Some clouds, in the sky
First up is the scale of the game. It’s absolutely ginormous (a word so superlative, it doesn’t actually exist), and is comfortably three times the size of Vice City, which was in itself a fairly colossal project. But so huge is San Andreas that getting around immediately seems like quite a daunting project. As you unfold the paper map that comes boxed with the game, this becomes instantly apparent. After a few minutes of ambling around the initial starting point, we realised quite how long it would take to drive around the entire island: and got a huge headache and skull-crushing brain cramps from merely thinking about it.
Marlboro country
Whilst bigger is better in many regards: allowing a breadth and diversity of urban and rural environments, you do occasionally wish it had been slightly more compact. As is traditional with the GTA series, many of the missions will see you driving (being chased, chasing or racing) from point A to point B which, seemingly, is miles and miles away. Then of course, you might crash half way and end up walking. In times like these, you’ll be cursing the massive nature of the game and just wishing for some decent public transport to make the game more easily traversable. It would have been a great blessing had Rockstar introduced some regular mass transit system whereby you could go to a bus-stop or some such, and simply warp to another part of San Andreas. Or even a simple 'retry mission' (much like the post-hospital Taxi ride in Vice City) would take the pain out of the more arduous commuting. But instead, you have to put in all the leg-work yourself (especially before you have access to aeroplanes and such-like); and that can be genuinely tiring, occasionally working to the detriment of the generally upbeat pace of the rest of the game.
Gettin' high to get by
There is a wide variety of different challenges to face up to during the course of the game, but the thinly-veiled and ever-prevalent point-to-point racing missions are beginning to become slightly stale. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that this type of thing has been done much better by specialist driving games like Burnout 3 and NFSU2, where the game engine has enough room left to include busy, traffic-clogged streets that make you feel like you’re actually racing through an almost life-like city. Too often you’ll find yourself on the streets of Los Santos, listening to the DJ’s quips about congestion and smog, with only a couple of other cars in sight. It’s clearly down to the PS2’s memory constraints, but it does have a negative impact on the immersive, realistic potential of the game. Running onto a freeway at 10 in the morning should, by rights, result in you getting smacked down by a turbulent metallic stream of fast-moving traffic. Instead, you might be faced with a Day of the Triffids style ghost highway, flecked only by the occasional passing taxi.
