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For me, Grand Theft Auto V’s extraordinary scope is summed up in two favourite moments. One is from a mid-game mission in which I flew a plane into another plane, fought the crew, hijacked the thing, and then parachuted out and watched it crash into the sea to escape death at the hands of incoming military fighter jets. Another time, whilst driving around in an off-road buggy, I got distracted by something that looked like a path up one of the San Andreas mountains. Turns out it was a path, and I spent 15 minutes following to the summit, where I nearly ran over a group of hikers. “Typical!” one of them yelled at me, as if he nearly gets run over by a rogue ATV on top of a mountain every time he goes on a hike.

I could go on like this for ages. GTA V has an abundance of such moments, big and small, that make San Andreas – the city of Los Santos and its surrounding areas – feel like a living world where anything can happen. It both gives you tremendous freedom to explore an astonishingly well-realised world and tells a story that’s gripping, thrilling, and darkly comic. It is a leap forward in narrative sophistication for the series, and there’s no mechanical element of the gameplay that hasn’t been improved over Grand Theft Auto IV. It’s immediately noticeable that the cover system is more reliable and the auto-aim less touchy. The cars handle less like their tires are made of butter and stick better to the road, though their exaggerated handling still leaves plenty of room for spectacular wipeouts. And at long last, Rockstar has finally slain one of its most persistent demons, mission checkpointing, ensuring that you never have to do a long, tedious drive six times when you repeatedly fail a mission ever again.

The story that GTA V tells through its missions takes full advantage of all this variety beyond driving and shooting (though the driving and shooting is still supremely enjoyable). It’s got so many great moments. It had me racing Michael’s lazy blob of a son across Vespucci Beach in one of many misguided attempts at father-son bonding, using a thermal scope to search for someone from a helicopter before chasing them across the city on the ground, torching a meth lab, towing cars for Franklin’s crack-addict cousin to prevent him from losing his job, infiltrating a facility from the sea in a wetsuit and flippers, piloting a submarine, impersonating a construction worker, doing yoga, escaping on jet skis, failing multiple times to land a plane loaded with drugs at a hangar out in the desert… it goes on and on. The days of a repetitive series of “drive here, find this guy, shoot this guy” are behind us. Even missions that would otherwise be formulaic are imbued with novelty and excitement by the potential to play them from three different viewpoints – in a shootout, Trevor might be firing RPGs from a rooftop as Michael and Franklin flank the enemy on the ground.

It’s the heists – multi-stage, huge-scale events that serve as the story’s climactic peaks – that show Grand Theft Auto V at its most ambitious and accomplished. Usually there’s a choice between a more involved, stealthier option that will (hopefully) attract less heat, and an all-out option that will be less tense but more explosively chaotic – and what crew to take along with you on the job. All of GTA V’s missions are replayable at any time, letting you relive favourite moments or try out another approach. They also have optional objectives in the vein of Assassin’s Creed’s synchronisation challenges, but crucially, these are invisible the first time you play a mission, and so they don’t distract you from doing things your own way.

Sometimes your own way won’t be the way that the designers expected you to do something, and though Grand Theft Auto V is usually very good at bending around you when that happens, there were one or two occasions where it wasn’t prepared for my personal brand of chaos. Overtake a car you’re not supposed to overtake and it will zip through lines of traffic as if by magic. Despite the introduction of new stealth mechanics, enemies will miraculously see you when the mission dictates that they should. Kill someone before you’re supposed to, and that’s sometimes Mission Failed. Most of the time the scripting is good enough to be invisible, but when it’s not, you really notice it – if only because most of the time it’s so seamless.

As ever, some of the wittiest writing shows up on the in-game radio that plays behind all of the exploration and mayhem. “There’s nothing more successful, more masculine, more American than a big wad of cash,” blasts one of the in-game ads. “We know times are tough, but they don’t have to be tough for you. Still got some liquidity in your house? Are you insane?” The music selection is also typically excellent, leading to many of those serendipitous moments where you’re driving along and the perfect song comes on. During a heist, when the radio isn’t blaring the background, a dynamic soundtrack seriously builds tension.

The satire is helped by integration of modern life into the game world. Every character revolves around their smartphone – it’s used to trade stocks, call up friends to meet up and send emails. There’s a great Facebook spoof, Life Invader, on the in-game Interne, with the slogan “Where Your Personal Information Becomes A Marketing Profile (That We Can Sell)”. You’ll hear adverts for preposterous parodic TV shows that you can actually watch on your TV at home, optionally whilst enjoying a toke. It might not be realistic, but it definitely feels authentic.

It’s worth mentioning that when it comes to sex, drugs, and violence, GTA V pushes boundaries much further than ever before. If the morality police were worried about Hot Coffee, there’s a lot here that will provoke moral hysteria. It’s deliciously subversive, and firmly tongue in cheek... but once or twice, it pushes the boundaries of taste, too. There’s one particular scene, a torture scene in which you have no choice but to actively participate, that I found so troubling that I had difficulty playing it; even couched in obvious criticism of the US government’s recourse to torture post 9/11, it’s a shocking moment that will attract justified controversy. It brings to mind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s No Russian mission, except worse, and without the option to skip over it. Some other stuff, like the ever-present prostitution and extensive strip-club minigames, feels like it’s there just because it can be rather than because it has anything to say.

There is nothing in San Andreas, though, that doesn’t serve Rockstar’s purpose in creating an exaggerated projection of America that’s suffused with crime, violence and sleaze. There are no good guys in GTA V. Everyone you meet is a sociopath, narcissist, criminal, lunatic, sadist, cheat, liar, layabout, or some combination of those. Even a man who pays good money to assassinate Los Santos’ worst examples of corporate greed is playing the stock market to his advantage whilst he does it. In a world like this, it’s not hard to see why violence is so often the first recourse. All the pieces fit.

Verdict [/bb]
Grand Theft Auto V is not only a preposterously enjoyable video game, but also an intelligent and sharp-tongued satire of contemporary America. It represents a refinement of everything that GTA IV brought to the table five years ago. It’s technically more accomplished in every conceivable way, but it’s also tremendously ambitious in its own right. No other world in video games comes close to this in size or scope, and there is sharp intelligence behind its sense of humour and gift for mayhem. It tells a compelling, unpredictable, and provocative story without ever letting it get in the way of your own self-directed adventures through San Andreas. It is one of the very best video games ever made

10/10 <3

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a sprawling Western tale of loyalty, conviction, and the price of infamy, chronicling the inevitable collapse of a motley crew of Wild West holdouts kicking against the slow march of civilisation and industrialisation. Set in Rockstar’s most authentic and lived-in open world ever, there are so many things to do, so many people to meet, and so many places to explore it’s giddily overwhelming. Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t just Rockstar’s greatest achievement to date; it’s a game so lacking in compromise it’s tough to know where best to start discussing it.


So let’s start at the beginning: It’s 1899 and American outlaws are an endangered species. Dutch van der Linde and his gang are on the run after a botched heist in the growing town of Blackwater and they’ve retreated high into the mountains where an atrocious blizzard is covering their escape. We slip into the spurs of Arthur Morgan, an exceedingly cool and capable outlaw who was found by Dutch as a boy and raised on the wrong side of the law, and settle in for a roughly 60-hour story.

The Big Country
And what a world it is; broader, more beautiful, and more varied than the one we explored in 2010’s Red Dead Redemption by a massive margin (though parts of that game’s map are also included). There are snowy peaks and dank, alligator-infested swamps. Thick forests and open plateaus. Quaint homesteads and grand plantations. Narrow streams and great lakes. Dusty gulches and dim caves. There’s the muddy livestock town of Valentine, with its wooden buildings and rustic charm, and then there’s the imposing city of Saint Denis, a grimy and growing metropolis full of modern extravagances like electric trams, paved roads, and Chinese restaurants. The vast assortment of ecosystems and environments seamlessly stitched together here is nothing short of remarkable.

The ability of this game to keep itself fresh after so many hours is extraordinary, and not entirely due to just the size and diversity of the world; it’s how alive all of those places feel. While the largely rural world of Red Dead Redemption 2 is far less dense than the likes of Grand Theft Auto V, it’s absolutely brimming with wildlife to discover, people to interact with (and potentially help), and places to scrutinise. The best kind of open worlds are those that seem almost indifferent to your presence in them; like life goes on whether you stick your nose into proceedings or not. I’ve sat and watched lumberjacks felling trees at a bustling logging camp and curiously tailed a perturbed Englishman wandering around town looking for his mate “Gav.” None of this is crucial to the progression of Arthur’s story; it just helps build a world around him that made me feel like a visitor rather than the centre of the universe. Red Dead Redemption 2 nails this in a way that few – if any – games have before.


In a Valley of Violence
The slower pace of Red Dead Redemption 2 compared to something like the slightly more breakneck GTA V is also a big part of how it encouraged me to drink in all the world has to offer. Bodies have to be manually looted, and Arthur needs to physically manhandle a body to do so. Single-action pistols need to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ before firing. Guns Arthur isn’t currently carrying need to retrieved from his saddle. Coffee needs to be brewed before drinking it.

How the West Was Won
The main story missions themselves are a cocktail of high-stakes heists, deadly shootouts, desperate rescues, and thrilling chases, mixed with a lengthy list of other activities. Many of those function as organic ways to teach us about new side hustles and activities that can be undertaken, from selling stolen horses to playing poker or fishing.

It all feels great to play, similar in a lot of ways to its immediate predecessor but injected with a pile of new animations and multiple layers of interactivity. It asks a lot of the finite amount of buttons on a controller, but once I became accustomed to which commands require a tap and which require a press-and-hold I had few hassles. Shootouts are supremely cinematic thanks to plenty of gun smoke and the same style of on-the-fly, ever-changing death animations that have characterised Rockstar games since GTA IV. You can even shoot off people’s hats and pick them up later for yourself.

I think there’s a common presumption that Red Dead Redemption is just GTA on a horse, but that’s a bit reductive. Certainly the GTA DNA is here, but with far more primitive firearms at your fingertips gun battles are more intimate and anarchic. I love the close range clashes, hunkered down behind bits of cover exchanging lead with enemies often just yards away, or slugging it out in bareknuckle scraps. It’s exciting and fun. Combat from horseback is equally well-handled and it’s always a grisly highlight to watch unfortunate saps go limp and tumble from the saddle in a seemingly endless number of ways. I think Arthur feels a fraction heavier than any of the GTA V trio, but I would not say that I found his movement cumbersome. I really like how connected Arthur feels to the world. I’m not a particular fan of that old-school, skating third-person feel – like the player character has no inertia – and that’s certainly not present here.Dead Eye returns, naturally, as it’s been part of the series since Red Dead Revolver. It’s had some upgrades this time, the most useful of which highlights critical hit areas on a target (very useful for clean kills while hunting). It’s still a very effective way to make you feel like an unstoppable gunslinger and the gruesome ballet of slow-motion death-dealing remains disturbingly satisfying.

Once Upon a Time In the West
Red Dead Redemption 2 is an undeniably pretty game across the board. The lighting is fantastic, particularly in dark, misty situations where shafts of moonlight stab through the trees, and I love the way it handles Arthur leaving weakly-lit interiors into the temporarily blinding sun outside. The sunsets are especially spectacular and seem to vary depending on the weather system. Some are harsh and beaming while others are warm and soft. The facial animation is a noticeable step up from GTA V, and the level of granular detail is almost absurd, from the way blood smears on Arthur’s shoulder after carrying a kill to the way individual strands of his majestic mutton chops quiver in the breeze. The way wagon wheels become caked in mud. The way rust builds up on a poorly-maintained firearm. It’s another long, long list that speaks to a high level of attention to detail.

No matter where you look, everything feels meticulously handcrafted. Every consumable is labelled and can be picked up and inspected. Every catalogue in stores is full of custom text and illustrations pointing to products available for sale or old timey advertisements. Hallways are decorated with framed pictures I’ve never noticed repeated throughout the world. Remember: this is the game where horse testicles shrink when the weather is cold. More than once I found myself temporarily hypnotised by the musculature and skin creases on my horse’s butt. That’s a weird sentence, but you’re going to be spending a lot of time looking at a horse’s butt. It might as well impress you.

Verdict
Red Dead Redemption 2 stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Grand Theft Auto V as one of the greatest games of the modern age. It’s a gorgeous depiction of an ugly period that’s patient, polished, and a huge amount of fun to play, and it’s combined with Rockstar’s best storytelling to date. Even after finishing the lengthy story I can’t wait to go back and play more. This is a game of rare quality; a meticulously polished open world ode to the outlaw era. Looking for one of this generation’s very best single-player action experiences? Here’s your huckleberry.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ trash game keeps crashing fatal error and logged for no reason.

Legit the Best Skate Game on Steam, if you loved the EA Skate Series or Skateboarding in general you will LOVE this!

Controls take some time getting used to, but once you figured them out they make more sense than Flick-it conrols from EA Skate Series.

Each stick controls one leg basically.

If you love Skateboarding as much as i do, CHECK THIS OUT!

UPDATE: I STILL LOVE IT AND THERE IS MORE CONTENT COMING!