Vice, not nice. (Grand Theft Auto - Vice City (PC))

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Grand Theft Auto - Vice City (PC)
Date:	06/07/05 (540 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great all round game with bags of playability.

Disadvantages: It ends.

For those who have played GTA3 on the PC:

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a lesson in how to take a game which is already bordering on genius and improving it. If you enjoyed GTA3, then you will love Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Go and buy it now. No excuses.

For those who have not played GTA3 on the PC:

Vice City is a game played in the third person perspective (rather like Tomb Raider). In this game, you play an ex-convict called Tommy Vercetti (voiced by Ray Liotta) who is just out of prison and has been sent to Vice City (i.e. Miami) by his 'boss' to expand their operation down there. However, your very first drug deal is ambushed by persons unknown and only you, your lawyer and one of the other people with whom you were dealing manage to escape.

You're obviously annoyed at being taken in, your boss in Liberty City wants his money back and you're obviously on the make at the same time, so things are going to get mighty interesting in Vice City...

So that's it. You're in Vice City, you know no-one apart from your lawyer, and you've practically no money to speak of. It's up to you to achieve your goals of getting revenge on the ambushers, sticking one to your boss for letting you rot in jail for 15 years and making as much cash as is possible and by any means necessary.

Sounds fun? You have no idea how much!

The game is broken down into two main types. The first is the free roaming section where you can run around Vice City, exploring. The other is the plot developing missions where you make acquaintances, usually by killing someone or stealing something for them. Between these two game modes, you'll be entertained for a long, long time.

I found the mission difficulty to be set at just the right difficulty level. I didn't waltz through the missions easily, but neither did I have to repeat all of them a dozen times over before progressing. Even if you do get stuck, you aren't restricted to trying to complete that mission in order to progress. You can go off exploring the city taking other missions or trying to find the hidden secrets. An idea of how much there is to do in Vice City is demonstrated by the statistics screen. The few times I've played the game from scratch to story mission completion, I've usually only actually completed around 50% of the game! There are loads of things to do regarding finding secret items, secret mission and various challenges.

There are new additions to the GTA series. You can, for the first time, own property if you can afford to buy it. Certain buildings are for sale throughout the city, some are available immediately (cash allowing, that is) and others only come onto the market as it were once certain missions are completed. These properties then become places to park your car (if there's a garage) and save your game. It’s also possible to go into some buildings, but not all of them. Some of the missions require it. Later in the game, some properties eventually lead to missions and eventually end up becoming sources of income. An example of this is a film studio where you get a few missions in order to help a budding film director make adult-orientated movies with actress 'Candy Suxxx'. Once these are completed, the studio generates cash for you to collect every now and again.

Graphically, it's a lot better than GTA 3. The original GTA 3 graphics engine was ropey at best, but it's been tweaked and improved upon to provide a better, more stable visual experience. With the game set in Miami ummm... Vice City, the game is also a lot more colourful than GTA 3's Liberty (New York) City as you might expect. Just like the real Miami, there are plenty of pastel coloured buildings, neon signs etc. The weather effects are still impressive and the day/night cycle still provides graphical variety as the city lights up as the sun goes down.

The one aspect of Vice City that I found really impressive was the user interface and controls. Quite often in games, part of the learning curve is actually getting to grips with the controls and the general "feel" of the game. With Vice City, I was able to really get into the game right from the beginning without worrying too much about the learning curve. This might have had something to do with the fact that the controls and user interface are practically identical to the original GTA 3 which I had played to death.

Even without previous GTA 3 experience, getting to grips with the game will take no time. Controls can be adjusted to suit your needs at any time with various control methods on offer (although I chose to stick with the tried and tested mouse/keyboard combination). The user interface remains similar to that of GTA 3. You have your clock which simulates real time (1 second real time is one minute of game time) for use when you're told to show up at a specific spot at a certain time , plus to control the day/night cycles. The wanted level, cash display etc. is all reminiscent of the original GTA 3 and extremely easy to read.

I found that controlling the vehicles was also extremely easy to do. The physics engine in the game has resulted in cars handling less realistically than you might expect, but that enables you to pull off fancy moves that you might see in the movies anyway like sliding your car around the corner when being chased by the police, or riding your motorbike up a flight of steps in taking a shortcut etc.

There are a wide variety of vehicles involved in the missions that you will eventually find in and around Vice City. New to the series are motorbikes and aircraft (although there was a secret plane in GTA 3). You have now got access to boats, cars, motorbikes, planes and helicopters. The variety of transport also helps with the longevity of the game as you have many different options to choose from when travelling from one part of the city to another. Each of these handle differently, so it pays to consider each vehicle for the job at hand. Some cars may be fast and manoeuvrable, but are easily damaged or destroyed whereas others can take more damage, but may be harder to control or slow.

Getting back to the attention to detail, I was initially surprised to hear Tommy Vercetti speak using Ray Liotta's voice. Progressing through the story and the missions though, and more and more famous voices came from character's mouths. When you have a cast list that contains people like Lee Majors, Dennis Hopper, Burt Reynolds and many, many more, you can be sure that the voice acting is up to scratch.

As with the previous game, you have to keep your eyes open for the pop culture references. They are littered throughout the city and the game itself is based heavily on Scarface with a liberal dose of Miami Vice thrown in (including the casting of Philip Michael Thomas, or "Tubbs" from the series). Two of the missions are called "Cop Land" and "No Escape" which are two Ray Liotta films. Spotting the pop culture references simply reinforces the attention to detail that has been lavished upon the game, and they're usually quite funny, too.

While playing the game, it's hard not to really appreciate the attention to detail that's been used when putting together Vice City. The radio stations are simply one example with plenty of hilarious DJ chatter and phone-ins in between the music (which is proper 80s music from real bands) plus you also have the option of incorporating your own music by copying shortcuts to your mp3s into a special folder. I took this option after a while as the music started to get very repetitive (although I didn't listen to all the radio stations which typically only play one type of music).

As with GTA 3, completing the story missions does not mean that the game has finished. I would be surprised if, on completion of the final story mission, that you were any more than 60% complete. There are plenty of other things to do in order to bump up your percentage if you choose to continue playing. There are 100 secret packages to find through Vice City, cars can be stolen and brought to a shop for redistribution plus other missions that would be familiar to GTA 3 players such as taxi missions, vigilante missions or ambulance missions plus the new pizza delivery mission.

Overall, I really enjoyed this. To be honest, I didn't expect to given the 80s setting, but Rockstar have done themselves proud with a humourous, adult-themed game that has bags of playability and longevity. If you play the game to 100% completion, it's not unfeasible to think that you could be playing for over 50 hours. For a game that you can buy these days for fifteen quid or less, I think that's a bargain.

The game ran really well on my PC, which was a surprise, seeing as the original GTA was very temperamental. The graphics are excellent, the sound (including music and voice acting) is flawless and the playability (the important part) was outstanding.

Vice City has a BBFC rating of 18.

Rockstar's recommended PC Specs:
Processor: Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon
Memory: 256 MB
Operating System: Windows 98 or later
Graphics card: Radeon 8500 series/GeForce 3 series or better
Soundcard: Direct X: 9.0 compatible sound card
Direct X: 9.0

My PC:
Processor: AMD Duron 1.3 GHz
Memory: 704 MB
Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Graphics card: Leadtek GeForce 4 MX440
Soundcard: SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 Platinum
Direct X: 9.0

Summary: Excellent action game involving a lot of insane driving around the mythical Vice City.