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Sunday 5 October, 2008
Having some familiarity with the GTA series of games, but having never played San Andreas I thought that it would be very similar to GTA III and GTA IV. While the game-play and style of the game was pretty much the same, GTA San Andreas had many details that made it amazing in it's own right.
Central to the storyline in San Andreas is the prominence of gangs. This is introduced at the beginning when CJ is thrown from a car by a cop onto a rival gang of the one CJ used to be involved with. In order to escape you must jump on a bike and ride away as fast as you can. This surprised me because in every other GTA game I've played I've never even seen a bike let along been able to ride it.
After completing the first few missions I go off to explore some of the sandbox play that's made the GTA series so popular. One of the first things that I noticed when looking at the map is that instead of being limited to a city with multiple islands, this is a state with multiple cities, much much bigger than GTA III's Liberty City. The second thing I noticed was that I could swim underwater, much better than drowning every time I walk into water. San Andreas also includes the ability to work out at gyms, something I found very boring, much like working out in the real world, but it comes in handy when trying to outrun the cops on foot!
I soon realized that leaving Los Santos wasn't a great idea as it immediately raised my wanted level to 4-stars so I decided to get back to the missions. The next mission is to get my name back out on the streets by tagging some buildings and tagging over some Ballas tags. This gets the attention of some Ballas standing near by and I soon discover that I can kill them with spray paint. Awesome. Other missions are pretty basic, drive-by's, chases and killings along with a little tutorial to learn how to shoot weapons.
Another interesting feature in the game is improvements to cars, I really enjoyed having a car that could hop with hydraulics and spent a good 10 minutes driving around bouncing up and down trying to jump things.
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