Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy: Definitive Edition Review.

This might be the easiest review I have ever done. Which is sadly ironic considering that the GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition is probably the easiest, no effort required, nor expense spared attempt to exploit sentiment and make a tidy little profit in the process. Remasters have become a prevalent, very profitable means to capitalise on nostalgia. The difference being that most remasters, however manipulative improve the existing material in someway. Ever the innovators, RockStar have instead decided to buck this trend by regurgitating the exact same Vice City, but smear additional diarrhetic excrement from an intern suffering from acute dysentery. Its a bold move that has resulted in RockStar tarnishing their once great name, negating any integrity that was seized when Sam Houser left the studio. This game is what would happen if British Leyland did video game remasters.

So, much like the development team behind this rectal abortion, I’m not going to waste my time putting any effort into this review. Carefully analysing the games “quality” and assign some arbitrary rating to indicate its relative merit. Instead I’m going to list the various misfortunes that has sullied my perception of this once venerated series. Issues such as:

Heavily compressed audio.

Missing textures.

Crashes.

Character’s heads poking through the roofs of cars.

Poorly rendered draw distances.

Music changing after pausing the game.

Missions immobilising audio.

Mission icons not appearing.

Crashes.

Vehicles spawning vertically through the ground like tombstones.

Levitating bodies.

NPC’s casually strolling through cut scenes.

Menu sounds of San Andreas in pause menu.

Cars appearing from the ether.

Invisible walls.

Crashes!

Vehicles with similar density to that of a marshmallow.

Fences with no hit detection.

Lampposts, traffic lights and other inanimate objects with too much hit detection.

Damaged car parts shedding instantaneously to the floor.

Character’s freezing during cut scenes.

Tommy teleporting into vehicles.

Sudden pixilated features on Tommy’s face and shirt.

Crashes that prevent me from completing missions unless you change the visuals in the options menu from “Fidelity” to performance for some reason!

I don’t expect perfection, but competency should be the minimum requirement. What RockStar have achieved here is commendable really. They have destroyed their reputation using arguably 3 of its most influential GTA titles, and somehow managed to “refine” a 20 year old game by making it worse. Quite the fucking achievement!