Grand Theft Auto V Review

Grand Theft Auto V's central trick, three protagonists you can swap between mid-mission, solved the series' oldest problem: how to be a sociopath simulator and a character study at once. Michael carries the midlife-crisis satire, Franklin the upward-mobility arc, and Trevor absorbs every atrocity the player was going to commit anyway, making the mayhem canonical. The heists are the best mission design Rockstar has done, real multi-stage capers with crew choices and approach branching, and Los Santos itself is a miracle of art direction, from smog-gold sunsets to the ocean floor.

That it launched on hardware with 512MB of RAM and still anchors the charts three generations later says everything about the engineering. The story spreads itself thinner than Niko's and its torture set piece aims for satire it does not earn, holding story to A. Everything else here defined what a blockbuster open world means.