More on GTAV - Review

I got stuck into GTA5 last night, and on some levels I was impressed, but on others wholly unhappy.

The controls, in my opinion, are far too twitchy, the AI traffic getting in your way is more annoying than ever, especially when you see the run through and you go to do it and ludicrously your car slows, or their car accelerates totally out of place for the situation.

I also hate the aiming mechanics, the aiming dot on my TV is so tiny as to disappear in the background most all the time, also the set pieces of missions, some of them are so annoying, I was in a car chasing my boat being towed; for example; and the car would literally slow just to give time for the dialogue to be played... and then when one character had to leap from the car onto the towed boat, I was behind the trailer, pressed against the boat for like 2 minutes... No jump, I finally move, so there's no boat to jump onto... the AI character leaps forward and under my wheels for the big fat "Mission Failed".

It just feels so glitchy, I'm going to let the game update tonight, by attaching to the internet with the console at last, but I've purposefully played the game away from updates to see how they let it be released, and you know what, it's not as impressive as the news coverage would have suggested.

There are bugs... Like you get a visual crash with static and then the system resolves this and recovers, but its very jarring.  You have floating and moonwalking animations, you have really rather poor facial animation of the characters going on.  Some of the mouths don't sync at all, especially on prominent supporting characters, like Michaels wife Amanda.

And then there are problems with the character switching mechanics, like I was Michael, I was told to change to be Franklin, so I did... The game changed me back to Michael and informed me to change to Franklin again... because it was mid-tutorial... in the mean time... "Mission Failed"...

The wife was sat there watching "Mission Failed"... "Mission Failed"... and my frustration showing, and she was saying... "just turn left"... on the motorbike.. yeah, sure it don't turn it just pirouettes, no finesse.

Then the map in the bottom left, yes its showing me where to go, but its 21 inches from the view point I'm looking at to the map on the bottom left, at least on my screen... And you can't take in the map without actually staring at it, the reason... its slightly transparent, so you can see textures through it... Road textures especially look like static on the mini-map, it looks like the sat nav is having a hard day with static... and that distracts from being able to take in the mini-map's information.  Also the oblique angle its at (isometric) is not as easy to read as perhaps a 2D top down mini-map would have been, especially with fast moving car chases...

And that's the big appeal, the big world in this game, but until you get to know the place - and its a big place! - you're going to have to use the mini-map, and its too short sighted, too small a heads  up of what's coming in the early game to plan where you're going.

So to be fair the game's good, but not as spectacular as everyone would think.

The other problem I have is the jaggies, I've watched the YouTube, I've checked out how it should look, on both PS3 and Xbox360 before buying the console just for this game, and it looked ace.

I've had it, seen it, checked my display settings are good... all to no dice, it looks so jaggy in places on this PS3... I dunno, maybe I'm spoilt by my PC which easily out performs this PS3 by 3 or 4 fold, but right now GTAV on the PS3 does not look like any of the footage I've seen recorded... And this isn't to start a flame war.  I'm just saying is all.