So you jump in a car, bum it round to the crack den and proceed to knock seven shades of shit out of your target with the baseball bat you looted from the corpse of an earlier victim. A typical mission might see you tasked with beating up a drug dealer. The core gameplay has changed hardly at all from Vice City. It's not the most interesting of hooks -although there's a pleasing amount of backstabbing, betrayal and brotherly love thrown in - but it works, and the promise of new areas to explore helps drive you on. Dragged back to the hood by the death of your mother, you start running with your old homies once more. The plot is pretty much thus: it's the early 1990s, and you're Carl CJ' Johnson, a Los Santos native who's spent the past few years thugging it up out of state.

Wisely, Rockstar feeds you fresh slices of San Andreas as you advance through the game's story, opening up routes to new areas as you progress. Fully five times bigger than Vice City, it's home to three cities and numerous small towns, with plenty of redneck-packed, hillbilly countryside in between.īut as with other GTA titles, you can't see everything right from the start.

Inspired by California (and a certain neon-lit corner of Nevada), the game world is huge. The main departure is that instead of being given the freedom to roam around a single city, you get a whole state in which to indulge your gangsta leanings. Rockstar North's latest sticks closely to the formula. Embark on the sort of whore-murdering rampage that recently got Hillary Clinton's knickers in a public twist, or simply cruise around town looking cool - the choice is yours. You have the option of undertaking missions - some of which keep the story ticking along, some of which don't - but you are also free to roam around the city if you wish the game world is very much your oyster. But here are the revision notes for anyone who may have recently awoken from a coma: you're a career criminal in a fictional city (although one that's clearly inspired by a real-life metropolis) filled with people and vehicles, any of which you can kill/drive (delete as appropriate).

Unless you've been squatting in a Saddam-style hidey-hole for the past ten years, I'm going to assume you know what the GTA games are all about. But now I wish I'd had the patience to wait that half a year, because after spending time with this version I'd much rather be playing San Andreas through for the first time on my PC. As Proud PC gamers, you may feel a little aggrieved to be reading this review now, rather than nine months ago when this game first reared its tabloid-baiting head on the PlayStation 2.1 myself crumbled in typical lily-livered fashion, holding out until around last Christmas, at which time I decided that I couldn't wait another half a year for a game that all and sundry were raving about.

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