Your only choice is to stump up £55 for three poorly remastered classics that deserve to have been treated with far greater respect than this. If the three games were also available separately then the obvious suggestion here would be to buy San Andreas now and see if they fix the other two later, but that’s not an option.
PC gamers are ruining multiplayer gaming with cross-play cheats - Reader’s Feature Vice City is barely any better, as while it has a voiced protagonist, by Ray Liotta no less, it’s just as obsessed as the first game with copying scenes and scenarios from famous gangster movies, rather than creating anything original itself. That’s absolutely not a criticism of the original game, given GTA 3 pioneered the whole concept of modern open world games, but it doesn’t stop it feeling any less archaic nowadays.
GTA 3’s protagonist is entirely mute, which immediately feels wrong, and there’s little in the way of an overarching storyline, just an endless series of ‘drive here and kill someone’ missions. The sense of nostalgia will be so strong for some people that they’ll be able to ignore, consciously or not, how simplistic and repetitive the gameplay and storytelling is, but in the cold light of day it’s very obvious. The final, intractable problem is how the games themselves have aged over time, and the answer is not very well.
It should also be noted that fan-made mods have done all these things, particularly the improved graphics, much better than Rockstar themselves and yet, predictably, they’ve all been hit with takedown orders for their troubles. It’s odd that there are less camera options than the originals though, including the iconic top-down view. The ability to instantly restart a failed mission is also greatly appreciated. Other changes are unequivocally for the better, such as the modern mini-map and waypoint system, and weapon selector wheel, added to each of the games. But most of the time this ends up looking weirdly cartoonish, homogenising the appearance of characters in terms of both age and ethnicity. These have all been removed now, in favour of more detailed character models and shading options. Originally the games attempted a photorealistic look, especially by the time of San Andreas, which pasted complex textures onto the faces of even minor characters. These and the litany of other glitches will no doubt be fixed in time, but another issue is the ugly new art style chosen for human characters. The longer draw distance is also a double-edged sword, as when you’re flying there’s no attempt to add any atmospheric haze or fog and it looks incredibly fake – like you’ve accidentally switched on the debug mode. The improved frame rate is a welcome improvement in theory, except all the games suffers from unexplained freezes and hiccups that have initially been blamed on moving the games over to Unreal Engine.
GTA: The Trilogy – and these are the better looking characters (pic: Rockstar Games) Which means many people won’t have played the games since they were first released – which creates quite the culture shock when time catches up with your memories. GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas, all had mobile versions (which is bizarre in itself, given how ill-suited the games’ controls are to a touchscreen) but only San Andreas’ one was released on consoles. One of the contributing problems is that, for reasons best known to themselves, Rockstar has never had a proper remaster of any of the games before. Instead, the majority of issues are cosmetic, like the ridiculously broken way the rain works, as it penetrates through solid objects and disappears when over the sea. It’s common to see cars and people disappearing into the ground or ghosting through walls, as random objects float through the air or turn invisible, but by luck rather than judgement you’ll rarely fail a mission because of them. Although all three game are filled with bugs, relatively few directly impact how you play and we only had a couple of crashes – and those solely on San Andreas. It’s important to point out straight away that this is not a Cyberpunk 2077 situation.