Introduction:
Grand Theft Auto 3 is about criminals, gangs and gangsters. The story begins with a butched bank robbery in which you get set up for by your girlfriend, while being transported to Staunton your convoy is ambushed and you make an amazing escape while the Police's attention is deterred, and now your out for some revenge on that silly bitch. Then the game begins! Grand Theft Auto 3 is the third game in the series suprisingly, although it is extremely different. The previous two games were both played from a top down perspective, with the main character being mearly a few pixels which were animated, also know as a sprite, now the game has made the big step into 3D and the final product is extremely faithful to the originals, it still feels like Grand Theft Auto and plays like it but the developers had a good idea of what options being 3 dimensional would open up. The game is now built up as well as out, a few select buildings are enterable, there are multiple freeway flyovers and bridges, and a lot of the driving aspect in the game is about maintaining control of the vehicles on different surfaces and slopes. Grand Theft Auto 3 definately has the best storyline of the 3 games, the characters you meet are more than just duplicates, they have full names and family members which you also meet, you discover most of their background as you progress in the game.
Gameplay:
Grand Theft Auto 3 is a game which will last you forever, I finished the story at 56% first time through, and although you can continue playing, I missed some crucial missions early on which aren't retrievable, because of the missions I chose to do, so I started again and the second time through is even more fun in my opinion, even the same missions don't feel the same because they play-out as you do them. When you've done just the story missions you'll probably have about 65% done. Rockstar have been kind enough to give us a whole lot of side missions in the Taxi's, Ambulances, Police cars, Fire Engines and FBI cars, and thats not all, probably the most fun side-objectives is finding all the Unique Stunt bonus ramps, and then completing them. When you hit one of these ramps the game goes into slow-motion and you are treated to a TV style camera of your car flying through the air, whether or not you complete the Unique jump is usually dependant on the speed of you vehicle. Then you've got 100 hidden packages to find which are scattered all around the 3 cities, they are hidden in some quite difficult-to-reach places and force you to do some problem solving more often than not, it makes a nice change from the missions, and provides a decent challenge.
If you played the game non-stop it would probably take about 80 hours to complete 100% and I can tell you that is not a short period of time. The amount of scenarios that can pop up during one go is endless, people get randomly bashed, cars get spooked by gunfire and gang members will always be up for a fight with someone.
Graphics:
Grand Theft Auto 3 feels like The Legend of Zelda 64: Ocarina of Time in the way it plays and looks, the camera system is extremely similar and it took a page out of Zelda's book and included a real-time day/night system, it has similar textures to the original Driver only the Architecture for the buildings is amazing, the whole city's design is second to none. You look at a stone wall and you expect it to be there as a 'boundary' but more often than not, there is something hidden behind that wall, its that awesome. YOU GO ANYWHERE! The weather effects are also top notch, when it rains the road gets slippery and is reflective, when the rain stops the road stays wet for a while with little puddles hanging around for longer. The fog is amazing, it blurs the streetlight flares, and the other cars headlights and they appear to refract through the fog, you can only see about 50 metres up the road. When the sun is low in the sky the lighting is generally orangy from the sunset, with lens flare effects kicking in when your looking directly at the sun. The water in Grand Theft Auto 3 isn't flat, it is 3 Dimensional with waves that get bigger when the weather is bad, the waves are repetitive though, if you just keep driving straight its like 'bounce, bounce, bounce', but hell its pretty cool when the waves are rough and its pretty funny when you crash your boat up onto one of the docks.
The streets are littered with little objects like rubbish bins, street lights, power poles, curbs and everything else you'd expect to see in a real city, and the best thing is that everything can be knocked over or broken. The vehicles in the game all have transparent windows that allow you to see the seats and steering wheels, they can be damaged in every panel, with scratches appearing after a small scrape, followed by dents on a harder crash, and finally parts break off after a really vicious crash. Every character animates quite well and looks the part, some of the pedestrians appear a bit low-poly due to the fact that the game can display about 30 of them at a time, along with the rest of the architecture in the game, and 15 - 20 odd cars. The cars are built well, with the doors being fully interactable, opened by the characters and broken off in an accident, hoods and boots flap after sustaining damage and eventually fly off after another crash. The car parts which fall off and lie on the road affect the cars behaviour when you run over them again, the car might bounce if it runs over a hood, same with pedestrians that have been hit, the car drives over them with a glamorous bump.
Gameplay - 9.8 out of 10.0
Graphics - 9.2 out of 10.0
Sound - 9.6 out of 10.0
Difficulty - 9.2 out of 10.0
Multiplayer - 0.0 out of 10.0
Lasting Appeal - 9.5 out of 10.0
Overall - 9.6 out of 10.0
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![Grand Theft Auto 3 [PAL]](b_gta3.jpg)
