Grand Theft Auto San Andreas review: The most ambitious game of the era, but is it the best?

With Rockstar Games' sprawling entertainment monolith Grand Theft Auto V having just hit the shelves, what better time to revisit the company's seminal games trilogy Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City and San Andreas? With a new generation of consoles about to arrive, these modern classics may be showing their age, but little of the black humour, legendary style or downright ridiculousness has been lost with time.
GTA III created a formula and Vice City provided a sense of style, but it was San Andreas that changed everything, as the team from Rockstar North built one of the largest game worlds of all time in just two years. San Andreas is the GTA most gamers remember, and playing it today you can see why.

Set four years after the events of Vice City, GTA San Andreas puts you in the shoes of Carl "CJ" Johnson, one of the best characters in GTA history, an ex-gang member who returns to his home town of Los Santos after the death of his mother. He soon bumps into his old enemy, corrupt cop Officer Tenpenny, before falling back in with his old gang. It's a monolithic story, one of the longest in game history, and it's supported by plenty of bizarre side quests ranging from casino heists to steering a young rapper to stardom. As always there's a great group of characters here, with Grove Street gang members Big Smoke, Sweet and CJ himself proving particular fan favourites. There's also several cases of returning characters from previous instalments in the GTA franchise, including the brilliant Kent Paul and the unnamed protagonist from GTA III, psychotic girlfriend Catalina in tow.

San Andreas sticks to the formula created by GTA III in missions and gameplay, but adds many previously unseen features such as flying planes, burglaries and dating (the game was particularly controversial for a hidden sex mini-game discovered by a hacker)! The game also added loads of player freedom, allowing you to customise CJ's appearance and modify his vehicles. For the first time, San Andreas featured not one, not two but three huge cities, as well as huge expanses of countryside, rivers and mountains between them. Other than GTA V, it's the biggest game Rockstar have ever put their name to, and it's truly massive. However, it inevitably feels less densely packed with details and things to do than the previous games, although there's still plenty to occupy your time. Despite the countryside often being a little sparse, the cities once again feel like living, breathing worlds of their own, each having their own distinct atmosphere. It's thrillingly entertaining.

Where the game does fail is in creating an immersive setting. Because the game is set in the 1990's, it doesn't quite have the wealth of iconic music, clothing and vehicles that Vice City had to choose from, and the game ends up feeling a little generic, as though it might have been set in any time over the last fifty years. It doesn't have the meticulous detail that made Vice City feel so alive, and you get the feeling that Rockstar's team spent too much time maximising the world's size than giving it the style that oozed from Vice City. The soundtrack also falls a little short, with only the brilliant country station KRose reigniting the inspiration of Vice City's music. Understandably considering it ran on ancient hardware, the game also has the most technical issues of any GTA game to date with frequent frame rate problems, blurred textures and regular pop-ins.

San Andreas is the biggest of the 3D GTA series, and it's easily the most popular and famous. It's world is huge, it's story stellar and, once again, it's great fun to play. But it's not the best. For me that honour goes to Vice City, a game so committed to style and storytelling that it puts almost every game of the time, including San Andreas, to shame.

9/10