I Played GTA V...

This will remain as spoiler-free as possible, because apparently people care about that kind of stuff.  The easy thing to do would be just not to read this, but you seem to lack the self-control necessary for that and instead will blame it on me for ruining the game for you. It's not like I'm texting stuff to your phone, or holding your eyes open like A Clockwork Orange. 

Let's get the important point out of the way first: this is a fun game, and you should probably play it unless you're like 11 years old or something. It's probably not a game for those kinds of people, since you get to bang whores and kill people and stuff like that. Generally stuff that you don't want little kids seeing or emulating or well, actually going out and doing. Not a week goes by where I don't hear about some 10 year old robbing a hooker. Or maybe that was a dream.

Driving is this game is different from the last one. Maybe. It definitely feels different. The fast cars definitely feel faster, but everything feels a little more slippery. And all the other drivers are very fragile. If you hit another car, they're almost definitely dying. Fine, that's funny because it's a game, but every single driver that dies ends up leaning forward onto the horn (which is how I know when I've killed someone (every single time I drive a car)), and that's absurdly annoying. It's also a lot harder to explode cars in this one. Back in the day, cars would go from working, to smoking, to being on fire, to exploding and being a fiery former car. And that was awesome. You could drive around, smashing cars, and then use the car as a bomb when it finally burst into flames. Obviously completely unrealistic, but who cares? Shooting 30 people and then hiding in a tunnel until the cops give up their search is unrealistic too, but that happens regularly. Bring back fireballs of death!

Also, the cars are now more damageable (probably not a word) even though they don't catch on fire. Getting hit by a couple cops means that you usually are going to get a damaged wheel and then the car drives absurdly horribly. Which brings up the next point: trying to change vehicles while the cops are after you is basically a death sentence. It takes like 4 hours to get out of a car, pick a new car, get into it and start it. Not that you're going to make it that far, because you've already been shot to death. I die a lot in this game. Mostly by cops, but also by various other things.

Within my first few hours of playing, I had fallen off a freeway (totally my fault), been shot to death several times (probably not my fault... those cops have a hair trigger about hitting their cars or shooting their friends), flown through a windshield (apparently traffic light poles can be knocked down but trees cannot), and been mauled by a mountain lion. Yeah, a mountain lion. They're instant deaths. If you hear one roar, you have a couple seconds to kill it or else you're mauled. I have no idea if this is true for sharks or not, because I murder those fuckers as soon as they appear. No Jaws bullshit here. I also started a gang fight. Sort of. They were a gang, I was a single person. They won. Although later, once I'd gotten some quality assault weapons and figured out how to hide behind stuff, those gang members have been getting mowed down on the regular.

So, some improvements from GTA4. The biggest one is you no longer have to deal with your stupid asshole friends calling you all the time ("Hey cousin, we should go bowling!" "Shut the fuck up, Roman!!"). That was easily the worst thing about the game. I also like the new weapon wheel, which makes it easy to switch from pistol to assault rifle to grenade launcher, which were really the only things I used. Sniper rifle too, but I always planned that one ahead and didn't really need to be switching around. Minigun? Yeah, but here come the cops. Rocket launcher? Too slow, but good for helicopter issues (although they are always replaced almost instantly by more helicopters. Go away, assholes!). Nothing else was really important for me, and I got through the game so there's that.

Non-improvements? Well, the cars are a little weird, but I'm much less happy about how fragile the main characters feel. I have almost maximum stats, but I'm constantly dying. Yeah, I suck, but I sucked equally as Niko and didn't spend so much time being released from the hospital. Let me just run around murdering fools! That's half the fun (the other half being driving around murdering fools). Also the non-fireball-cars-of-doom. I loved those things.

So go play this game, and think about what a horrible person that makes you as you kill whores and put sticky bombs on other people's cars.

-Jon