About a month ago, Rockstar Games released GTA V, which is actually the 15th part of the GTA series. It was titled “Best Selling Game”, “Most Expensive Game In Production” and so on. It also broke records like “Most Mini Games Within A Game”. But the most impressive part is something different.

GTA 5 had a total production value of about $137.000.000. Compared to the most expensive movie, “Avatar”, with a production value of $237.000.000, this may sound “cheap”. But Rockstar made about $800.000.000 only by the pre-orders in one day. Avatar, in comparison, made $233.000.000 during the first three days of the movie release—not even covering the production value. Rockstar gained almost 600% of GTA’s production cost. That is much more than Avatar made after a couple of days. It’s absolutely impressive how much money they made in such a short time.

I was pretty excited before the release, so I got myself a copy as soon as possible. The first reviews of others where amazing and gave me a deep look inside the gameplay. I took a short vacation from Opoloo, stocked up on fastfood and snacks and locked myself in for the full experience.

The story

You start with a couple of easy missions to get familiar with the controls. After the first mission, it’s up to you to continue with completing the story or start exploring the world on your own. To get in touch with the whole game, I started to complete all the main missions before exploring other activities like skydiving, all kinds of races, rampages, driving around the world map, or playing mini games like golf, tennis and more.

In GTA 5, you can switch between 3 main characters. A ghetto thug boy, a rich family father in retirement, and a total redneck psychopath. This is the most epic combination ever! It’s so much fun because of the completely different personalities you get to play with, and it gets even funnier during heist missions where they come in conflict with one another. You need to switch between them to cover your buddies and make your way through.

The main story has 69 individual parts, some of them more extensive than others—the heist missions. You can even choose between different plans for the heists. The normal missions are usually shorter, but you can still choose different interactive solutions to pass them.
In heist missions, you gather with other characters and plan different ways to complete the heist. One of the characters is “the brain” of your team and he shows you ways to get the job done. After his short presentation you can choose between A, B and C and also select some additional accomplices, like a driver, a gun man, and hackers. This is amazing for the experience, because you can customize your team and really plot the mission.
The accomplices you can choose have different abilities. Depending on their skills, they also get more or less of the cake once the heist is finished.

If you don’t want to do missions, no problem. You can do a lot of things instead, like sports (skydiving, tennis, etc…), mini games, pissing off the police, or go to a strip club and get a private dance. There are so many opportunities to have fun, you wouldn’t believe it.

Some of my friends told me “The story is boring and pretty short”. 69 missions aren’t that long, but the missions themselves are amazing in their variety: Short, long, easy and difficult missions. Everyone will be satisfied. Completing the story took me at least 4 days of playing, which is totally okay. I’m not disappointed by the story like some of my friends. I can also see that I have a lot of days left to finish the rest of the game, so I can clearly not understand what my friends told me about the story and gameplay.

While finishing the main story, I also completed some side missions and came up with a game completion of 75% in about 4 days (8-12 hours playing each day).

The online mode

After finishing the story, I spent some hours in the online mode. I was curious, because I had experienced the unofficial online mode for GTA San Andreas, which was already pretty good. But the online mode for GTA 5 has blown my mind, it’s a very good online game, where you can do whatever you want, together with your own friends.

First of all you need to create your character. This part is very interesting because you don’t only create your character, you also create 4 grandparents and 2 parents which automatically leads to your character. It’s not that easy to make your character look like you want, but it’s fun. First I had some trouble, but I came up with some redneck-looking grandparents, which led to the same appearance of the parents and led me to my character. He’s looking a little bit Southern, but is clothed and styled like a young business man. Once you’re done, you can join the online mode.

Starting with the initial missions to learn some things about the online mode. After that, you can do whatever you want. Kill other players, race them, or create your own crew with your friends to do the heists.

You can increase your rank with several methods, deposit or withdraw your money at ATMs, or put money on someone else head. In case other players are pissing you off and you’re not able to drive to your ATM, you can activate the passive mode in the settings (you’ll be charged $100 to activate it). In the passive mode, you’re not able to kill players or get killed.

I haven’t played that much online but it’s already a lot of fun and slightly different to the single player mode.

So what?

GTA 5 is absolutely worth giving a try. The story, graphics and online mode are awesome and full of fun. It’s an expensive game, but still worth buying it.

I’ve spent only one week’s time with the game before I started writing this article but I had a lot of fun and I’ll definitely go on playing. I hope you’ll have as much fun as I have with GTA 5.