Rockstar does it again with one of the best games the PS2 has ever seen!
The game takes place in the early 90’s and has three major cities in it, Los Santos, based off of Los Angeles, San Fierro (San Francisco), and Las Venturas (Vegas). At first all you have unlocked is Los Santos but as you play through missions you will end up unlocking the other two cities throughout the course of the game, which is by no means short. The game itself will take no less than 40 hours unless you simply use every cheat code possible and blast San Andreas apart.
The graphics are fairly decent and the environmental effects such as heat waves coming off the street, or fog in San Fierro are extremely well done. The one downfall is that the game runs at a never steady frame rate. This is rarely noticeable and the frame rate is always playable. One of Rockstar's great achievements this time around is creating absolutely no loading times in the actual game environment, save when the game loads a cut scene which will make your TV go black for a second or two. The cuts scenes are extremely well done and the voice acting is downright amazing along with awesome explosions of RPM’s, and the soothing fire of pistols, sub-machine guns, and fully automatic M4’s.
The story is very cool and has loads of side missions available as well. The one downfall is that characters which the game spends so much time developing and building tend to simply drop out toward the end of the game. The ending never ties up all lose ends although it is still quite satisfying and will leave you wanting more.
This game is amazing and is probably the best game so far in the Grand Theft Auto series and for any fan of Grand Theft Auto, or someone who lives in a country where it is not banned (hot coffee fiasco), I highly recommend picking it up.