Grand Theft Auto V Blows All Other GTAs Away

Want to hijack a plane in midair? Smoke some dubious weed and go on a very bad trip? Blow up a meth lab? Stop dreaming and start doing. Grand Theft Auto, to be released Tuesday for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (reviewed), ramps up fast and doesn’t slow down for anyone. If you don’t like those early hours of other Grand Theft Auto, games, where you have to run dinky fetch quests for low-level gangsters for 10 hours before things get interesting, you won’t have a chance to feel that way about GTA V because it’ll have you robbing banks and jumping trains on a dirt bike faster than you can say “not eligible for parole.” I couldn’t really get into previous games in the series, but I can’t stop playing the fifth.

The reason that GTA V, narratively speaking, can get its plot into high gear so quickly is that it is the first game to let you control three main characters. The typical narrative of “penniless street thug works his way up from petty crime to kingpin” is gone, or at least it’s not the entirety of the narrative thread this time. By being able to shift the player’s control between three wildly different characters at various stages of their lives,GTA V gives us all of the various perspectives and experiences we expect from this urban crime drama, from drug deals gone bad in grimy flophouses to intricate million-dollar heists, but no longer in rigid sequence.

The first two characters you meet are the classic Grand Theft Auto archetypes: a gangbanger who wants to make it big and a career criminal who’s given up the life but gets pulled back in. The third fits in to no such established pattern and is, I think without question, the most wonderful player character ever in this series: Trevor. He would never have starred in a game all his own, he’s just too crazy. He’s a homicidal sociopath, a sexual deviant and prone to unexplained fits of rage. He’s an ugly, filthy unchecked id, a manchild without a filter. He’s haggard, clothed in rags and stoned out of his freakin’ mind.

In other words, he lives exactly how the typical Grand Theft Auto player acts. Trevor is what you, Upstanding Model Citizen, become as soon as you pick up a controller and boot up an open world, no-consequences, do-anything crime simulator. Grand Theft Auto didn’t tell you to go on a rampage and kill all those sex workers with a sawed-off shotgun. It doesn’t even make sense in the logic of the story since the characters are supposed to be cool, calculating master criminals, not lunatics with grenade launchers. Oh, but not Trevor. When he shows up for a mission, he looks and acts like he got there by way of mowing down pedestrians in a stolen sport utility vehicle.

All this adds up to some spectacular moments; I’ve played a lot of games that were supposed to be funny but I can’t remember laughing at a videogame cut scene so hard as I have during some of Grand Theft Auto V's. The writing, acting and comedy timing is just as perfect as you’d expect from Rockstar at this point, but whereas in previous games a character like Trevor would have been some minor nutjob you took a couple of dubious missions from, now he’s front and center and mixing it up everywhere.