Video game remakes are far from new—no one forgets when Super Mario All-Stars took the trend mainstream in 1993—but this year seems particularly packed with old games being repurposed for new hardware. Blame that on the long tail of the last console generation, which ended with a focus on games built to be easily scalable. While they were built on the Xbox 360 and PS3, such games were obviously made with an eye to be easily upgraded to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, complete with detailed characters and worlds full of robust geometry. Developers squeezed these games onto the wimpy, low-RAM consoles of the day by making some sacrifices—frame rate, texture size, resolution, anti-aliasing—all the while holding onto code that would shine on current-day hardware with only a few tweaks.

The results of such remasters have been solid enough, especially for anybody who missed games like Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, and Metro: Last Light the first time around. Those who had already been down these roads, though, rightly balked at the idea of paying $40 to $60 just for higher resolutions and bouncier hair physics.

Even before this trend became apparent, we expected—and hoped for—Grand Theft Auto V to join the remastering party. In our 2013 review of the PlayStation 3 version, we offered wishful thinking: "A new version of the game on next-gen consoles or the PC would no doubt fix [visual] issues and really set mouths drooling." One year later, the game that brought older consoles to their half-a-gig-of-RAM knees has returned, hitting most of the wish list checkmarks: 1080p resolution, smoother frame rates, multiple types of anti-aliasing, updated assets, and a bit of new content to boot.

Yes, the blood looks better

Last year's best-seller has returned with its massive single-player killing spree intact, still asking players to hop between the lives of a young-gun car thief, a meth-addled psychopath, and a mobster in the middle of a mid-life crisis. It's still impressive to see how effortlessly the game juggles three playable protagonists, often during the same mission, to organically grow the game's playground of mayhem.





















If you want a sense of what newer hardware does for a game like this, don't squint at your TV to count pixels or look for a more diverse pool of cars on the road. True, the game does bump the resolution up to 1080p, boost the average texture size, add a new bloom lighting system, FXAA, sharper depth-of-field effects, higher draw distance, increased foliage, cooler smoke and particle effects, and more cars and people on the road, among other tweaks.

Still, when I booted up the new version on PlayStation 4 right next to a display running the original game on a PlayStation 3, the differences just weren't all that staggering. I saw a few more cars parked in one parking lot, and a couple of the trees and wall textures rendered differently. Otherwise, character polygon counts and other prominent, close-to-the-camera details didn't look all that souped up, and most of the scenery looked like it had been barely touched.

Instead, switch from Franklin to Michael to Trevor as quickly as you can, and watch your console dump the current locale and reload nearby environs across the virtual city of Los Santos. Prior consoles already did a bang-up job handling this game's massive county, between its mountainous prairies and its pedestrian-loaded alleyways, but now, you can really tear across the virtual landscape.

In my testing, I never stumbled upon any Assassin's Creed-esque glitches within the upgraded Los Santos. Flying a massive blimp from one corner of the map to the other, dipping and rising in altitude all along the way, didn't cause a single hiccup or popped-in background element. That's great news for the game's open-world action.

Scenery upgrades vary based on a given mission or cut-scene locale. Some wall art or decorations got astoundingly nice boosts or modeling tweaks compared to the last version, while other content is flat and smothered in blurry textures. Meanwhile, the up-close character models already looked pretty good on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, so they don't get giant boosts in animation or fidelity. The new version also does nothing to fix the uncanny valley issue of GTA V's character eyeballs; they still often look glassy and spacey, and that's a tough barrier to get over in a game that wants you to fall for its protagonist villains.

Another other major tech complaint is that certain regions, particularly the well-worn path to Michael's palatial home, consistently trip up GTA V's next-gen renderer and bring frame rates down noticeably, if only for a moment. That's certainly more the exception than the rule; GTA V on PS4 otherwise sticks to a pretty solid 30 fps refresh rate, a massive improvement over last year's edition, and we're happy to see it. Still, Rockstar decided to load up on visual flourishes as opposed to making last year's engine purr at 60 fps, and I wonder if that was the right call.

Compared to visual stunners like inFamous: Second Son and Ryse, GTA V's assets don't look so detailed and effects-heavy that they need a frame rate dip to 30 just to stay afloat. In many cases, I would have liked the option to keep things looking medium-good while moving along at up to 60 frames—especially now that the series has begun experimenting with first-person mode.

Putting the “hood” in “hood ornaments”

At almost any point in the updated version of GTA V, you can click the camera-angle button a few times to lodge it directly into your protagonist's eyeballs. As the game was not originally built for first-person action, Rockstar has advertised that "over 3,000 animations" were added to the game just to make the mode feasible. Short verdict: It works. Longer verdict: It works, but there are some caveats.







While running around or shooting, first-person mode mostly works as you'd expect in a modern shooter. You have a few preset control options to choose from, and I was comfortable enough with the default option, which let me stick to cover, lean out, pop a few perps, and run to the next point pretty comfortably. Other critics have remarked on how much more startling the game's most violent bits feel without a third-person barrier, and I would tend to agree. Pummeling and kicking someone on the ground as they shout and protest, all while the auto-aim feature locks the shaking camera tight on their prone body, feels unsettling in a way that the steadier cameras in other first-person games can't match.

Indeed, since GTA V preserves its third-person system at all times, allowing players to jump back to that camera angle on a whim, the first-person mode must contend with the scrambles and maneuvers that exist in the original engine. That can get tiring to watch when you have to hop and crawl over ground obstacles; feet and arms are visible at all times, which can be distracting as you roll and bend through those moves.

First-person mode also extends to driving, which is where I had to draw a line in the blood-soaked sand. On the plus side, every car in the game has been updated with a detailed dashboard, often including a CD player display with the current radio station and song's name along with other Rockstar-ian visual flourishes. Plus, players now have the added option of using the right analog stick to glance at any car passengers during a mission. However, the field-of-view within a car in first-person mode is way, way too narrow, and while the game includes a field-of-view slider for action on the ground, it doesn't include the same slider for car driving. That's just bonkers.

During the game's trademark high-speed driving missions, you'll want to look all around your car to determine whether you can merge or cut someone off or run a red light, but the right analog stick is way too sluggish to allow quick glances from within the cockpit. Rockstar even blurred each car's rear-view mirror, presumably because the game's renderer wasn't built for such a visual trick, and you'll suffer a whopping full-second delay when pressing the look-behind-you button. It's too restrictive a viewpoint to effectively complete the game's tougher driving missions. Worse, GTA V doesn't include an option to toggle, say, "first-person on feet, third-person in cars." (Update: Turns out, it does! As user davidhender pointed out, the option is available in a toggle unhelpfully named "allow independent camera modes," which I am now using and quite enjoying.)

Jet-setting radio

Unlike Grand Theft Auto 4, this entry in the kill-and-rob franchise has yet to receive any story-based add-ons—and none have yet been announced—meaning the GTA V we played last year has simply returned. The game has received a healthy slew of free downloadable add-on content, including bikes, cars, and guns, and those come packed into the updated game's quest by default. Rockstar has advertised some new content for "returning" players—meaning those who played a prior version of GTA V and logged into Rockstar's "Social Club" service. One of those is a use-anytime blimp, which I liked quite a bit.

Otherwise, the single-player elements Rockstar added this time around are mostly super-simple quests requiring players to hunt around for collectibles or graffiti tags in exchange for new weapons and cars, as opposed to entirely new plotlines. (Rockstar was also kind enough to add 163 new songs, spread across all of the game's radio stations, and the tracklist is impressive.) Sadly, there's no way to import single-player progress if you've played the game before. Really, Rockstar should have unlocked the solo campaign so that series fans could dive back into their favorite missions right away. That's especially true since last year's game already encouraged fans to repeat missions and complete optional objectives, meaning the game's biggest devotees are almost certainly fatigued already.

Multiplayer modes, meanwhile, include an improved character creator (and the ability to import your last-gen online persona, though that's currently a little wonky) and a boost to 30 players per combat round, but I couldn't test the latter. We held back our new-gen impressions until launch day to double-check whether Rockstar learned from its 2013 online-mode mistakes, but repeated attempts to log into the PS4 version's multiplayer mode have sent up error message after error message.

At the very least, pre-launch multiplayer sessions were sparsely populated but worked pretty well. I liked the option to choose whether all players were forced to use first- or third-person perspective in a round of driving or combat, and the campaign options and variety have certainly improved since the game's launch last year, but we're still waiting for those oft-promised "heist" campaigns to find their way to multiplayer.

I would call this the definitive version of Grand Theft Auto V, but we know what's coming on January 27, 2015: a build for PCs. That version should let us unlock even higher resolutions and frame rates that will let us enjoy far more responsive controls in first-person mode. In the meantime, if you're part of a very specific niche—namely, new-gen console owners who love explosive, M-rated fare and barely touched GTA V when it first came out—then this is the holiday season's biggest no-brainer.