The GTA that ate itself
Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City (2009, 360 / PS3) contains a couple of new episodes, previously downloadable, and set in Liberty City, the dystopia setting for Grand Theft Auto 4. In one you work your way up the ranks of a biker gang. In the other you’re the muscle for a gay nightclub owner. Most GTA games worked as grand, almost lyrical westerns, but these pared down episodes are more gritty – they’re genuinely like little enclosed episodes from a longer TV series. They don’t quite breathe on their own terms.
Here people speak constantly, cut-scenes come and go, and the pieces are literally swimming in dialogue, but I find it all washes over me. If believable dialogue is the measure of what constitutes serious gaming, then count me out – this has it in spades, but it amounts to nothing. I’d rather play in silence.
What used to pass as complex satire seems to have turned in on itself. The connection with the original GTA conceit – a satire of modern Western values – seems to have been overrun by its own subject matter. It’s as if the thugs and lowlifes have taken over and all that is left is the crudeness and the violence itself. It’s a game that no longer knows what it means, and what it wants to say – all it has is the capacity to keep on moving on.
And what you do was never that strong. You drive around a believable city, but video gaming is swamped with such experiences these days. The 2-year-old engine is creaking. The shooting was never satisfying. I never enjoyed wrestling with the helicopter controls. The cars don’t handle how I want them to – the idiosyncracies used to give the game colour and variety, now they just frustrate.
If this was your first GTA it might blow you away – I’ve played 9 of them now, and countless open-world competitors and the concept feels almost totally redundant. As it should after so long. What felt like the best game in the World two years ago now feels like a relic. Time to go west.
