It’s been a while since I got to speak about something so positively negative that all been written on a whim. After the game launched back in October and it’s two major updates that more or less didn’t fix any buggy features at all. I guess it was time to review it.
It should have been an easy remastering yet here we are, on the lowest powered consoles, with the terrible frame-rate and all. Let’s inspect the casualty that is the GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition.
Presentation
When they did announce that their three most iconic games are going to get remastered using the unreal engine, there was some remembrance of optimism. Until people get their hands on this trio of games which cost 80MYR (20USD regional) each, all buggy and a broken mess that rivals the first week of Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout 76 in terms of botch-ness.
The frame rate, especially on the Nintendo Switch, will constantly drop its 30fps frame limit to 20 at times at some parts of the maps for all three games, or even during cutscenes if you believe it. Perhaps it’s combinations of shadows and load distances making the already memory-limited console feel the limitation of that Nvidia chip. But, at least flying out of bounds would make the frame-rate stable.
The sound design is okay, definitely not as buggy as people said it was back in the 1.0 version but you can hear the audio for stuff such as talk shows being lower quality than the music.
And to be honest, as a fan of the originals, the new character models may look a bit funky but it’s still rather in-tune with the game’s style themselves, so I really don’t have an issue with them, though I wished Take-Two didn’t have to C&D their free competition if their paid one looks terrible.
So in short, the switch from Renderware to Unreal Engine 4 is quite mixed in terms of looks and even performance, which is a shame since these are the rare occasion that a GTA game could land on a Nintendo console,
Gameplay
Positives first, the weapon wheel and aiming system from its future successor, GTA V works well. And both 3 and Vice City play exactly like their original self but with more streamlined controls. The main downfall of this trilogy is San Andreas, even with reports suggesting that it’s the most worked on. Most noticeably weapons balancing on enemies are broken to all heck.
One noticeable example is that coding for enemies getting out of vehicles after doing the drive-by animations will have accurate aim for the rest of the gunfight, making gang fights rather dangerous when the new draw distance spawns in enemies out of your peripheral vision and have 100% aiming accuracy.
This example I feel is more detrimental towards the game that says the many various bugs that have been making the rounds on social media (since those are technically existed within the originals anyway lol) because it makes the game harder for those on consoles and in need of balancing if they ever wanted to release another update.
Other than that, everything else hasn’t changed one bit since this new version is based on their 10th-anniversary ports way back in 2011 and 2015 respectively, But it still can’t beat its original version, no matter how the naming scheme makes it.
Content
You are getting three games worth of content, which will set you back around 20 hours of gameplay if you want to do mostly everything within the three cities. Both GTA 3 and Vice City can be completed around 5 hours a piece with San Andreas, being the behemoth of content that it is way back in 2005, taking the majority of time spent with how many missions you’ll be doing for various bosses. But still, these are pretty good time-sinks if you want to relieve the 2000s jankyness in video game form.
Personal Enjoyment
It is never fun to revisit something that you had enjoyed back then, playing without those rose-tinted glasses and hoping for something special. When in reality it is just a bunch of games forever trapped in an abysmal port once again.
I do feel that perhaps this is a shift of perspective from the current team at Rockstar Games or even their parent company, Take-Two, of wanting to focus more on the open-ended live-service model made popular by Epic for the GTA Online platform, rather than celebrating its glorious past with more than a few GTA Online cosmetics and a lackluster port to Unreal Engine.
They could have done it better than this release or even helped the understaffed Grove Street Games in polishing this collection but they didn’t. Rockstar should be better than this and evidently, the state of this Nintendo Switch port when compared to its LA Noire port from 2019, it’s depressing to see how the mighty have fallen.
I hope that within the end of this part, I could write words like “Even though this game has its issues but it is still a fun time”, but that would be a lie. I didn’t enjoy this new trilogy port and calling it a Definitive Edition feels like an insult to long-time fans like me and many others.
Verdict
The mighty giants of open-world games have returned to a lackluster performance that serves no purpose other than to make more money. GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition is a pretty bad cash grab, no matter how you look at it. It might play fine if you disregard it’s terrible performance and balancing, but the publisher’s actions before the game’s release makes playing this port all the more bitter than nostalgic.
Played on Nintendo Switch, Review copy purchased by reviewer.
GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition
GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition is a pretty bad cash grab, no matter how you look at it. It might play fine if you disregard it's terrible performance and balancing, but the publisher’s actions before the game's release makes playing this port all the more bitter than nostalgic.
- Presentation 4
- Gameplay 4
- Content 5
- Personal Enjoyment 3