see deal Grand Theft Auto Online - PlayStation3 $19.89 on Target

We’ve already played the First Act and spent a good five hours mucking about in flying cars, obliterating each other with orbital lasers and zipping around the city in jetpacks mounted with miniguns. It’s eccentric and ridiculous, as you desperately try to avert a potential apocalypse from engulfing the city of Los Santos. Since it’s out today, there’s not much point going through specifics of what you actually do, but instead here’s a detailed overview of how it works and some of the coolest stuff it adds to GTA Online

1. What the Hell Is Happening?

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2. How’s It Structured?

3. How Do You Access It?

GTA Online: Hidden Lair 4 IMAGES

4. The Missions Are Insane and Absurd

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GTA Online: The Deluxo 5 IMAGES

5. New Toys

GTA Online: The Avenger 3 IMAGES

6. Obliterate Your Friends and Enemies

GTA Online: Orbital Cannon 3 IMAGES

Unlike previous heists, which were discrete missions, The Doomsday Heist tells a much bigger, campaign-quality story that raises the stakes to an absurd level. Egotistical billionaire entrepreneur Avon Hertz (think Elon Musk), with the assistance of his artificial intelligence Clifford (think Siri meets Jarvis), find evidence that some outside party is planning to destroy all life. With the help of Lester, you and your team are recruited to save not only Los Santos but life as we know it.The Doomsday Heist is one sprawling mission encompassing three distinct acts. Each act more closely resembles heists as they currently function in GTA Online. That means a series of smaller set-up missions, which typically involve acquiring the equipment to pull-off a more elaborate final mission. We played the First Act of three to completion, which took roughly four hours. So to finish The Doomsday Heist in its entirety we could be looking around 12 hours – a runtime that gives most single-players game a run for their money. The Doomsday Heist may well prove to be the most significant expansion to GTA Online.Before initiating The Doomsday Heist, one of your party must purchase a ‘Facility’ and become the CEO of a new organisation. This requires you having a fair bit of cash in your bank but is done simply enough through a few clicks on your phone. There are 9 IAA Facilities dotted around the map – the one I bought was just to the East of the city, situated beneath a lake. Upon buying it, you can customise it in a variety of ways: there are nine striking (i.e. garish) colour schemes available; a lounge, security room (which comes with a gun locker and a live-in on-demand strike team should you need them), and personal quarters, meaning you can spawn here instead of your downtown apartment. There’s even a friendly receptionist who’s always happy to dole out snacks. These ridiculous new digs instantly cast you as both a Mission: Impossible-style task force and an insane Bond villain in a Zuckerberg world.The reason you need one of these facilities is because they contain the high-tech briefing room that allows you to initiate The Doomsday set-up missions. The First Act is broken down into three smaller missions, each containing a set-up component and a more elaborate pay-off mission. Interestingly, the first part of these missions take place fully in GTA Online, meaning other players can help or hinder your mission, while the more elaborate later stages are instanced missions, involving the 2-4 players that make up your heist team.GTA has an interesting relationship toward reality. In one sense, it’s arguably the most realistic representations of the real world you can find in a video game. I played GTA V before I’d ever visited LA, and when I finally did, the queasy feeling of deja vu was waiting around nearly every corner. Insignificant parking lots were instantly familiar. It is an obsessive recreation of a real-world location. But GTA moves quickly beyond reality; it uses that fidelity as a launch-pad for something always much wilder and more eccentric.Crucially, this isn’t LA; it’s Los Santos, a sardonic, distorted, and excessive version of the real world. GTA Online has continued that mission, adding insane races in the sky, and The Doomsday Heist pushes it even further. One of the very best moments comes when you find yourself in a Deluxo, a new vehicle that closely resembles a DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future. After respraying it and equipping some upgrades – a machine gun and rockets, naturally – you’re tasked with tracking down a series of vans across the city and hacking them while in transit.Once you’ve hacked all four, you’re given a new set of targets. Soon you realise, however, they aren’t more vans but a group speedboats out at sea. As you approach the water, Lester tells you about one more upgrade – press X and the wheels on the Deluxo rotate onto their sides and a grill at the rear of the Deluxo glows with a faint blue light. Why? Because where you’re going there are no roads.It’s just one of those amazing, absurd moments that GTA excels at creating. So you can look at the twinkling city of Los Santos at night, marvelling at how they’ve perfectly distilled the atmosphere, and you can do so from the comfort of a flying car. The realistic and the preposterous collide spectacularly.In addition to the Deluxo, there are 14 other new weaponised vehicles, including futuristic tanks and stealth helicopters. One particular vehicle worth singling out is the Avenger, which is a huge armoured aircraft, but that’s sort of doing it a disservice. When you buy it, you can once again customise the interior, since it can accommodate up to 30 players at one time who can explore the aircraft while it’s in transit.Speaking of ridiculous stuff, the update also adds the ultimate griefing weapon to your arsenal: the Orbital Cannon. Situated within the one of the rooms in your base you’ll find a large circular table displaying a real-time satellite feed of Los Santos. Once booted up, you’re given three options; at no cost, you can snoop around the map, spying on other players. Or you can target them, manually or automatically, with the absurdly wonderful orbital cannon.Targeting manually is a bit more tricky as the reticle moves relatively slowly, while Automatic Targeting allows you to select a player from a list for an assured kill. As you’d expect from an ‘orbital cannon’, the effects are devastating; a beam which resembles a bolt of lightning plummets from the sky, devastating everything and anyone nearby. If you’re targeted, your kill screen simply reads Obliterated. Understandably, the orbital cannon comes with a hefty cool-down (an in-game day, or 48 real-time minutes) and cost (half a million for manual, $750k for automatic targeting).Little over a month ago Rockstar went on the record to say that due to the ambition of the original campaign and its continuing work on GTA Online, and other games, it didn’t feel single-player DLC for GTA V was “either possible or necessary”. But The Doomsday Heist feels like it might be that significant, story-driven expansion we were waiting for. It has an epic and eccentric new storyline, featuring new characters, locations, vehicles – there’s even a whole new radio station. So while we were patiently waiting for single-player DLC, they went and made GTA Online a wild and epic campaign of its own.