When the Grand Theft Auto Remaster Trilogy was announced, fans cheered - who wouldn't love the opportunity to replay some of the most influential games of recent years with an updated look and game mechanics? The release of the collection, however, turned out to be a disaster: bugs, crashes, problems with lighting and models are just a small part of the problems that players encountered. We were also disappointed, although not as much as Metacritic users, who brought down the collection's rating to a miserable 0.5 points. We share our impressions in the review.
Games from an online game developer Friv2Online of the Grand Theft Auto series , without exaggeration, have gained cult status , and in many ways influenced the appearance of the gaming industry - the same GTA clones simply cannot be counted, both good and terrible. From GTA III, when the series first entered the third dimension, to GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, GTA IV, and GTA V, Rockstar has raised the bar of quality with each new game.
And everything would be fine, but only those parts of the franchise that came out back in the PS2 era are too old to be of interest to the modern player in their original form. In addition, you could play them either on retro platforms or on a PC, pouring mods on top that allow you to adapt games to current OS and screen resolutions.
Given the fashion for the return of the classics, the release of Grand Theft Auto remasters was only a matter of time. Which is good in itself: players on modern consoles got the opportunity to touch the cult friv games, and the publisher made an impressive profit from this. However, something went wrong.
It is worth recognizing that Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition, in addition to problems, has positive features. The developers have made many changes to the gameplay. For example, they added a wheel for selecting weapons and radio stations, as in GTA V. Now there is no need to frantically sort through the barrels in the heat of battle: by pressing a button, time slows down and we get the opportunity to select any of the guns.
The games also have a checkpoint system that eliminates the need to return to the beginning of the mission after a failure: if you fail, you can replay the task from the last checkpoint, which will most likely return you a couple of minutes back - although sometimes checkpoints are still are quite far apart, and we have to spend time on tedious trips to the goal.
The combat system has been slightly improved , but it takes some getting used to. The sight is automatically fixed on the enemy, but with free aiming, the crosshair walks so that it becomes difficult to hit the target. This is especially confusing during chases with firefights: it is very difficult to keep the aim on the pursued car using the stick.
In addition, navigation has been improved (with the route displayed on the radar), the car control scheme has been changed, achievements and trophies have been added, downloads have been accelerated - in general, it is noticeable that the developers tried not only to improve the graphics of the remasters, but also to provide gamers with an experience comparable to modern projects. Yet in the years since the release of GTA: San Andreas, not to mention GTA III, the gaming industry has stepped up and many of the mechanics of open world titles have evolved.
At the same time, in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition, the visual component has been significantly updated. And this is the case when you don’t know whether to scold the authors or praise them - the impressions are very ambiguous.
At their best, GTA looks amazing: San Andreas has great sunsets, and Vice City has very nice neon effects. There are beautiful explosions, pretty nice car models, good reflections, detailed interiors. The environment pleases with high-resolution textures, and on nextgen consoles, games run at almost 4K (1800p) resolution. At certain moments you honestly admire the picture.
The only pity is that this admiration passes when angular, plasticine, in some places - just creepy, character models catch your eye. Some of them should have stayed in the original version - so fucked up by their developers. And the "rubber" necks, bending at unnatural angles, gave me a couple of creep scenes in San Andreas.
And only the characters would be fine - that comical cartoon that appeared in the remasters can be experienced. Lighting glitches in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition, turning some story scenes into parodies of themselves. The textures flicker in the friv game: the red pants for CJ bought in a clothing store shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow, but not red.
There is nothing to say about the effects of rain : not only do they cover the screen, interfering with the player, they can also work in rooms and cars - when it starts to rain inside the house, you think about a crossover with Harry Potter.
The trilogy is full of bugs: some are funny, others interfere with the passage. Sometimes AI does not work here , cars can grow in size, and the absence of fog suddenly reveals the compactness of game locations - it turned out that even San Andreas with its three cities, countryside and desert is very cramped. Finally, some content was cut from The Definitive Edition, like the Confederate flag on the shirt of one of the characters in Vice City or Michael Jackson songs. A trifle, but unpleasant.
Finally, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition simply lags on all platforms, even powerful PCs, PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles. If you turn on the quality mode on PS5 , then you can only play at 30 fps, and with uneven frame distribution, which makes these 30 fps very uncomfortable. In performance mode, the game stutters in a number of scenes.
On the Nintendo Switch, the remasters look worse than the original PS2 games, and the frame rate drops below 30 fps. This is an incredibly terrible technical execution, especially for Rockstar, which has always been famous for its special attention to the quality of its projects (if we talk about consoles).
Rockstar apologized for the situation, has already released the first (hopefully of many) patch that fixes more than 60 problems, and also returned to the PC the original games of the trilogy that were previously withdrawn from sale and promised to give them to everyone who buys remasters before June 30, 2022. However, it will take a long time to restore the shaken reputation.
At the same time, we still have GTA in front of us, and even the poor quality of the remasters cannot seriously affect its greatness. This is the gloomy Liberty City and the eternally silent Claude, this is the neon-beach Vice City and the charismatic Tommy Vercetti, finally, this is gangster romance, three different cities and Carl Johnson trying to put his life in order.
This is an opportunity to get on a bike and ride along the ocean to the soundtrack of the 80s , or get involved in a gang war, retaking the city area by area, or get fat, go in search of UFOs, complete a mission with a helicopter and finally catch up with that damn train (by the way, in the reissue, this mission seems to have become easier - it obeyed me the first time).
Of course, all of the above can be done in the original games, but only if you play on PC or own previous generation consoles. On modern platforms, remasters are the only way to touch the masterpieces, and even though GTA III has aged quite badly, Vice City and San Andreas are able to give odds even to some modern games.
And if you don’t want to run into problems now, don’t rush to buy a trilogy - there is a high probability that the publisher will throw all his efforts into correcting the tarnished reputation and eventually bring the collection to the proper state.