Los Santos Bound

Rather than actually buy the Playstation 4 I'd been telling myself I'd get this fall, I bought Grand Theft Auto V for my XBox 360 last month. One last game for that system.

So you play as three characters: Michael, a thief who cut a deal with a fed to fake his death and is currently going through a midlife crisis. Franklin, a younger car thief and driver who is getting tired of getting nowhere. Trevor, who was Michael's partner on the heist where he faked his death, but only found out that's what happened 10 years later. He's a violent, lunatic meth dealer and gun runner. The thing I've read online is Michael is what people who play GTA think they are, a classy guy with some style and rules, but Trevor is what they actually are. Someone who runs around shooting random people and blowing shit up for no reason.

Michael pisses off a cartel bigwig by destroying his house (or his mistress' house) and has to pull a jewel heist with Franklin's help to get the money to make things right. Which is what tips Trevor off he's alive, and then it's the three of them working together uneasily. And they all have their own things going as well.

Granting that I haven't really played a GTA game since Vice City, the main new thing in here to me was the whole heist aspect. The game gives you two options, one typically quieter and one louder. Each one will have different equipment required to make it happen. You'll have to hire additional people to round out the crew, and you get a few options of varying skill. The more skilled they are, the more likely things are to go smoothly, but they get a bigger cut of the money. If they survive a heist, you can use them again later, and they'll have improved their skills from the prior experience.

I went with what I thought was the quieter route every time. On the jewel heist I cheaped out on the driver and the gunman, but not the hacker, since the hacker would be able to keep the security system down longer and let us steal more. The gunman wiped out on his dirtbike, although I grabbed his bag of jewels, and the driver got us lost in the tunnels, but it mostly worked out. Still, after that I didn't cheap out again. I figured the amount of heat was going to increase, and I really couldn't afford to have useless helpers getting me killed.

After a certain point, I added one more rule: I would not use an approach if it involved helicopters. I hate trying to control helicopters in this game. I don't know what specifically I'm doing wrong, but it's always a struggle for me to get them to do anything smoothly. Descend, turn, move forward in a straight line. Any chopper I steer wobbles like a drunk hippo. Alex was watching me play his copy once and said I was making him motion sick. So no helicopters. Fortunately, those are usually associated with the "loud" option.

Besides all that, there are solo missions specific to each character, involving people they meet. it can be Trevor helping some weird couple steal random crap from celebrities, or Franklin helping Lester off greedy billionaires. It all boils down to largely the same thing, you drive somewhere and commit some level of criminal activity, but some of them are funnier than others. And then there are the random scenarios you could trigger at any time. People needing a ride, people trying to trick you into walking into a stick-up, or you drive past a liquor store and hey look at that armored car picking up the day's cash. The game gives you the option to ignore those if you want, which is nice.

One thing that frustrates me a little is the game is forces you down a certain pathway it feels like I should be able to avoid. The whole thing with the cartel guy, for example. Michael destroys his house, guy shows up at Michael's house right after, with just two goons. One carrying a gun, one carrying a bat. And Michael just lets the guy push him around. I'm sitting there thinking, "He thinks I'm buying him a new house? How about I kill him and his goons and they can ask the devil to build them a new house?"

You can have there be consequences for that action. That's fine. Just don't act like that situation is beyond my ability to fight my way out of. Same thing with Steve Haines, fed douchebag. Just let me kill him. To be fair, the game does, eventually, at the very end, let me kill him. It's just, I wanted to kill him 5 seconds after he opened his mouth, so waiting that long was very frustrating.

(There was never any possibility I was going to have Franklin kill Michael or Trevor, if only because whichever I chose, it would have made one of either Haines or Devon Westin happy, and I hated those guys. Besides, for all their bitching at each other, they did help Franklin make more money than he would have ever imagined making. Plus, they helped me save Lamar's dumb ass.)

Like Red Dead Redemption, the game will give you the option to skip to the next checkpoint if you keep dying at a certain spot. I used it a few more times here than I did in RDR (where I only used it once). About 5 times, total, maybe less. One of those was an incredibly boring sequence where I followed a janitor home from work, and he actually obeyed traffic signs. After I accidentally bumped his car and spooked him and failed once, after sitting through 5 minutes of that. I just rammed him immediately the next two times so I would fail and could then skip ahead.

The annoying thing is the game would make me sit through that, but the part where Michael hits his wife's yoga instructor in the face with a laptop is relegated to a cut scene?! Come on, I wanted to smash somebody in the face with a laptop, but every time I do it at work they call Human Resources!

There's still a lot of random crap I can do in the game. You know, if I feel like putting one of the characters through a bunch of games of tennis or whatever. Or I could go hunting for scraps of an alien spaceship. Or buy a few more businesses. I haven't tried to hijack a fighter jet from the military base yet. Not looking forward to the hospital bills I'll incur trying to pull that off.