Grand Theft Auto was one of those games everyone wanted, owned, and played. GTA became a surprise smash hit mainly through its graphically simplistic gore, mass destruction and mafia style missions. The gaming environment allowed the player to choose what they wanted to do, whether it is stealing cars, shooting people, or running down innocent pedestrians for fun. Although violent GTA had excellent potential for freedom of game play and allowed its players not only to have a bit of fun by doing things they wouldn’t normally do, but actually make the game interesting by introducing missions which allowed to become a gangster mafia type. It’s no wonder GTA 2 was released quite quickly after the success of GTA, but it didn’t really offer anything new.

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Hype surrounding the release of GTA 3 should prove it successful, but can the same excitement be had from what was once a top down fast game into a highly detailed 3D world. So many others have tried and failed, Renegade came very close to being good.

Game Play

For those of you who don't know, in Grand Theft Auto III you play an escaped convict. You begin in liberty city where you once again try and become the best villain in town. Missions at the beginning are quick, easy and range from dropping your gangster friends and their girlfriends around town. Complete these mission and you’ll soon become friends with the big boys in town. Missions start to become a lot more varied from there on. As you meet people in the city more missions become available by going to see them. They are easily marked on a handy map on the side of the screen which means its hard to get lost. Missions can vary from robbing people, assassinations and planting bombs. With each complete mission you get paid a sum of money which depends upon the risk of the mission.

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Right from the very start you will notice the freedom this game give and just goes to show why the previous GTA games were so popular. As well as completing the missions you need to obtain transportation. As usual you either break into parked vehicles or steel them from drivers as they are stopped at traffic lights. I get the feeling the developers have toned down the police a little. In the previous games, just stealing a car was sometimes enough to get them on your case. Now I can quite happily break into loads of cars without a problem. The game has literally hundreds of cars and types of vehicle to drive. Each vehicle has a purpose in GTA3. If you steal a taxi for example, you can go pick up paying passengers and taxi them around town. This not only adds a bit of variety into the game, it makes the game feel freer, possibly realistic. As well as taxis other vehicles can be driven and then used. You can steal a fire engine from outside the fire station then go around town putting fires out. Driving an ambulance you can go pick up people needing to go to the hospital. There are so many different types of vehicle but the mission styles remain the same.

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Some missions require weapons where you will first need to obtain the right one for the job. I especially love the machine gun and find it especially satisfying to use during an assassination. Sniper rifles are also present, but I’m not a strategic guy. your violent and illegal deeds increase, your police star rating goes up, and the cops start looking for you. The more stars you get, the more police home in on you, until when your rating is full, you have army tanks on your back. Each city contains special features or power ups such as jumps that give you cinematic slow-motion panoramas, hidden packages to collect, secret missions, special vehicles, etc. GTA 3 really does have the same life and energy of the original. The casual gamer can pick up the game for 10 minutes and have a quick blast, mowing down a few pedestrians, or you can choose to play missions, taking out gangsters and opposition but in a more arcade than tactical style of play.

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The nice aspects of the original are in place. If police are hot on your trail you can go to a spray shop to get a new paint job for your car. As soon as you do this the cops loose your trail. Sometimes completing a mission also gets the heat off your back, which I feel slightly strange, yet necessary for the difficulty of the missions to remain consistent. If you fail a mission you can attempt it again which is nice, because in the original once a mission had failed that was it, you had to take on a different mission.

Graphics

The graphics are probably the most beefed up element of the game over its original. The 3D graphics really do make this game something else. The detail in the cities is amazing. With the people in the city the game feels alive. The lighting effects seem to be lacking in places which must be something to do with the fact it was a play station title.

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This is where the criticism comes in. The play station version was slick, smooth and somewhat more playable. For an unknown reason the developers chose not to develop GTA 3 to optimise the PCs capabilities to the full. You can forget playing this game on a low end machine, event the mighty Geforce 2 GTS 64Mb had problems. With this card the level of detail and resolution had to be lowered so much to make the game playable it meant the game was no longer good to look at and looked like a poor play station one title. Throwing more hardware in the way of a Geforce 4 did a world of good, but not everyone can afford a Geforce 4 and feel you shouldn’t need one. For a game that was once play station you have to say the conversion is pretty crap. I suggest you stay well clear unless you have a pretty powerful machine.

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Sound

Once again the sound is fantastic in this title. Music plays a big part in this game, and instead of the developers being happy with the normal array of music that comes with the game and plays when you get in a car, they even allow you to play your own. If you burn your music cds to your hard drive and put them into the correct folder you can here your music when you turn the radio on. This is a neat feature and means you don’t have to put up with the music included if you don’t want. That said the array of styles of music is superb, and it’s nice to see so many normally overlooked styles being included. As well as the music in GTA 3, the sound effects are also good. Each car, van, vehicle has is own engine noise.

Overall

GTA 3 is a superb update to the original. OK, so very little has changed. There are some very funky 3D graphics, and their does seem more to keep you amused in the gaming environment. GTA 3 just goes to show that if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. So many people loved the other GTA games so this enhanced 3D version should keep the public happy. Missions are brilliantly devilish, but all these good features don’t out way the one and only criticism. The graphics are good, but just too damn slow. You need a top end PC to run at any decent frame rate with all details on. With the game originally a play station title it just exudes shoddy conversion. This is why the game is marked down so much. Some reviews feel this doesn’t warrant the mark down, but it the game is unplayable as it was meant to be in high detail then there are going to be so many un happy gamers. We all can’t afford Geforce 4’s. I suggest you get the play station version if you have one, or the Xbox version that should be out soon. If you have a fast PC, ignore my mark down, the games top.