When we first reviewed Grand Theft Auto 5 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in September of 2013, we declared it a masterpiece and awarded a score of 10 out of 10. Here’s what we said then:

Grand Theft Auto 5 is not only a preposterously enjoyable video game, but also an intelligent and sharp-tongued satire of contemporary America. It represents a refinement of everything that GTA 4 brought to the table five years ago. It’s technically more accomplished in every conceivable way, but it’s also tremendously ambitious in its own right. No other world in video games comes close to this in size or scope, and there is sharp intelligence behind its sense of humour and gift for mayhem. It tells a compelling, unpredictable, and provocative story without ever letting it get in the way of your own self-directed adventures through San Andreas.

It is one of the very best video games ever made.

That’s still where we stand on it today. And whether you agree that it’s a masterpiece or not, the PC version is definitely the best way to play GTA 5

see deal Grand Theft Auto V - PlayStation 3 $19.99 on Gamestop

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Graphics options are plentiful and powerful, with everything from standard quality and view-distance adjustments to a field-of-view slider (though it’s more limited than discriminating FOV players might want - modders have already remedied that). Controls are customizable, and you can play your own music library on the in-game radio. It’s hard to complain much about that.

For the most part, the menus are well done and feel good to use with the mouse. That’s best exemplified with the web browser, which feels like you’d expect navigating a web page with a mouse to feel. The one place this breaks down a little is in the score menus; it’s a little tougher to navigate an Ammunation gun store’s wares with the mouse than it is with a D-pad or arrow keys, but it’s still totally workable. It’s simply a small reminder that this wasn’t originally a PC game. Loading

Using a mouse to shoot, on the other hand, is good enough that it risks making combat feel a little too easy. I don’t pretend to be a brilliant marksman, but if you’re a bad guy (or a cop) in Los Santos, your odds of even making it out of your car to start shooting drop considerably when I’m using a mouse. Without the scourge of auto-aim dragging the targeting reticule down toward center mass, I found myself picking off most enemies with a single shot to the head, especially when playing in first-person mode. That doesn’t mean I felt invincible, though; because the authorities will never stop coming until you give up and run away or die, they’re always going to give you a challenging fight through the weight of sheer numbers.

Nice PC-specific control touches, like not having to hammer a button to keep up running speed (just hold down Shift) and being able to hit a single button (Caps Lock by default) to activate a special ability make everything feel like a native PC game. You don’t get the annoying horizontal drift when running in first-person like you do in the PS4 and Xbox One versions, either.

One of my favorite things about the control setup, though, is that like GTA 4 and a select few other games before it, GTA 5 lets you seamlessly swap between the mouse and keyboard and a gamepad on the fly. No need to go into a menu and swap - just push a button on one or the other, and all on-screen prompts change to reflect what you’re using. It’s a fantastic thing for a game like this, where running and gunning is more precise with a mouse and keyboard but driving or especially flying benefits greatly from the analog input of a thumbstick. You can even use both at once, if you like.

GTA Online , which has been very well behaved this week (I’m as surprised as you!). Though I’ve experienced the occasional disconnect or bout of lag, it’s nothing out of the ordinary for an online game that matches up groups of up to 30 players. What is out of the ordinary is how diverse and varied the available activities are: dozens of different types of deathmatches, co-op missions (including the all-new and very impressive multi-stage heists), races over land, sea, and air (some of which involving combat), and general open-world chaos like spontaneous drive-by shootings (or strafing runs) of other players. The online version of San Andreas is a place where anything can happen at any time, and it’s fantastic to watch people make use of that freedom, even if the majority of it is the inherent humor of crashing things into other things.

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The main PC-specific feature is the Rockstar Editor movie tool and its associated Director Mode, which gives you access to a wide spectrum of playable character models. It’s a powerful creative tool that lets you easily capture gameplay clips and then edit and export them into what can end up as extremely elaborate movies. I did experience a crash that robbed me of about an hour’s work on a classy short film about a man in an alien costume who punches people on a beach without provocation. I love the flexibility of the camera and the simplicity of the editing controls – they make me wish I had a finer eye for filmmaking as I go for easy laughs with a montage of slow-motion close ups of fists hitting faces. Fortunately, there are far more creatively talented folks out there who will entertain us for years to come with GTA 5-made machinima.