izigame.me

This is the worst game launch and remaster I've ever seen. You may think that's hyperbole with all of the garbage releases in recent years (Halo: MCC, Assassin's Creed: Unity, Cyberpunk 2077, etc.), but I'm totally sincere. Here's a long list of everything I can think of that this game does poorly, as well as the mistakes made by Rockstar and co. themselves.
-Playstation players got unintended early access, meanwhile PC players had to wait days to play it after a few hours after launch with no explanation of why or when it would come back until the day before it finally did. Why? They left assets in the game code they didn't want public. Not just a few things, but a ton. If that doesn't speak to how amateur this project is, I don't know what does.
-The game released in an inexcusably abysmal state:
-This game is chock full of bugs.
-The atmospheres of these games are ruined. Instead of GTA III's distinctly moody vibe, served by its blue tone and unusual soundscape, you have an ugly, grey, bland and overly dark visual backed by extremely muffled audio that sounds significantly worse than the original PC release. Instead of SA's sunny, orange hue, you have a generic artstyle. VC suffers from many of the problems found in the other two games, but it always had a vivid, larger than life aesthetic, and so the cartoony models and exaggerated colours don't look totally out of place.
-As a general statement about the artstyles of these games, they look too cartoony. This now seems to be purposeful, unlike the original games which only looked cartoony as a result of their limited technology and not due to an intended style. Now that we have better tech, there's no reason outside of budget and developmental constraints that they shouldn't look as realistic as they were originally intended to be. Colours are too vivid and the lighting gives everything a plastic, glossy look (characters look like action figures).
-Ambient occlusion is too strong, making the games look ridiculously dark at times - especially in cutscenes. Turning it off however makes the game look flat and outdated.
-Misaligned and ill fitting textures everywhere.
-Performance is dreadful. Why does a game from 2001, which looks worse in many areas than its original release, run significantly worse than brand new games built from the ground up released in 2023?
-"Improved combat" is a lie. The auto aim isn't even as snappy as the controller input (GInput) mod for the original versions of the games. The only thing they did to improve it was allow you to move while firing some weapons and add a weapon wheel. Wow. Incredible.
-Missing music from the original games - a lot of it. Hardly "definitive", is it? You're a multi-billion dollar company. You make more in a year from GTA: Online than most game developers and publishers ever see. I'm certain you could've afforded to re-license some songs, cheapskates... just as I'm sure you could've afforded to hire more than some mobile developers to remaster the games that got you where you are today.
-Censorship: GTA III, and to a lesser extent, GTA VC's heavy dismemberment, made killing so satisfying. Now there are just occasional decapitations. Why?
-Rockstar exclusive for a year with no announcement that it would come to any other platform until it randomly appeared a week or so ago on Steam. Why? They didn't want people waiting to purchase it on Steam. They wanted us to buy it on the Rockstar Game Launcher. Exclusives suck as is, but most publishers at least tell players ahead of time they they're limited exclusives. Rockstar didn't want to do this.
-Misspellings everywhere due to AI upscaling. These should've been impossible to miss.
-Again the audio is horrendous. Why does everything sound so muffled?
-III and particularly VC have the worst AI I've ever seen in video games, regardless of era. Unbelievably, they're even WORSE now.
-Broken collision and geometry. Fall through maps, hit invisible fences, etc.
-The occasional clunkiness of the original games' movement hasn't been resolved.
-Minor but still noticeable and offensive changes to gameplay - both done on purpose and things overlooked.
-AI upscaled textures are the bane of modern modding and game development, from a consumer's point of view. I have no idea why anyone thinks these look good. I've yet to see a single example of upscaled textures, outside of ultra low resolution pixel art that looks like anything other than a grainy, fake mess. This game's full of them.
-The radar now has a GPS for mission objectives that you can't turn off. This is a nice addition as an option, but the maps are small enough so as to not warrant it for me personally, and so I'd rather be able to use the minimap to plan my route myself on the fly without being guided the whole way through. It's a difficult thing to ignore. Honestly, this is one of my biggest gripes with this release even though I appreciate what they were trying to do. Is it really that hard to just add an option to disable it, though? GTA IV and V have this option.
-A full year later and almost nothing has changed. It's been a year since we've had a sizeable update.
-No separate sensitivity settings for vehicles and on-foot.
-Rockstar and Grove Street Games were dismissive in attitude towards their massive failure, adding further insult to injury. The fake apologies were late, too.
-You can't buy the games separately... despite launching and downloading them separately. Why? Because Rockstar knows nostalgia is a powerful tool and that people will pay the full price of admission for even one of these games. People can rightfully bag 343i all they want, but when they re-released the Halo games on Steam, they didn't force you to buy all of them at once. They allowed you to buy each of the six games contained by themselves, paying only $11AUD for each. THAT's good customer service and business practise. What Rockstar have done here is spit in your face.
-Even for 3 remastered games, regardless of how well they released, $90AUD is a lot to charge.
-Camera modes are weird. They're either too close or too far. No in between. I don't have this problem with the originals or other Rockstar games.
-Auto view centering is really annoying. Please let us turn it off.
-Even the desktop/Steam icons look ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dreadful.
-The price is much higher in some regions because Rockstar are idiots.
-Some achievements are mission specific, and given that you can't replay individual missions, if you miss it the first time then you have to restart the entire game just to get to the point where you can earn the achievement again. Some of these are "secret" achievements, too. The developers realise these are incredibly long games, right?
-The difficulty of these games have been decreased in specific missions for the sake of bad players.
I'm a complete and utter moron and so I bought these on Steam (I refunded them on Rockstar when I bought them on launch). I love these games so much and even if they're inferior versions, having an excuse to replay them by getting all the achievements was incentive enough for me to buy them at half price. I'm also delusional enough to hold onto hope that they may be fixed one day. In other words, I'm a total sucker, and that's exactly how these companies get away with treating us like crap: because suckers like me will still buy them despite causing a fuss. This negative review won't do anything to prevent this garbage collection from being a top seller, and why bother to fix it when despite being upset about it, I'm still going to buy all future GTA titles? They don't have any reason to. I don't really know what point I'm trying to make... I just want to acknowledge the irony of me paying for these pieces of crap while complaining that they're pieces of crap. It isn't lost on me and I am part of the problem. Hopefully you won't be and you'll either pirate this ♥♥♥♥ or just play something more worth your time.