GTAV Review, Part 3 - The Finale

I had a hell of a time trying to get this piece together last week. Nothing was falling into place properly, and I put myself under the gun with Nik having the week off, but that ultimately bore nothing. I'm finally in a good spot to get the last of my thoughts on GTAV out, bullet point quick hit style.

• The three available endings all wrap things up pretty neatly, but are all middling at best.
• Given that the story is about a couple of scumbags committing various scumbaggery, however, it feels oddly appropriate.
• Finding all the collectibles is a nightmare, even with tracking via the Rockstar Social Club website.
• The city portion of the map is tightly clustered, with large swathes of the surrounding countryside going underutilized, if at all, even in side missions
• After the story is done, if you've been keeping up with the side missions, there's not a whole lot to do, and what there is to do loses a lot of its charm.
• Mission encounters are designed well enough, and it's very difficult to die during them, but more random ones on the streets, with police and gangs alike can quickly turn fatal, which can be frustrating.
• It's incredibly difficult to make money in the post-game, but outside of the usual array of properties, weapons, and vehicles, there's not much to spend it on, either.
• Among the various mini-games that can be completed, you can enter a triathlon. The first two are easy enough, lasting about 4-6 minutes each, but the third and final triathlon is a 25+ minute button mashing hell. The swimming portion alone is roughly 8 minutes in length, almost twice that of the previous two.
• Another minor irritant is that the fifth and final street race suddenly makes the switch from cars to motorcycles. Worse still is that some of the sections have you making blind leaps over hills, sometimes crashing into traffic, with no control over the situation. On top of that, if one of these crashes happens to kill you, there is no retry, which most of the other events have available, so you have to reacquire your motorcycle from the impound(or even purchase/steal a new one), and wait for night to roll around again to have another shot at it.
• The last heist mission is a complete disappointment

Outside of that, I've encounter a few other oddities, and other miscellaneous technical issues. The most memorable involves me accidentally grounding the mini-sub on a sandbar as Michael, and switching characters for a bit to do some other things. When I switched back to Michael roughly two in-game days later, he was at home watching TV, and the mini-sub was parked along the sidewalk outside of his house.

Overall, Grand Theft Auto V is a highly competent game with a sloppy third act that does more to stagnate the genre than advance it. With the technical issues it has, and a story that doesn't deviate too much from the standard GTA formula, I'm going to have to give Grand Theft Auto V a final grade of:

B- 

It's a game that tries entirely too hard to be something it's not, and doesn't try hard enough to be what it is. Far from perfect, and failing to raise the bar as its predecessors did, it's a disappointment, but it's one that is wholly enjoyable while it lasts.