Vice City is undisputedly one of the best action-adventure games of all time and can be recommended to almost anyone.
ACTION-ADVENTURE
If you want the short version, here it is, Vice City is easily one of the best PC games of all time and can be whole-heartedly recommended to anybody into action-adventure games. It improves considerably upon every aspect of Grand Theft Auto III and introduces some new features of its own to stand at the summit of the PC action-adventure genre.
After just the initial hours into Vice City, you realize that this is going to be quite a different experience to the one you experienced in Liberty City. The most obvious difference between Vice City and Liberty City is that of a superficial one in that the whole city here is modeled after the 1980's Miami and looks a lot different from Liberty City which was modeled after New York City. The huge skyscrapers resembling NY's many are replaced by the beach sand and palm trees of Miami. The city is quite big and detailed and it will take you hours to just roam around and explore this beautiful metropolitan. The city is not just for the eyes and almost every object in the world can be used in any manner of your choice. You are free to enter any car parked on the roads and drive it or enter into any house and look for hidden loot. The city is made up of what is necessarily three islands connected via roads and bridges and you will visit each of them throughout the course of the game for various missions.
The basic thread of the Vice City storyline is as follows - you are Tommy Vercetti, a hard hitting convict who has just spent time in the cells of Liberty City State Prison. As soon as you are released you are hired by your old boss Sonny Forelli to do a small job that goes horribly wrong and you lose Sonny's cash and the goods you were supposed to collect. You start with the mission of relocating your lost cash and very quickly find yourself aiming to be the most wanted man in all of Vice City with plans of taking over the entire city. Vice City uses these beautiful cut scenes to advance the story. These cutscenes give you enough insight on the story and why you are going to undertake a particular mission.
Vice City represents probably the best implementation of this kind of open ended gameplay seen to date. The variety of missions range from the standard run and gun missions to intimidating a few people for your clients to piloting a helicopter and many others that you will just have to experience yourself to find out. You will have many missions open to you at any particular time and you can choose the one that you want to undertake. Each of the missions and where they can be undertaken are marked clearly on the map which is always present in your HUD.
After you are about a third into the game you will also be introduced to the Property System. In not complicating and spoiling stuff this system allows you to buy certain properties in various areas of the map and finish the tasks that accompany them in order to advance through the game. The other reason for finishing these missions is that every property which you buy and finish missions on will start to generate a certain amount of revenue which you can collect regularly, thus increasing your wealth.
The save system has been exactly retaken from GTA III without any change. This means you can save in any of your properties just by standing on top of the videotape icon present there. However, you cannot save while on a mission and you are limited to saving in between missions. But this doesn't mean that some of your experiences in Vice City are going to be frustrating, on the contrary this kind of save system allows for the perfect balance in not allowing a player to save anytime which would make the game fairly easy and making the missions themselves a bit challenging which means that you will have to think in order to finish a particular mission.
Other than the core missions themselves you can go about to find Rampages in which you will have to kill a given number of gang members or destroy a given number of vehicles in the allotted time and there are thirty-five of them in all. Other than that you can try to find Hidden Packages which give you added wealth as well as give you bonuses for every ten you find and shockingly enough there are a total of 100 hidden packages lying around the city. You can also choose the fastest car or bike in Vice City and try to jump high using ramps that are intelligently placed around the City and also try to do wheelies and additional stunts that again give you money depending on the difficulty and technicality of the stunt. The amazing number of vehicles you will find in Vice City is also added bonus over Liberty City. In GTA III you were only given access to cars, police vehicles and ambulances. In Vice City you have access to bikes and helicopters in addition to the already mentioned cars. You will also have additional missions using said police vehicles and ambulances which you can carry out to gain additional bonuses.
The graphics in Vice City are nicely done and look pleasing on the eye. The eye-capturing beauty of Miami has been re-created to great effect by Rockstar games. The beaches and the array of buildings you will see are a treat to the eye. The character models in the game all look very life like and their actions are plausible enough to give you the feeling of being in a real city. Each of the vehicles in Vice City are highly detailed and have somewhat realistic physics and damage effects. However, if there are beautiful graphics and you are talking about GTA, then there must be some issues accompanying it. In Vice City there are some serious frame rate issues in some areas where, even on high end systems, the frame rate drops make the game unplayable. Minor quirks aside, the graphics get the job done in giving you this amazing open-ended city to explore and exploit.
Sound is one area where Vice City scores pretty high compared to other games. Vice City features a great sound track and one which you will want to hear many times. There are many different radio stations to choose from and each one of them is unique in their own right, you have a Spanish station, you have a station where people will discuss social stuff and others that you will want to listen for your pleasure through the many driving sequences in Vice City. On top of all that you can add any MP3 songs of your own choice in the MP3 folder in the Vice City folder and listen to that as a separate radio station in itself. Dialogue for the game is well written and each of the actors providing voice-overs has done his job in making the game's characters feel real.
In the end, your experience through Vice City will be like none other and you will enjoy the game right through till the end which isn't really the end, so to speak. The game plays out in sandbox mode once you finish the main story and you will be able to roam freely around Vice City to look for hidden missions like RC car races and various bike and Helicopter checkpoint missions. Vice City is so huge that even if you want to see everything in the game you will never do it in one play through of the game. Therefore you have great replay value here and even if you finish this game as many times as you want your experience will be different each time. All the above aspects make Vice City a must buy for anybody who has been waiting for a PC port of this amazing PS2 game and also make it easily one of the greatest games of all time.
Posted on: 02/22/2005 by Balaji Sivaraman