There is a problem brewing in San Andreas...
This is not a critique on the GTA series since they are a fantastic set of games but this one just doesn't fit in.
The state of San Andreas is that of a boring half designed world. It is home to three cities which resemble Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas but they are all lack the soul and design that went in Liberty City and Vice City, they lack the clever layout that its predecessor had. Granted Los Santos blends the rich side of the city to the ghetto perfectly and shows the difference in cultures just like in real life. Las Venturas has some hilarious references to real life casino's and the same difference between the rich and the poor side of the city like in LS.
But San Fierro lets the side down with it being just a plain grey set of building on a hill, with no real effort in replicating the famous sight of San Francisco other than the Golden Gate Bridge.
The cites are surrounded by lush countryside for LS and SF and desert for LV each with small towns scattered in between but they are all fairly identical and just serve to get more health and weapons. But there is a the problem with the design in it that everything to on too much of a grand scale, it takes too long to get anywhere by car or bike and you are always too far away from useful things like missions and safe houses, it's only when you gain access to the skies (by passing some terribly hard missions) that you are able to travel anywhere with ease.
The game's structure is split into two main games, the first is that of a gangsta life which casts you as Carl Johnson, the "gangsta" cum good guy who wants to get rid of drugs from his neighbourhood and avenge he death of his mother etc, its all fairly predictable and Carl is a character who wants the player to feel for his situation but when he's just killed 60 people is not terribly easy to feel any sympathy for him.
The game soon turns into a story of revenge and betrayal and the plot moves along in a fairly smooth fashion but the story it tells is not as compelling as it was in Vice City. Put simply it feels very derevitive.
The missions are similar to that of any other GTA game with the usual drive characters around the map, kill somebody, drive back; they all use a fairly similar structure. There is some variety thrown in with some racing and on rails shooting. But each mission has an unpredictable difficulty with some being ridiculously easy and others being frustratingly unfair. The unfair missions usually revolve around the player relying on the AI to do the shooting, which they can't do because the NPC AI is fairly dumb.
The control scheme has become more complicated than previous GTA games a new aiming system and new abilities such as climbing and swimming but the aiming is just as terrible as always in GTA with it often aiming at the wrong person in the middle of a heated gun fight.
A game of this size is going to suffer in terms of glitches and this is no different being filled with bugs that should have been ironed out during development. There is also some pop up and slight slow down but the lack of load times is very impressive.
The music choice in Vice City was applauded for its variety and choice but SA has some absolutely terrible songs and the usually funny talk radio stations are just not as funny as they should be. The voice acting is as brilliant always with some great characters like Tenpenny (voiced by Samuel Jackson, no less) although there is a lot more swearing than previous iterations.
However its still a fatastic game. What with being a sand box game its exactly what you make of it and driving around, beating random people up and just generally messing around is still the funnest thing to do in this game.
The game looks a lot better than previous GTA's and whilst its never stunning its still very impressve with more pedestrians and cars on screen at once than ever before. The variety in vehicles and NPC models has improved as well.
There is still a lot of trademark GTA humour in the game with lots of brilliant references to other games and movies that seperate this game from the growing crowd of other sand box titles. A game that's filled with too many bugs, a poor soundtrack (purely subjective though) , poor mission structure, terrible aiming system and a constant need to vary the difficulty from laughably simple to incredibly frustrating does not deserve the praise it gets of being "perfect, amazing, fantastic."
Graphics- technically impressive but lack polish and there is too much clipping and various other bugs.
Sound- poorer soundtrack than expected but great voice acting
Gameplay- rubbish shooting and aiming controls with a poor mission structure and difficutly, but driving and flying is still very good.
Value- with a game this big and filled with a lot of secrets its impossible not to give it props in this catergory.
Tilt- its what you do with the game that decides what kind of an experience you have with it, and I had a lot of fun.