Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas : Games : Web Wombat

It's sold millions upon millions of copies, caused more uproar than a transsexual Tim Curry at a church meeting and provided politically incorrect amusement.

The Rockstar boys have trawled the eighties and the naughties in their quest to satirise and summarise criminal culture, and, today, we're going to be looking at their irreverent take on the early nineties, complete with big bad gangstas, terrible music and clothing dead people would flinch from wearing.

Before I begin, I'd like to note that Rockstar have never been known for their sensitivity, and so San Andreas is one very, very raw game.

Coarse language is at an all time high, racial slurs are no longer out-of-bounds and if anything the violence level has been upped a couple of notches. So anybody with a low threshold for any of the above should just stop reading now, as should anybody offended by the previous games in the series.

Carl Johnson was one of your aforementioned big bad gangstas, and he's come home to Los Santos (one of the three major cities within the fictional state of San Andreas, meant to represent the great state of California before it got its own Ah-Nuld) to find his mother, matriarch of the Orange Grove crime family.

Only thing is, she's been murdered, his family is now falling apart and his hood is filled with drug dealers and scum. So Carl takes it upon himself to reclaim the streets in a campaign that will take him across San Andreas and back again.

Which brings me to my first point: I have a problem with San Andreas as a setting. Unlike Vice City's titular capital or GTA3's Liberty City, San Andreas suffers from a personality problem. Namely, the timeframe.

The nineties aren't so far away as to be nostalgic (thus removing a lot of the laugh potential), and yet they're not close enough for us to think of the fashion, tunes, cars and movies of the era as anything other than brain-bendingly horrific.

Add to that a cast of characters who can only be described as unsympathetic and a script that seems more about schlock and shock than actual plot, and things are already looking down.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - more violence,
more swearing and more crudity in general

Of course, it's not all bad. San Andreas, when eventually unlocked in its entirety, is massive (each city is basically the size of the whole of Vice City, and that's not including the miles and miles of countryside separating each locale) and, to go with all this extra space, there's an amazing number of things to do.

You can ride BMXs, go skydiving, swim, work out, date, pig out on fast food, engage in low-rider hopping competitions, tag your territory, hire gang members, play pool and basketball, go dancing (truly painful due to controller problems) and I haven't even covered all the extra-curricular activities on show.

Not all of this is particularly fun or amazing, but it does help to deepen the sense of immersion, even if you would rather beat your compatriots around their various heads for being such morons than play pool with them.

To go along with this, Rockstar have introduced a transparent stat-system into the game, bringing some RPG elements to the GTA table.

Basically, most every action you do in the game has a stat attached, and doing these things for longer or with more skill lets you raise the associated stat.

Doing tricks on your BMX, for instance, will level up your BMX ability, meaning you can corner more easily and keep from falling off in the event of a crash.

By the same token, Carl himself has several stats including appearance (what clothes you buy, tattoos you have and haircut you pay for), muscle tone/fat (how much exercise you do), respect (this is gained by doing missions, mainly, and dictates how many members you can induct into your posse) and stamina (how long you can sprint on foot or with the aid of a BMX).

What this boils down to is a character that can be truly yours, once again upping the immersion factor.

Mission-types have also received a casual once-over, so you'll get to do a whole lot more, including stealth about (using Manhunt animations, I might add) and cut throats, as well as burn down marijuana crops with a flamethrower, though many missions will remind you of the previous games early on in the proceedings.

Mention should be made of the fact that the difficulty level this time around is far higher than that of the previous games in the franchise, and this could be off-putting to newcomers to the series. Be that as it may, anyone familiar with third-person actioners should be able to navigate their way through the game without too much in the way of trouble.

When it comes to environments, few games
can touch GTA: San Andreas for sheer scope

One of the things that simultaneously lets down and holds up San Andreas is the RenderWare engine, which is beginning to show its age, but still manages to pull off a few clever tricks.

Character models are blocky and textures tend to be a little on the blurry side, while the framerate is wildly inconsistent…however, this is offset by excellent animation and car modeling, a wonderful weather system (heat-shimmer on hot days and rain complete with heavy film-grain effects on soggy evenings, as well as fog and so on), and generally good pixel-shader use.

It's not the best looking kid on the block, but it's still no slouch.

Audio has always been a big thing with the GTA games, and San Andreas is, in some ways, no exception.

Voice-overs are good (with guest appearances by Ice-T, Samuel L. Jackson and James Woods, along with a massive crew of rappers, MCs and DJs). Then again, C.J. and his compatriots could have been replaced by trained monkeys, so it's a bittersweet pill to swallow.

By the same token, the radio station music, excellent in the previous two games, is barely average this time around, with the only standouts being a track each from Soundgarden ("Rusty Cage") and Rage Against the Machine ("Killing In The Name"), and an appearance by Ozzy Ozbourne ("Hellraiser").

A disappointment, but still a good game in its own right; some will love it and some will hate it. This could be a sign that it's time to move on for Rockstar, or it could just be a sign they need to kick the RenderWare engine out and rethink their whole approach.

Either way, the chrome is starting to come off this particular bumper.

Game: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
System: PS2
Players: 1-2
Online: No
Developer: Rockstar Games
Distributor: Take 2 Games

Rating: 80%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is on the shelves now.

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