Grand Theft Auto 3

Review - More Daily Mail enraging fun from Rockstar.

Gameplay over graphics. It’s an old videogame adage, and it’s one I’ve always hated. Good graphics are essential, they can improve the gaming experience, and Grand Theft Auto 3 proves why. Apart from anything else you don’t purchase NVIDIA’s latest offering to play something that looks like it belongs on an Amiga do you? I want polygons and I want billions of them. Obviously gameplay is the most important thing but as technology evolves greater visuals can provide a more detailed and immersive environment for a game. Which in turn helps the playability of a title. GTA3 not only has both, but its lineage proves that graphics can be as important as gameplay.

GTA 1&2 just seemed like more of a good idea to me than anything else. So you can kill cops, ‘jack’ cars and act like a thug. But who cares when all you can see are some very bland and nondescript sprites. Cop killer?, it might just have been a small shrub you ran over in your 2-tone brick. For me as a gamer you just didn’t connect with what you were doing because the whole thing looked like a mess. Which in the end made the whole thing pointless.

However, as PS2 gamers experienced over a year ago, GTA3 has a brand new spangly 3D engine, and very impressive it is too. Now you really do get the feeling that you’re wandering around pillaging people in a real environment, not only does the new perspective add a greater deal of immersion it also adds new scope to some of the missions. You certainly couldn’t have overlooked a docked tanker from the roof of a warehouse, providing covering fire to your accomplice using a sniper rifle in either of the previous incarnations of GTA.

The basic premise for any newcomers is a simple one. You make contacts in the criminal underworld of Liberty City and through completing missions for them your notoriety increases. The main missions range from stealing cars to order, planting car bombs, luring hit squads into ambushes and collecting pornography that’s fallen from a van. It’s a very good variety of things to achieve and this gives you a strong urge to keep going just to see what the next mission has in store. Ultimately the goal being to become the number one criminal in the city with a side story of revenge against an ex-girlfriend. The game’s structure breaks Liberty up into three connected islands which are opened up progressively as you work your way through the missions. How you complete the missions and in (roughly) what order you do them in is up to you. The game strikes a perfect balance between a linear structure and the free-form way you can pass time and complete your goals.