The best GTA ever

The new string to the Rockstar franchise GTA V blows all the GTAs away. Finally, this is organised mass killing. Grand Theft Auto V skips all of the preliminaries and gets right to the insanity

Set mostly within the glitzily superficial city of Los Santos, a warped mirror of Los Angeles, GTA V is a sprawling tale of criminal maniacs self-destructing on a blood-splattered career trajectory to hell. Michael is the middle-aged thug, obsessed with movies, who pulled a witness protection deal with the feds after a failed heist many years ago. When his old partner Trevor, a sociopath who bakes meth out in the desert, turns up in town, the two join forces with a young black kid, Franklin, who's set on leaving his gang-infested neighbourhood behind. The aim is a few final high-paying jobs, but there's a festering resentment between Trev and Michael that goes back a long way, a fizzing fuse that trails all the way through the carnage.

This three-character format emancipates the narrative, jettisoning the awkward requirement for one protagonist to be everywhere, witnessing everything in this vast world. Switching between the characters can be done at any time while off mission, and all three have their own little pet projects to get involved with, adding variety and a few amusing surprises: switching to Trevor usually involves some bodily function or weird violent episode, while Michael has his dysfunctional family to manage. And overlaying all this is a huge plot about warring government agencies and corrupt billionaires.

The result is a freewheeling joyride through genre cinema and literature: there are psychotic mafia bosses, insane motorcycle gangs, xenophobically sketched triads, corrupt secret agents and cynical movie producers – their stories twist and interconnect, slithering around the lives of our protagonists.

Speaking of mission design, there’s another reason Grand Theft Auto V feels like it ramps up a little more quickly: Rockstar finally fixed the gameplay. GTA games, for as polished and perfected as they are in certain respects, have always been broken in others. Grand Theft Auto IV didn’t have mid-mission checkpoints; if you died at any time during one of its prodigiously long missions, you were booted back into the world and had to restart the whole thing. Now, there are checkpoints and it makes a world of difference. If you bite it, and you will, you can hit a button to retry immediately not far from where you failed.

Nevertheless, if you want to hijack a plane in midair? Smoke some dubious weed and go on a very bad trip? Blow up a meth lab? Stop dreaming and start doing, the Grand Theft Auto V.