Grand Theft Auto III Review (Flunk)
It's okay
I went into this expecting a buggy/broken mess, but it's okay. Not bad, not good, just okay. It's times like this I wish Steam would have a horizontal thumb option.
It's far from a 'definitive' edition, but if you're wanting an excuse to replay GTA3 and not have to worry about controller configurations, patches, mods, and want a few QoL improvements (SatNav, autosave, mission checkpoints) and achievements, then it's worth your time. (Not £55, mind).
Note to the achievement hunters: There are missables and Rockstar Social Club has additional achievements.
I played to 100% completion and these were the bugs/issues I encountered:
- Biggest bug was that the mission failed/complete text would sometimes remain until you started/ended another mission or reset the game. Most of the time, this wasn't a problem, but some mission triggers won't occur if the the text is present. (One example is when you're trying to drop of the 'ladies of the night' to the police ball)
- For me (on my triple monitor setup), the game would switch to my left-most monitor halfway through the boot sequence. Didn't figure out how to deal with it in full-screen mode, but in borderless-window, alt+entering, dragging the game to the correct window, then alt-entering again fixed that. Only a minor annoyance and only needs to be done once per play.
- The traffic seems a little more chaotic than I remember. A lot of cars crashing into each other and there's a weird bug where AI controlled limos will kinda teleport around tight bends. To be honest, the chaotic traffic kinda made the game more fun.
- Some of the barriers between islands randomly disappeared. The collision detection was still there, but I couldn't see the barriers. Also, the bridge to Shoreside Vale was lowered at one point (before it was meant to) but there was no hit-box on it so I dropped straight into the sea. Minor bug, but a strange one.
- Saw maybe about 4-5 floating AI cars in my playthrough (including one pointing vertically coming out of the tunnel to Portland).
- I maybe misremembering the PS2 version, but the Mafia seemed far more aggressive than I remember (after they aggro). On a few occasions, my car would just explode with no warning due to rapid shotgun fire.
On a random note, it's funny how spoiled we are by modern open world games. GTA3 feels so tiny now! I remember being blown away by the size of the map back in the day!
Anyway, moving onto Vice City now.