Sound: 10
Gameplay: 10
Value: 10
Reviewer's Tilt: 10
Overall: 9.7
Reviewed by Chris
You’ve gotten it because everyone’s been talking about it for so long now. When we first heard about this game just a few months before it was released, gamers everywhere were excited. And they should have been. It’s the sequel to the most talked about game of all time, Grand Theft Auto III. When that game debuted last October, it became an overnight success. Gamers everywhere were happily at its mercy as it let the player take the role of a criminal who gets to do virtually anything in a huge, sprawling metropolis. It’s quite exciting.
When I first heard about Vice City, I wasn’t completely excited right away. To be honest, I was still playing GTAIII; I didn’t need another one. Well as the months passed on until the big release of the game, I started reading previews for this game. Game Informer printed the best preview I have ever read. They talked about huge accomplishments that would be attained, how Vice City would improve virtually every problem gamers had with GTAIII and at the same time, give the player entirely new experiences such as driving around in motorcycles (something oddly missing from GTAIII) and fly helicopters and a WINGED airplane! YES!! No more screwing around with the Dodo; trying to get that hunk of crap flying was next to impossible. After reading the preview, I had high expectations for Vice City.
And I must say that the hype was worth it. Don’t dismiss this game as a GTAIII clone crammed with a bit more goodies to hold our interests. I strongly believe that even if Vice City was to become an “expansion pack” for GTAIII, which, if you remember right, it was rumored to be, that people would have been happy with just that. If GTAIII got a few little additions in it, I would have gotten it, no kidding. But let’s get something straight here: VC is not an expansion pack, by any means. It is a completely new game—no, scratch that—it’s a completely new experience.
I stress “experience” because Vice City breaks some new ground. At first glance, you won’t notice any major differences from the previous game…the textures look exactly the same, the framerate has increased, but barely…it looks almost identical to GTAIII. And right off the bat, people diss the game because they don’t feel that the series has aged at all. I can’t tell you how many times I have logged onto GameFAQs or Gamers.com and read complaints about the game. On the first day the game came out, people complained that there was hardly any change. But these are the idiots who had only played the game for fifteen minutes. And let me tell you, fifteen minutes with a game is hardly enough time to make a judgment. The game takes a while to grow on you.
Not too long, though. The first few hours of the game are the strangest. You are thrown into a giant city and you don’t know any of it, but after a while, you learn all of the boundaries. You then discover that you’ve only seen less than half of the city, the rest of it is locked in the beginning. But as you start completing missions, and gaining more and more, the game starts getting impressive. You discover amazing experiences such as flying the Maverick, racing boats in the harbor, and even destroying a building with RC helicopters with explosives attached. Amazing stuff awaits you.
Be warned…the first few hours start off kind of slow. Personally, I enjoyed it because the pacing was perfect. You can’t expect to be able to do everything at once; the game takes its precious time to set the player where it wants the player. You explore, explore, and explore. When you get tired of that, you switch to a mission. And then it gets addictive. You’ll do everything from starting riots to taking a side in a war between the Haitians and the Cubans. The game’s missions never fail to impress. In my entire GTA: VC gaming experience, I cannot think of one mission that did not impress me. The missions were captivating and entertaining. It must have taken some big brains at DMA Design to put this game experience together.