It’s finally here GTA V, the game that I have been waiting for since the first trailer was released all the way back in November 2011. Since that day we’ve heard all these amazing new features to the GTA franchise like having 3 lead characters and real time character switching, as well as having tons of old features make a welcome return like character and vehicle customization. GTA V was a game that broke many sales records and surprisingly my high expectations too.
GTA V as previously mentioned features three lead characters named Michael De Santa, Franklin Clinton and Trevor Philips. Michael is a former professional bank robbery (as well as being successful in many other criminal activities) but after a heist went wrong he 
decided that it was time to retire from the criminal life and move to Los Santos. Franklin is a low end criminal who is looking for bigger and better opportunities which leads him to Michael who Franklin thinks can get him that opportunity. Then lastly there is Trevor who is not only just mentally unstable, he was also Michael’s former criminal partner before Michael “retired”
The first missions of GTA V is pretty much a tutorial for two of the major features in GTA V, character switching and heists. In the mission you play as Michael a few years ago during his final bank heist, in the mission you are shown the basics of character switching like at one point in the mission Michael is caught by a security guard with a gun to his head and you have to switch to Trevor to save him. Later on in the game you can switch characters while not currently doing any missions, when you switch characters most of the time you will see a cutscene of the character you have to switched to doing something like Trevor eating out of the trash or Franklin coming out of a strip club. Character switching doesn’t take too long to load either, it’s not instant but it’s not to slow.
One of the major problems for me with GTA IV was that the missions pretty much all felt the same, and after a while it became boring. Rockstar took notice of fans complaints that missions needed a change up similar to how San Andreas had a variety of different missions. Now in GTA V it’s not all “go kill this guy for your reward” type of missions they are varied like I mentioned before with the addition of heist missions due to the popularity of the “Four Leaf Clover” mission in GTA IV that has you robbing a bank, but GTA V 
takes it to another level as you have to get equipment ready and actually plan these heists before hand like picking who you want to take with you and choosing between two ways of doing the missions which means there is a reason to go back and do the mission again. I really enjoyed the heists in GTA V and my one complaint would just be that there should have been more heist missions because they are that fun.
Like all Grand Theft Auto games the story is only the beginning on the fun. GTA V brings back a lot of features that many people missed in GTA V like flying planes, character customizing (Haircuts, tattoo’s and beards) and also being able to mod vehicles. Then there are new features added like a bunch of new sports to play like Tennis and Golf which both are really fun to play as well. Along with a array of new sports to play you can also test your luck in the stock market, buy stock and possibly earn millions in profits or make a bad investment and lose it all. There is so much you can do outside of missions that we created a list of everything you can do (Link here)
Gameplay is also solid too with some new features added like a special skills that can be activated by pressing both analogue sticks at the same time, while doing this as Franklin in a car you go into slow motion mode and can avoid some nasty car collisions, and as Michael you can activate it during shooting which kind of reminded me of Red Dead Redemption’s “Dead eye targeting” car gameplay will be a love/hate feature some are already disliking it and some love the car gameplay, me personally I think the car gameplay is pretty good. Melee fighting has also been improved from GTA V, punches feel/connect in a much more realistic fashion, at one point I found myself hitting people on the streets for the hell of it because it was just fun to do.
Final verdict
GTA V was another solid entry into the Grand Theft Auto series, I enjoyed the variety of single player story missions, the tons of side missions to do as well as all the returning features from San Andreas that got left out of GTA IV. There were some problems for me like textures completely disappearing quite a few times throughout the game which kind of takes you out of that amazing experience and then I also had issues with the police system in the game, it got annoying when you’d have a fight or shoot someone in the middle of nowhere and your wanted level would automatically go up but other than that I really enjoyed everything else. Pick up this great game right now, and also check back for the GTA Online review next month (Here’s a list of Online features confirmed so far to get you excited)
+Missions are varied
+Heists are fun
+Tons of things to do
+Solid gameplay
+Great characters and story
-Texture issues
-Cop/wanted mechanics
9.5/10
