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Wednesday 20 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
One of the many new editions San Andreas brought to the series was the ability to customize and build up your character’s stats. This added some RPG elements to the open world action game that make for some very fun game play. You can work on increasing your character’s respect, strength, driving skill, weapon skill, etc. Along with these stats you can change your characters physical appearance. You can change every element of your character’s clothes, add tattoos, and change hairstyles along with many more options. These elements don’t really make the game better, but make your character much more personal.
While on the subject of stats, there are new driving and weapon skills you can work on maxing out. As you increase your driving skill, by driving for extended periods of time without crashing, you make your character handle vehicles better. This is a nice feature because it feels like your character is improving along with you. You can also get weapon skill for each different class of weapon. If you play enough you can earn the gangster skill level with all weapons, which makes you more accurate, deadly, and even gives you the ability to dual-wield some weapons.
Yet another new feature of San Andreas is the ability to recruit gang members and participate in gang wars. This fits right in with the urban 1990’s gangster feel of the game. Your character now has the ability to recruit gang members (the number of people you can recruit depends on your respect level) and try and take over rival gang member’s territory. This is a very fun aspect of the game because it adds mission like structure tat any point of the game. The player could be joy riding around the city and decide that they want to start a gang war.
DESIGN:
The design of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is amazing. There is so much content in the game it is amazing everything works so smoothly together. San Andreas added a lot of new and innovative features to an already hugely popular series. Rockstar did an excellent job of adding tons of content to San Andreas without making it lose its charm. San Andreas looks, feels, and plays like previous GTA games and that is definitely a good thing.
One thing that was always very frustrating in GTA games was that your character could not swim, yet there was water all around. San Andreas finally allowed your character to swim, and what a difference it made. No longer would you progress through 99% of a difficult mission only to have it all end when you flipped your car over a guardrail into a river. The ability to swim has been long overdue in the GTA series and it is great that San Andreas included it.
Another example of the excellent design of the game is the sound. This includes sound effects, voice-acting, and of course the music. GTA games have always been known for their killer soundtracks and San Andreas is no exception. Although the music selection isn’t as catchy as GTA: Vice City’s, it is still far superior to most games on the market. On top of great music, the voice-acting is top notch which is a nice change from most video games.
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