Sound/Music

Wow. Another amazing part of GTA3. The sounds are very well done. People scream as you run them down or shoot at them. Vehicles sound sweet. Sirens scream as the police or ambulances respond to your massacre. And... my favorite part. The radio stations. There are nine different stations ranging from reggae, electronica and talk to metal and a sweet 80's flashback station. Each of the stations also have their own set of ads and sense of humor. Heh. I often just leave the game sitting when I'm at work so I can listen to the music, and the talk show just kills me. There's just something great about hopping into a hijacked car, throwing your shotgun on the seat, turning on the '80s station and burning some rubber. (I'm your DJ for the afternoon, Michael Hunt. Just call me Mike.)

Controls/Camera

Pretty much the same controls you see in any shooter. WASD, mouse for weapon up/down, fire to use gun, space to jump etc. Keys are remapable, but the defaults seem to be very well thought out and assessable. The camera is easily changable to a number of preset angles, but the default behind and above you mode seems to work the best. You can even set it to the old sk00l GTA above head view, but it sucks when the third person is so amazing. If you pull off a really sweet stunt, the game slows down matrix style, and the camera automatically goes to a nice angle to see your car flying through the air. Very cool.

Weapons

Booyah. You want guns? We got guns! From your fists and feet to your general all purpose friend, Mr. Baseballbat all the way up to sniper rifles, rocket launchers, car bombs, hand grenades, assault rifles, submachine guns and Molotov cocktails. We've got them all, and they all come with an easy to use point and click interface! Load up and go!

Guns can generally be bought from your local Ammu-Nation superstore. (Hey, you look trustworthy, have a gun!) You can also kill people and take their weapons if they're packing, or if the mission requires a special weapon it will be provided to you. You can also find weapons hidden, so look around. Weapon visual effects are great, and the effect they have on your enemies is even greater!

One of my favorite things to do in this game is look out the window with the uzi and do a drive by. Oh yes. We've got drive by shootings as well. Ahhhhh yeah.

AI

Ummm... The AI is generally of the "run at you shooting" sort. Shoot back and they'll usually run away, but it depends on the character. Police just call for backup. And the cops aren't too bad in this game. They'll ram you off the road, or try and block you in and kill you. Create enough mayhem and you'll wind up with more and more heavily armed law enforcement on your ass, including the FBI and S.W.A.T. Teams. SWAT=Bad news for you, as does the nasty police chopper that makes it damned hard to avoid these bastards. The coppers will take cover behind their cars when they get into a firefight as well.

The computer also starts placing squad cars ahead of you as you run. Grrrrr. Other than the cops, the AI is fine. Nothing special but.. Well, you're generally out in the middle of a street, and there's not much cover. How smart do they have to be really?

Manual

Eh. It's a manual. Gives you the basics. You really don't need to read it for much there's a tutorial at the start of the game that gives you all the same basics in an in game situation, although it is handy to keep it beside your keyboard as a quickref. I have the map on the wall behind my computer. It's saved my ass a few times when I needed to find the hospital quickly.

Stuff that sucked

In GTA3 you have to return to your hideout to save your game. When are game developers going to realize that.... I LIKE TO SAVE WHENEVER I WANT. Damn it this pisses me off, and it seems it's on console ports. (A friend assures me that this stupidity is very common on consoles. In fact, it's the norm!) There's nothing more annoying than having to do the same damned mission 10x because you couldn't save part way through it and messed it up. Lord save us, and make people add a save game option. I don't even think it would be that hard to do! It should be 11th freakin' commandment: Thou Shalt Add an Anytime/Anywhere save game feature!

Most of the people I've talked to who are playing this game are experiencing severe frame rate drops at some points in gameplay, usually when there's a crapload of cops after you. This happened quite often during testing. Not sure what it is, we're only running 800x600, and this machine should handle that easily. Doesn't happen with any other games on this system. Very odd.

No multiplayer! I can't believe there's no multiplayer! I'm hoping they'll be releasing a patch in the future to add TCP/IP support, for this is one game that would be outright amazing with multiplayer added. :)

I hated the way the controls switched from mouse/keyboard to keyboard only when I went into Ammu-Nation. Very annoying, and soooo console.

Bug Report

Not really a whole hell of a lot here to report, other than the fact that I had to patch Windows XP to get the game working. (Annoying, but common with this one apparently.) It's an MS bug, so we'll be blaming them this time around.

Occasionally... Actually frequently... The game seems to loose track of your location and speed and you get catapulted forward down slopes or off stairs. Often to your death, or at least sever discomfort. (Nothing like juuuuust completing a mission with 20% health and dying walking down a laneway when you become airborne.

Conclusions

Go out and buy it. This game is a complete blast. It's definitely not a game for the kids, but oh boy. All the guilty pleasure of the first and second games are back, and they've been bundled with an amazing looking engine, tons of new gameplay features and a killer soundtrack. I love a game this open ended as well. :) There's just so much stuff to do out there you're not going to get bored for a long, long time, even without multiplayer.

This is one of the rare cases where a sequel easily beats down it's ancestor, tears out it's heart and feasts. The team has obviously put a ton of work into this game, and it's sheer addiction factor has me playing far later into the night than is healthy. Damn you Rockstar!