Grand Theft Auto V is in trouble

If first impressions count, Grand Theft Auto V is in trouble. This is a miserable opening, breaking the series tradition of dropping you into a fast car in a beautiful city, instead kicking off in a snow-driven town in the American Midwest with a flashback heist. The first thing you do is hold up on the left analogue stick for two seconds before control is snatched away from you. Behind the wheel of a car, you spin out on icy roads. As a way of beginning a story it makes sense, but it’s a lacklustre way to open a videogame. Thankfully, within half an hour we’ve got one car stuck on a fire hydrant, flipped another over into the path of an oncoming train, and taken a third on a police chase out of the city and made our escape on a jetski. Normal service is resumed. And it just gets better from there.

We’ll start, even if Rockstar won’t, with the city. Los Santos borrows Red Dead Redemption’s dramatic skies and soft colour palette, lit with bloom and lens flare by day and gentle, fuzzy depth of field at night. It has almost no loading screens – borrowing Max Payne 3’s enforced slow walk to disguise cutscene loads – and runs at a consistent 30fps. It’s a remarkable recreation of Los Angeles’ urban sprawl, a stark contrast of poverty and the superficial veneer of immeasurable wealth. And like LA itself, it’s intimidatingly large at first, the whole world open from the start, the map filling in as you explore. Drive a few blocks from South Central’s street-corner gangbangers and you’ll find the primped boutiques of Vinewood. Head north and you’ll arrive at the hilltop mansions of the city’s monied elite; keep going and you’ll find desert and the verdant hills surrounding Mount Chiliad. Down south there’s a ramshackle beachfront, a pier (with working funfair) and the massive Los Santos International Airport. And around it all, a picture-postcard body of water that, for the first time in the series, is fully explorable.