GRAND THEFT AUTO : VICE CITY
REVIEW:
Discounting Grand Theft Auto 3, there's no other game that offers anything like the experience you'll have with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The game of fast cars and ruthless criminals packs more action and excitement into the first few hours than can be found in the entirety of most games. Released almost a full year after the previous version (and right during E3 -- thanks, Rockstar), there are a number of compelling, albeit minor, changes to the model that captivated us so much last year. I played through a lot of the game on the PS2 and have been hard at work this past week playing through it once again on the PC.
For those of you who've already experienced the joys of the previous game on the PC or PS2, let me spell out the major differences and improvements in store for Vice City. The story is much stronger this time around with a fully-fleshed out protagonist. The missions themselves are often longer and sometimes involve more kinds of gameplay than before. Buildings play a bigger role as well as the game permits players not only to enter structures but also buy them, opening up a new range of missions and rewards. Add to that more weapons, vehicles and a host of other surprises and you'll see that Vice City raises the bar for the series. The only downside is that the overall design of the game doesn't have the same impact that the previous game did. Hey, if it ain't broke...
If you've played Vice City on the PS2 there are fewer surprises in store. The two games are wholly identical in terms of content (making things a bit easier on our strategy guide guys). All the missions, bonuses and characters are completely identical to those in the console version. But the PC version benefits from better graphics, a slight tweak in the controls, a custom MP3-driven radio station and a customizable character skin.
If you've never played either game on any system, you're in for a real treat. Vice City tells a much tighter, more personal story that GTA3. While the anonymous nature of the character in the previous game made it a bit easier to loose yourself in the role, the main character in Vice City is tied to the overall narrative much more tightly. The story plays out in a series of cutscenes that set up the action of each individual mission.
The game takes place in the 1980s, before the events in GTA3. You play as Tommy Vercetti, a gangster who's just finished a 15-year stint in prison. Once he's out his bosses send him down to Florida's Vice City as the point man for some new operations. Once there Tommy teams up with a shifty lawyer (think Fredo) and the two begin plans for a big drug score. Once the drugs and the money disappear, Tommy finds himself fighting to discover who's cheated him while fending off the existing criminal elements of Vice City. As you might imagine, this type of scenario does involve a fair bit of violence. What you might not expect is how the game can walk a line between humor and horror while presenting all this material.
Vice City itself is a fully developed island town that lives and breathes like few other game settings before it. Cars drive up and down the streets, boats ply the water ways, news copters zip by overhead and everywhere you turn the citizens of Vice City are going about their business. The crooks, cops and citizens of the city are all capable of a level of dynamic behaviors. But even if you're not shooting at them, they still have agendas. You'll see rival gangs fighting each other in the streets and traffic accidents escalating in to fist fights.
And while you'll spend plenty of time walking amongst these encounters, the real heart of the game is stealing cars and driving from crime to crime. The list of cars available in the game is far too long for us to examine each of them in turn but some general comments should give you a good impression of what to expect. You'll find lots of small sporty cars and lots of large family sedans and wagons with plenty of gradations in between. Large delivery vans, city buses and trucks give you a slower but more damage-resistant ride. It's just what you got in GTA3, there's just more of it this time around.
Although it's not new for the series, I should probably say a few words about the rules of the road at this point. Rockstar's struck a great balance between offering you consequences for your actions and letting you run around without worrying about the real rules of the road. Cops aren't too worried about speeding, running red lights or even causing crashes. This keeps the pace of the game high and also ensures that, when you really do do something to cheese off the cops, it becomes a dynamic part of the game rather than an inconvenience. The pace of the game is also helped in that crashes aren't as catastrophic as they might be in real life; you can take a few hits and keep on going.
