[GTA3] Chaos in 3D

After the success of GTA and GTA 2, the makers probably thought “let’s make it 3D”, a good decision, if you ask me, because this decision made a masterpiece that has made the GTA series a large success.
The nice thing about GTA is that you can walk around freely, causing destruction in a city in a legal way, using your mouse and keyboard. I’ll try to explain why the game is still worth playing and why it’s better than its sequels in some ways.

Always interesting, the box

Mafia game
Something that I especially like about the game, is that it’s a real mafia game that really has the ambience of a crime game (dark, unhappy and serious). This realism is the best in the beginning of the game, you work for the semi-Italian bunch of guys, and the missions are very mob like, blowing people in cars, hiding the evidence of a murder, kill people who didn’t pay their protection money etc. But the more missions you have played, the more Hollywood like they become (if they weren’t already).
When you play the missions, and you watch the cutscenes, you’ll notice that there is a story in the game, that pushes you to complete the game. A weak point of the game is that you sometimes get bosses who don’t fit in the main story line and that sometimes the missions don’t have a place in the story.
A strong point of the game is that most missions are very realistic, especially at the beginning of the game, and that the missions become very hard to pass near the end of the game. I think that the last mission of the game can’t be cleared without using cheats, it’s really hard. The sequels lack of this difficulty. Vice City and San Andreas actually have last missions that you can easily beat.

Another thing that is nice to notice about this game, is that this GTA 3 is the last GTA game where you can find elements of GTA and GTA 2. You get messages on a “Samurai”, money for the chaos that you’ve created and you can even watch your character in a third person perspective. Also, the character doesn’t talk, only shoots, and it’s a very serious game.

I’ve never seen an ambulance doing this…

Hollywood
The game is, next to mafia like, also very Hollywood like: giant explosions, Hollywood car chases and of course jumps and stunts with your car (there is even a jump in it that looks like the car-stunt in the James Bond film “The man with the Golden Gun”).
This Hollywood elements make the game impressive, and it even fits the game situation.

b00m

Violent interaction
Of course, one of the things that made GTA such a success is the possibility to kill people a digital way using a lot of different weapons. The blood and the popping citizens aren’t very realistic, but it gives the game a bloody effect.
It’s a pity that there are missing a couple of things in this game, but they are added to the sequels, like jumping out of the car while driving, swimming (not too hard, isn’t it?), shooting people out of cars, a realistic fighting system (with different accuracy for different guns), and maybe they must have added a crouching possibility, very helpfull if your being attacked. Maybe this could’ve helped you through the last mission. These are a few of the things I missed in GTA 3.

The chaos in GTA 3 can be very serious and can cause nice chases, like a guy in a sports car chased by the army in tanks, or something like it. The problem of the police is the AI, the chance that they get you is very little, and they don’t catch you, they kill you, not a very police-like way to work… Also the “dangerous” helicopters are easy to fool, this can make the chases very irritating and boring.

The weapons in the game are realistic most of the time, but there aren’t much though. Also the weapons aren’t overpowered like you see in some games, but it’s a pity that you can’t hide behind walls or something like it, it would have made the shooting a lot nicer.

Drive along? No I’ll drive myself

Auto?
Yes, GTA stands for Grand Theft Auto, it is “Grand”, much of “Theft”, but not so much “Auto”. There are of course a nice number of cars that you can “borrow” but I expected some more racing in the game. There is one phone with racing elements in it and some other race missions. But not many… and your fellow racers always drive exactly the same way, that’s why they smash up to other cars and do other weird tricks, making them lose in the end.
There are many different things that you can “borrow” from limo’s to ugly cars to racing cars to ice cream cars.
The collisions look realistic, well, the cars are maybe a little bit too strong, but all right.
It’s a pity they stick to “Auto” because there are only 3 other ways of transport in the form of a boat, no motors, bikes, helicopters or flying airplanes.
Luckily you can do a lot with the cars, like unique jumps, which are most of the time spectacular, but you must find a map on the net to find them all, they are well hidden.
If you’ve done all unique jumps, you can do base jumping with your car, or fly with a tank, of course with a code.

woehoe, shooting of a roof

Conclusion
A very good game that looks fine, even these days, with the right configuration. Also the music is good, nice tracks from the radio stations, you can even add your own music if you don’t like them. The free-roaming isn’t boring quick, but they could gave added some more areas, missions and sub-missions.

Sound: excellent, if the music bores you, you can switch it off. The sound effects are good, only the shots sound a bit weird…
Graphics: Still look good, nice 3D, sometimes a frame drop or large pixels, but mostly it is smooth. Only the explosions look very fake, but I don’t know of games in which they look like real…
Gameplay: It plays very well, smooth controlling, only the drowning is irritating, but the game reacts good on your commandos, and you want to play it till the end.
Lifetime: Long, very long. You can be happy with the missions for a long time, and you’ll be playing the game much longer if you want to get the 100%.; After that, you’ve got nothing more to do…. You’ll throw the game in the trash bin, because you can’t do anything else than causing mayhem and driving around because of the lack of submissions.

Score: 9

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 9:06 pm and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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