Like they say, every rose has its thorn. San Andreas has several. Foremost, sadly, is the fact that GTA's trademark jankiness has returned. Granted, several systems are in place to remedy it, but at the most inopportune moments it rears its ugly head. When it does, you'll want to throw your controller through your TV screen. What am I talking about, specifically? Basically, just the general loose nature of many of the game's systems. I can't count how many times I've accidentally shot cops, gotten too high a wanted rating, and had to restart a mission. Or, during missions, my partner clips into the environment for long enough that our target escapes. Don't get me started on checkpoint races, either; the slightest bump in the road sends me careening down a cliff, only to have to reload my game ('cause it would take too long to swim), drive to the mission, and start again. These are things that would have been remedied by a "restart last mission" option in the pause menu. But sadly, none exists. Given how challenging a lot of the missions are, this is a shame.
A made man.
The question, though, is whether these moments of jankiness take away from the experience. Personally, I think they do. Momentarily. Once you beat the mission in question, they're quickly forgotten (until they resurface, anyway). It's easy to forget these problems are there, when you ponder the game's grand scope, but when you're playing it, and you're forced to deal with them, they're incredibly frustrating. With San Andreas, the Grand Theft Auto series has gotten bigger and more exciting than we all probably imagined it ever would. But apart from a handful of small fixes, everything that's frustrated us about it is still there.
That said, you'll be hard pressed to find a game as expansive, detail-rich, funny, and engrossing as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Whether you want to engage in a long series of well-scripted and challenging missions or just bust things up for a a little while, the game has got you covered. There really is no other game like it, despite there being many imitators, and this is precisely the kind of experience that reminds why, exactly, we play games: to be liberated from the constraints of reality, and explore living, breathing worlds. Few games have come this close to realizing that promise.
