50 Years of Video Games: Grand Theft Auto III (PS2)

The Grand Theft Auto series is certainly one of the most influential game series of all time, and that mostly comes from the innovations found within in its third entry, Grand Theft Auto III. While it wasn’t the first game to utilize an open world where the player is free to explore without levels restricting them or objectives that demanded immediate attention, this 2001 PlayStation 2 title made many leaps forward for the concept. While the term has waned in popularity, it helped popularize sandbox gaming where player-guided action is emphasized by the variety of systems in place to entertain them even when off the beaten path. Not only that, but the game moved open world gaming into the third dimension with a city you can explore similar to a real one, giving it a feeling of being rooted in reality even with its deliberately absurd satirical takes on real world social issues. You can take missions in a structured format in Grand Theft Auto III and complete the story, but if the mood strikes you, you can also steal a car, run over pedestrians, and then get in a lethal shootout with the cops only to come back to life after and potentially do it all over again. This openness to be amoral and violent got the game in hot water, but the controversies over the mature concepts would help to really push away the idea that video games are primarily a medium for children’s entertainment. Players were free to abandon inhibitions and play the game how they liked, and hundreds of games that followed would begin to integrate Grand Theft Auto III’s innovations, but that does mean time has shown how the ideas can be done better, especially through the game’s own sequels. Luckily, time hasn’t totally made the game seem archaic, and once you acclimate to the rather rough and jagged character models, you can slip into the criminal life of Liberty City and experience what made this game historic with little issue.

 

Grand Theft Auto III begins with Claude, a character who never speaks and isn’t even addressed by name in-game, performing a bank heist with his girlfriend only for her to betray him for a bigger cut, Claude surviving the encounter but almost taken away to prison when providence strikes. The Colombian Cartel is looking to bust one of their own out during a prison transfer and Claude happens to be in the same vehicle as their target, slipping away in the chaos with another prisoner called 8-ball who helps him slip back into a life of crime. Claude’s lack of emotional reaction to most anything does make the quest for revenge against his girlfriend Catalina lack a bit of its potential oomph, but most of the story involves Claude moving between the three boroughs of Liberty City, the crime riddled New York City analogue filled with different gangs he bounces between as his allegiances change. At different times working under an Italian mafia, the Yakuza, and independent characters like the corrupt cop Ray voiced by Hollywood talent Robert Loggia, Claude is mostly along for the ride and things gradually find their way to Catalina simply because he has a finger in so many pies. The characters he encounters aren’t often too memorable and mostly serve as mission givers, but a few have a quirk or too like the mafioso who lives under the thumb of his loud elderly mother or the Yakuza leader Asuka who seems more depraved than a cast of characters mostly interested in the monetary rewards of organized crime.

 

If you stick with the story missions of Grand Theft Auto III you’ll find a good degree of variety within them even though they do often lean more on the game’s driving than the on-foot action. Driving is done rather well though, the various cars you can grab all having different advantages in terms of durability and handling. All of the vehicles are perhaps more fragile than you’d expect of automobiles, but this might have been done to both add some difficulty to the abundant driving missions as well as lean into the opportunities to cause some chaos with exploding cars. Liberty City is a large place and learning the roads will benefit you both in finding new activities to occupy yourself with and giving you better ways to approach missions, the game usually giving you an instruction rather than a strict directive and the player can choose their route to a location or how they intend to handle the trouble they find there. You might be ordered to go kill a certain character and driving will inevitably be a part of the mission, but if they’re positioned well you can maybe even just run them over quickly and clear the mission that way rather than popping out to use your firearms. Early on the game does do a bit too much in the way of simply picking up and dropping off characters, but eventually the transportation angle is phased out in favor of things like tailing targets, trying to wreck specific vehicles on the road, or needing to get somewhere quickly to participate in some action outside of your automobile.

While exploring on your own two feet can be a bit slow, there are definitely times you’ll want to leave your vehicle, usually to handle some enemy that won’t go down so easily to vehicular manslaughter. Claude can accumulate a set of weapons over the course of the game, and while his bare fists and a baseball bat are good for harassing passersby, most of the time if you are up against someone you’ll need to whip out the firearms. There is a rather large issue looming over gun use in the game though, that being how the game handles the controls. Most guns cannot be aimed freely, the player needing to lock onto a person to open fire on them with any degree of accuracy. The streets of Liberty City often have a lot of pedestrians you might lock onto or you might highlight the wrong member of an enemy group, but the accuracy is less of a problem compared to the lack of engagement it brings. You press a button to pick the target and then hammer another to fire until they’re dead, there being no elegance or challenge to the gun use much of the time because its goes for practical functionality. However, since it won’t count for obstructions like a small barrier between you and your target it can also weaken your options rather than making it easy to gun down your target. The most common weapons like the pistol, machine guns, and shotgun all rely on this system, but the game does at least give you a few tools that can be handled well and deservedly so due to their different purposes. A sniper rifle needs that ability to freely aim your shot to fulfill its expected role after all, the rocket launcher avoids the likelihood of self-damage by giving you the chance to point it where you please, and weapons like the grenade and flamethrower can do well without needing to hold the lock on button. These are rarer and more limited weapons though, but Grand Theft Auto III does often get around its weak gun play by only having a few moments like the unnecessarily hard final mission really force you into tackling the objective in a very specific manner.

 

The freedom to not only do as you please in the city but integrate that into the guided activities of the story is definitely where Grand Theft Auto III does its best. There is plenty of room for organic and unique scenarios to arise both while exploring the city or trying to do a job. If you choose to do some optional jobs from the telephone you might find yourself in a race with some absurdly driving AI opponents, but both you and them are going to perform differently every time due to how the traffic behaves or how characters like rival gang members might interrupt with gunfire. If you pursue violent impulses and go on a killing spree for kicks, police officers will begin showing up trying to book you, their efforts escalating as your crimes add up and eventually you can start encountering more advanced tactics like roadblocks, police choppers, and even calling in backup from the FBI or army. Seeing how long you can survive after agitating law enforcement is both thrilling and difficult, especially since they’re the best armed and most chaotic foes you can face in Liberty City.

 

If you are feeling more benevolent though, you don’t always have to be stealing cars just to get a ride. Players can pop into an ambulance or fire truck and activate challenges where they help with medical and fire emergencies. Police cars will provide criminal hunting jobs and taxis will test your knowledge of the city as you transport fares, although a minimap in the bottom left helps you see nearby roads and the general direction of not only current objectives but where new major missions can be found. These side activities can even help you out if you stay committed to them, the money of course good for buying things like new weapons but the safe houses where you can save your game can soon have helpful items outside of them if you do enough of the optional work or find enough of the hidden packages that reward you for peering around every corner of Liberty City. If you do die or are caught by cops you lose all of your equipped weapons so there is value beyond these being potential ammo refills, but there are guns hidden around the city to find as well and they can be picked up off the bodies of people.

While the story does enjoy referencing mobster films and crime dramas without having much of their charm, the game does manage to have a strong identity by extra touches to life in Liberty City. You start off on Portland Island, a place full of adult entertainment and seedy businesses, but when the bridges open up to Staunton Island you find a bustling metro with skyscrapers looming high. The last location, Shoreside Vale, is a bit more restrictive, a greater focus on suburban housing and smaller commercial areas making it a bit less exciting and fewer missions seem to take place there for that reason. Different gangs operate in different areas of the city and you’ll notice the types of cars in an area shift based on the conditions of that chunk of the city, the landscape of all three soon to become second nature as it plays hosts to activities both required and created by the player’s curiosity.

 

The radio stations might do the biggest part in creating an attitude for the game though, there being ten of them all with their own radio DJs, commercials, and music genres of choice. The player is free to change them while driving, certain musical choices letting the player set the mood of the action. Putting on the classical music station can lend things an air of gravitas or you can put on some intense house music to pump yourself up during heavy action. Most of the music featured are licensed tracks, and while the Reggae station features songs all from one artist, you’ll find a spread of recognizable songs in the oldies station and some decent tracks over on the pop, hip hop, and rock channels. They do only have a few songs each so unless your music tastes are broad some might become overly familiar, but talk radio and the interruptions of the radio elements like commercials do add in the personality the game pulls off so well. Grand Theft Auto III has plenty of overexaggerated depictions of social issues that are still relevant today as well as just bringing generally absurd ideas to the table. A gas-guzzling SUV is described almost like a war machine by the soccer mom owner in one ad while another convinces you that apes are good pets by trying to twist the abundant inevitable problems into something mundane, but Chatterbox FM and its talk radio definitely shines the most with its call-in show. The radio channel DJs are already caricatures like a party girl with a drug-addled brain talking over the party music, but Chatterbox FM has people call in with unusual problems the host shuts down expertly. Liberty City’s humorous chaos is made all the more believable when the radio shows how far gone some of its citizens are and how businesses push the limit on what they think they can get away with, the personality placed over the setting instead of the cast.

 

The open-ended moments between picking up jobs also make Grand Theft Auto III a great way to use cheats without harming your experience. Rather than making things too easy, the cheats can get you kitted up with the equipment needed to really cause havoc, the player even able to spawn in a tank that is perfect for spreading mayhem. It does still feel important to mention the guided content tries to keep up the variety to incentivize engaging with it, that not only the way new parts of the island open up but it can also introduce you to new concepts like taking boats out on the water or bring you to a new location like the runways of the airport. Unfortunately you cannot retry a mission you know you’re going to fail from the pause menu or anything, needing to drive back to the mission giver afterwards to get it again, but even cancelling a mission can be a small problem at times as they either expect you to do enough of it to fail or the only escape is to die. Timers are at least used regularly to avoid this and there are usually a few mission options made available at once so you can sideline a harder one if need be, but that freedom to make your own fun also means you aren’t just going to be stuck doing the same thing over and over until something clicks. In fact, being able to go out and do other activities can end up benefiting you when you’re ready to do more of the story as you start to learn locations of things like the pickups that lower your wanted level so you won’t have cops harassing you during something important. Liberty City hits a pretty good balance between being expansive without being empty, so while not every system at play works the best within it, it is still a game world that is enjoyable to come to know, a true playground for players who like to get to know a virtual space like it was their own home town.

THE VERDICT: While the run-of-the-mill crime drama plot mostly serves to set up the action in Grand Theft Auto III, Liberty City itself has a character all its own that propels the game forward. Satirical commentary on the radio pairs well with a city riddled with criminal organizations at each others’ throats, and as you guide your quiet character from one squabbling group to the next, you are given plenty of interesting activities that test your driving skill and let you embrace the chaos the game lives off of. The freedom to explore the city and make your own trouble is a nice breather between structured missions and it can pay off with extra goodies, interesting discoveries, and a growing knowledge of ways to use your knowledge of the city’s layout and opportunities to better clear even the hardest missions. While the driving works well and the amount of focus on it feels appropriate for it, gunfights often struggle with the lock-on combat system or are made less thrilling for its lifeless approach to targeting, the game a little less compelling since being out of a vehicle feels like such a step down.

 

And so, I give Grand Theft Auto III for PlayStation 2…

A GOOD rating. The shooting system is definitely the weakest part of this game that otherwise didn’t age too much despite future installments showing how to do the ideas featured here better. There is one automatic weapon with free aim that gives you the taste of something better, but you also can’t move while using it, so there is a small degree of acceptance that a lot of gun fights will come down to hoping your automatic targeting outpaces incoming damage. The PC port did open up the opportunity to point your guns as you please and is likely the better choice, but even in the PS2 original there is still plenty to enjoy. Missions can still structure challenges that either make good use of the way you explore and drive around Liberty City, the game integrating ideas like chases, car combat, timed deliveries, and more to ensure that the automobiles don’t just slip into one kind of play that would grow old. Getting out of your car for some on-foot action is a bit easier to stomach too because you are given more freedom to make your own paths and find your own solutions, the goal of killing a certain target not often locking you into any weapons or approaches. The game does get a bit less exciting when it does try to limit you too much, the final mission being a clear case where difficulty and restrictions just make it a chore to actually complete, but there is plenty to do before you hit that point both in goals the game lays out and ones the player can make for themselves. Pushing yourself to survive rising levels of cop aggression can make for an adrenaline-packed battle for survival, but you can also go accept missions from pay phones or new characters to receive goals like collecting goods that spill out of a van or smashing apart a rival gang’s fronts across the city. The setting itself definitely provides the player with a good host for whatever type of play they choose to embrace, indulgent chaos and objective focused play both encouraged and intertwined as one can benefit the other. The more this game world becomes familiar, the more opportunities it provides to do whatever angle of play you like best.

 

I don’t like using the word “outdated”, especially when so many people who do use it will then try to say some games are immune to the impact of time despite seemingly antiquated elements. It’s easy to look back at a game that did something novel at the time and see how future games have refined it into something much better, and either elevating a game for its impact or dismissing it because it’s been outdone both feel improper. Grand Theft Auto III’s visuals are certainly rough at parts and its story is more functional than interesting, but things like the gun controls were lacking then and are still now. While we have come to expect more out of our games, those little issues were always part of the game’s identity, but in the same way so are the many positives that mean it can still be enjoyed even now. We may know the future installments provide a lot more of what this game does well, but that doesn’t make it worse, and if anything it shows why these ideas caught on so well. Grand Theft Auto III’s approach to its world benefits it in most every department, giving the player a setting worth exploring for practical reasons and ones tied purely to a player’s own amusement. Systems can be engaged with outside of the mission parameters to make your own fun, Liberty City perhaps more a toy box than a sandbox as it puts in plenty of things to interact with. It’s the kind of game where you can invent your own goals and pursue them without it trying to restrain you but it doesn’t leave you flapping in the wind with some expectation you need to always guide your own play. Future Grand Theft Auto titles would do a lot better, but Grand Theft Auto III is as much about letting loose as it is doing some enjoyable challenges the game set out for you, its scope broad enough to provide a wide range of opportunities but benefiting from its simpler nature than its sequels because familiarity can inform how the activities on offer are influenced by the player’s growing knowledge of the crime-riddled streets. There’s a reason these design concepts began sprouting up in so many games afterwards, and it still comes through in the game that turned Grand Theft Auto into a household name.