameplay? No. Is it somehow perfect? Yes. By the end of the game, you'll have a huge emotional investment in the characters.
If San Andreas is about one thing, it's attention to detail. But it's not about one thing. It's about a bewildering multitude of concepts, humour, gameplay and originality. God, we love it so.
99 Problems? As if So, are there problems in all this gameplay glory? Maybe a handful of things. Lip-synching is erratic, going from absolutely perfect to dubiously vague, sometimes in the same scene, although you'll only notice if you look closely. 'Trip skip' is a great innovation, but only half-solves the issue of endless drives to reach a mission or save your game. And apart from the odd seagull skimming through the sky (and vultures in the desert, to boot), there's no animal life in San Andreas. Maybe it's unfair to demand horse-riding and bear-hunting, but when all our other impossible dreams have been realised, why shouldn't we get that too?
But enough niggling. In the end, perhaps the best things about San Andreas are the little touches that escalate the gameplay in ways you'd never thought possible. Who would have thought that the simple addition of a parachute would provide hours of pure, absorbing gameplay pleasure? Or that cutting up cars on the freeway could result in so much adrenalised carnage?
As you've gathered by now, San Andreas is a bit sizeable. Not big like a fat man. Big like Saturn. Think at least three times bigger than Vice City, plus a massive amount more for side missions. We recommend a week off work filled with non-stop play if you really want to see everything it has to offer. Even after that, you're going to be coming back for a very long time. Because it's simply the most satisfying box of grown-up toys ever made.
In a way, San Andreas is a manifesto for every future video game. Now we've seen what can be done when truly brilliant people get to make a world brimming with variety, music, humour and sheer scale, very few other games are going to be able to live up to it. We've got a shrewd suspicion that the next time anything this amazing rolls round, it's going to be called Grand Theft Auto 4.
PSW Staff
// Overview
Verdict
Undoubtedly one of the greatest video games of all time, San Andreas truly defines modern gaming. Buy it.
With an uber-authentic script and voices supplied by some genuine LA heavies, it's no surprise San Andreas scores high on the authenticity front. For the first third of the game, you'll start feeling more and more like a thug as you earn respect through crazed crimes. (The ability to win territory only works in Los Santos, so you'll need other ways of making money in the other cities.) And crucially, the radio stations are stuffed with original G-funk.
