I want to like the Grand Theft Auto series from Rockstar, I really do. Ever since it became a cultural phenomenon with Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PlayStation 2 I've bought the games soon after they came out.
But I've never liked them.
At first I though it was me. All my friends thought the gangster tales and gun play were great. And while I like both of those things, when I see Grand Theft Auto games all I see are overly long missions that if you fail two-thirds of the way through you have to start over, and collecting random items like pills or cubes. Where they saw interesting mini-games like dirt bike races and car races, I saw tedious ones like delivering pizzas or dropping people off in cabs.
And the shooting? For a game based on shooting things, Grand Theft Auto games have the worst shooting in third-person shooters. That it took the development team making a completely different game, Red Dead: Redemption, to finally get the shooting right says volumes.
As for the story, criminal gets pulled back into a life a crime against his will was a cliche before the series even started in 1997.
And now we have a new one coming out this year. And what's that you say, there's more gangsters coming this Fall? And one of the characters I can play as is a criminal looking to get out of the life? Maybe it will be different this time.