Grand Theft Auto V

Despite playing GTA 5 for over a decade, I never beat the campaign until the end of 2024. GTA 5 has the weakest map out of the 3 GTA games i have played; San Andreas, GTA 4, and of course, GTA 5. That's not to say the map is bad, but with a game like GTA where the map is its own character, I feel this is an important point to bring up. The map offers plenty of variety, but little reason to ever visit the middle section of the map (the desert and Sandy Shores area most notably). Most of my time in free roam is spent in the southern Los Santos area of the map, as without there being multiple cities, I don't feel the need to ever leave Los Santos. Paleto Bay is okay, and I find myself visiting every now and again, but this is usually only a quick visit as I race pass in my super car trying to circle the map as fast as possible. This is made possible by a highway that goes around the outside of the entire map, and also straight through Paleto Bay without any interruptions, completely negating the use of any roads that go through the middle of the map in order to get to or from Paleto Bay. The game has also seen downgrades since its predecessor, including worse vehicle handling, overall worse AI (from what I could tell), a less detailed and less 'alive' city, and a lack of building interiors and worse physics system. It however excels at new quality of life features, such as improved aiming and a weapon wheel. Having a wide variety of vehicles that you could also customize and a military base filled with military vehicles also rules, which was all oddly missing from GTA 4. These features are easy to take for granted 12 years after launch, it's hard to imagine that GTA 5 is still the latest entry in the series 12 years on. Having 3 protagonists is fun, and switching between them always keeps free roam fresh. The narrative is nothing to rave about, and at times seems to go a little too over-the-top for my liking. I would argue that GTA 4's narrative is better than 5's, but to be frank, no GTA story has really gripped me the way I would like them to just yet. I hope that GTA 6 will provide the narrative I crave from Rockstar, as we have seen how talented their writers really are with RDR2, which had a story that had me fully immersed and invested more so than any other piece of media I've ever seen or played (apart from maybe Game of Thrones).