Some frustrations remain from the original game, however. Failing a mission no longer requires you to drive all the way to the quest giver instead, a new checkpoint system lets you jump back into the action almost immediately. Grove Street Games have added a few quality of life changes, such as GPS navigation in vehicles and the ability to set custom waypoints on the map. There simply isn’t enough time to manually aim at each Triad or mafioso without dying, and about halfway through the game I turned on aim assist in order to make it through gunfights alive. Enemies are still kind of dumb, and while they’ll occasionally take cover behind cars and crates, they will rush you en masse most of the time. Gunplay is a different story GTA 3 now having over-the-shoulder free aiming doesn’t suddenly make the game a tactical cover shooter. This gives you a lot more control over the speed of your vehicle, a welcome benefit given how much time you spend weaving through oncoming traffic. Driving is definitely much improved, with acceleration now controlled by the right trigger rather than a face button. Let’s just say that the word ‘inspired’ is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. Prior to release, Rockstar touted ‘ GTAV-inspired modern controls’. Some tweaks have been made to the gameplay to bring it in line with the expectations of modern players. Liberty’s individual pedestrians don’t have a huge amount of personality, but collectively they add up to help the city become what every romantic comedy director claims New York to be: an additional character in the story. It’s actually quite impressive how much of the city’s feel Rockstar was able to convey on the PlayStation 2, a console less powerful than the phones in our pockets today. Liberty City itself is surprisingly lifelike I’ve seen New York for myself since the last time I played the game, and it has been endlessly amusing to recognise places I’ve been. GTA 3‘s plot, such as it is, channels classic crime stories like Goodfellas and The Sopranos and boasts a wide cast of larger than life characters. The gameplay is satisfying and arcade-y, with an immediacy that newer GTA games have lost a bit in their trend towards realism. Cruising down the street in a stolen sports car, royalty free music blaring and your Uzi rattling, is every bit as enjoyable as it was in 2001. The missions are simplistic, the side-activities are crude, and you’re only given a limited set of weapons and tools with which to approach them.īut GTA 3’s relatively small scope doesn’t prevent it from being a tonne of fun. 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V opens with a bombastic bank robbery and car chase straight out of a Michael Mann movie GTA 3’s first proper quest tasks you with giving a sex worker a lift home. In many ways, the game seems downright quaint when seen through modern eyes. It’s certainly eye-opening to replay GTA 3 in 2021, when games are still building upon the blueprint it laid out. I couldn’t help but wonder: does Grand Theft Auto 3 hold up? GTA 3 is often overshadowed by its sequels, but I wanted to go back to where it all started. It was the bleak, mean streets of Liberty City, a twisted mirror image of New York at the turn of the century. As the games downloaded to my PS5, it wasn’t the neon glitz of Vice City or the vastness of San Andreas that first called to me. A game that offered you freedom, or something like it.Ģ0 years later, Rockstar and port studio Grove Street Games have released Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. A game that let you go wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted, in whoever’s car you wanted. It’s funny that an open world crime game was ever a novelty, but GTA 3 really was a landmark event. Grand Theft Auto 3 was something of a holy grail to me back then a game I had to go my friend Alex’s house to play in secrecy, knowing full well I wouldn’t be allowed to own it myself for years to come.Įven at that young age, I had a sense of how truly groundbreaking Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 3 was. I grew up in a relatively strict Catholic household, the kind where my Irish grandad would give nine-year-old me sips of his beer one day and where my dad would pre-screen X-Men to see if he thought I could handle it the next (he didn’t). Touting visual enhancements, performance upgrades and gameplay tweaks, this collection of remasters purports to offer the ultimate way to experience these classic games. Grand Theft Auto 3: The Definitive Edition is part of the new Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition collection available on all current platforms.
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