GTA: San Andreas HD ReviewGTA: San Andreas HD Review
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GTA: San Andreas HD Review

Reviewed on Xbox 360



October 31, 2014

For a game with such a big world, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas starts in a pretty personal place. In the first mission, Carl Johnson silently mourns his recently deceased mother. Thanks to the upgraded textures and higher resolution (all the way up to 720p!), I could see pain in his face that wasn’t apparent a decade ago. In the second, CJ reunites with his estranged brother and sister, but the audio cut out after a few seconds, interrupting the bittersweet moment. That’s a pretty good encapsulation of what this re-release of San Andreas brings to the table: it’s the same great story and setting, bolstered by relatively sharp visuals but also hamstrung by new technical issues.

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Just about every Grand Theft Auto since the series went 3D attempts to mix emotion with carnage and comedy, but none has nailed the balance as well as San Andreas. Carl Johnson’s adventure has plenty of betrayal and redemption, but there’s plenty of good-natured ribbing amongst friends as well as offbeat interactions with some of the city’s weirder inhabitants, like a weak-willed hardcore rapper and a conspiracy spouting hippie. The range of activities also runs the gamut; while the running, gunning, and driving of previous GTAs is still at the heart of San Andreas, the amount of physical activities, minigames, and gambling just a short drive away is still impressive today.

Most extracurricular activities are quickly introduced and rarely overstay their welcome, save San Andreas’ insistence on making CJ’s health reliant on side activities like working out and visiting restaurants. It’s worth noting that this is the first Xbox version of San Andreas to incorporate Achievements, so if notifications and meta-points happen to give you additional motivation, you might find additional reason to explore, experiment, and complete the campaign.

When it comes to that campaign, San Andreas is a bit less of a hassle than it used to be. While the auto-aiming system remains as troublesome as ever and some of the missions you’ll have to complete can be amongst the series’ hardest (particularly the train-chasing sequence with Big Smoke, and Zero’s maddening RC helicopter escapades), but a new checkpoint system allows for immediate retries after a failed mission. The two key benefits are that you don’t need to worry about the loss of weaponry and armor that comes with being arrested, or endure the sometimes-long “drive of shame” back to the mission marker. In a few cases, you can even pick up midway through an objective. Those cases are rarer than they should be, however given how long some missions run, boring drives from the mission start point still happen far too frequently. Even though it’s a far cry from the retry-friendly checkpoints in GTA V, San Andreas’ system is way better than it was a decade ago.

The same can’t be said about the UI, which has been directly lifted from the iOS version of San Andreas. Finding a particular bit of info, whether it be a stat, option, or objective takes an extra button press than before (whereas you’d previously just scroll through the categories and see the information), and the map is confusingly omnipresent, but the menu buttons and can’t be moved until you activate it with the back button. You’ll have to do that often, as the static section of the map rarely fits in enough of the world to discern a proper path to your destination amongst San Andreas’ entwined highways and loopy dirt roads.

The sights and sounds of San Andreas are the best they’ve ever been on consoles, but those come with the biggest caveats. While improved textures make the world more vibrant, signs more readable, and characters (slightly) less puppet-like, you’ll have to deal with a surprisingly choppier framerate. It’s usually manageable, only really manifesting when the camera is moved around quickly or too many cars are on the road, but it can become distracting when it plays out during action sequences. There’s also that issue of audio suddenly muting during cutscenes roughly 10 percent of the time, which is stranger than the graphical issues since San Andreas’ epic soundtrack and star-studded vocal performances haven’t been altered.

Originally written and published by Dave Rudden at IGN Xbox 360 Reviews. Click here to read the original story.

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