OUR RATING: 9.2 EXCELLENT About our ratings

TANGIBLES: Gameplay: 9 Visuals: 8 Audio: 8 Value: 10 Quality: 10

Why you should buy it: Not Available Why you should rent it: Not Available

UNIQUE RATING: 9.2 SUGGESTION: N/A

Steer well clear of San Andreas if you’re the type of person who flinches at “ghetto talk‿. San Andreas relies so much on this brand of speech you’ll find yourself greeting your friends with a swagger and clapping them on the back, adding a few “bros‿ to the resulting chat. This is a testament to just how damn good this game is. It has the ability to suck you into the main character’s situation – Carl Johnson – and keeps you riveted for forty plus hours.

San Andreas isn’t wholly different from GTA 3 or Vice City. The setting and plot are a new one and there are many other delightful additions, but there will be more on these later. The next paragraph is solely written for those who haven’t sat down and read any San Andreas review.

As aforementioned, Carl Johnson takes center stage in this big adventure. Carl isn’t the type of man who aims to study at Harvard and pursue a classy degree; his goals are more firmly rooted in the grounds of revenge and brotherhood. On returning to Los Santos, a series of iniquitous events forces him to remain in the city. The game unfolds as Johnson is embroiled with his old Grove Street homeboys and spends much of the game facing unjustness.

So, how good is the PC version exactly? In many ways it’s better than the console iterations, but does lack that big-screen feel. It is the best looking of the three, however, and there are enough scaleable options to get it running on a wide range of systems, which is a plus. There’s also the potential for attaining the best framerates on the PC, proving you have a decent system. With an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ and 768 MB Ram, the game ran pixel perfect when the resolution was toned down from 1024 X 768 to 800 X 600 (16 bit).

With everything maxed out the game looks great. It isn’t home to the graphical wonderment found in Far Cry (which is gorgeous enough to place you in a stupor) but we’ve come to expect average looking visuals with the GTA series. At the very least, San Andreas for the PC looks crisper than any other GTA before it, including San Andreas on the PS2 and Xbox, assuming your computer could handle other new-age games.

The plot is told with plenty of charisma and swearing. San Andreas is a mature title that holds its 18-age restriction aloft with pride. This is not geared towards a younger audience because, inevitably, you’ll witness plenty of spilt blood and liberal use of the "F" word. The game is, ultimately, told with its tongue in its cheek. Some of the characters have suitably over-the-top voices and you’ll never get the feeling that Rockstar was running out of ideas.

The latter is simply because there is so much to do. Although you might be perfoming a drive by one minute, another time you’ll be sneaking into a house and filching documents. Addmittedly none of the skill sets the game presents you with are as developed as in a genre specific title.

Stealth, for example, is simply translated from the likes of Thief where shadows are your friend and you must avoid certain surfaces more than others. Here, all that is asked of you is to walk slowly and stay low. There’s still an element of skill involved, and situations can get quite tense, but if all the missions had you infiltrating and exfiltrating, it’d get quite monotonous.

Another, more important skill set is that of the shooting. The game plays solely from a third person view in the PC version and it works well for the most part. There are some idiosyncrasies in the action, though. First and foremost, you can only crouch when standing still and there are certain maneuvers Johnson performs when the right mouse button is being pressed, and others when it isn’t. Simply put it's a fiddly control system that's been implemented and has clearly been developed with a keypad in mind. This is the most console-ish aspect of the game. Fighting alongside other gang members isn’t fun either, as they have a tendancy to get in your way. The one, vital shot they’ve impeded you from carrying out can be the difference between winning and losing. None of this is enough to make you put down the game, however, and the only reason they’re being sighted is to temper all the praise.

By far the most developed skill set is that of driving. Most of the game will see you hijacking a vehicle (be it a BMX bike, motorbike or car) and maneuvering your vehicle to the spot in question. At first its fun to bang your car up as much as possible and watch its bonnet fly off before majestically incinerating. However, if you’re on a mission and you’re riding with one or two other important characters, it can be devastating to have to lose your mission because you damaged your car so much that it blew up and your fellow men were killed. It’s nice to see the cars get damaged, but even the slightest bump can cause the door to say goodbye. When the rest of the game doesn’t bother about being realistic, you feel Rockstar could have lessened the effect crashes have on your vehicle.

You’d expect to be able to save your game at any point in a PC game, but no, San Andreas for the computer employs the same save-game checkpoint system as in the console iterations, and it works well. Although purists might be put off, this isn’t a game for wine sipping connoisseurs anyway. The fundamental aspect of the San Andreas (and in all the other GTA games) saving system (one where you must return to a certain spot – or spots – on the map to save your game) is geared towards one of the fundamental aspects of its gameplay: the fact that, providing you have cash in hand, you cannot lose the game. If you were able to save at will it would undermine the very feel of the series and make the game too easy, encouraging people to play the game as you would, say, a normal 3rd person action title. San Andreas is not only about completing the story-led missions, either. There are plenty of asides to do and if you just don’t fancy undertaking a quest, there’s always a city to be explored.

San Andreas’ map is stupendous in size. The very first city you enter, Los Santos, is as big as Liberty City and Vice City put together and it can only be rivaled by that of the first game, which allowed access into all parts of the game world. Yet, San Andreas forces you to complete numerous missions before you can progress to the next locale. You’ll spend a good two days in Los Santos (around 10 hours) before you’ve done enough to unlock the next city, and, put in perspective, Los Santos is home to the easiest missions. You probably won’t mind at all because there’s just so much to do in Los Santos anyway. For instance, lifted straight from the previous GTA games is the option to assume the role of whoever’s vehicle you’ve stolen, providing they’re job-specfic. Should you hijack a police van you can toggle vigilante missions on and off and go in pursuit of a wrongdoer. Should you break the law during these missions (hit another plolice car, for instance) you’ll have the police on your tail, which is odd, but it doesn’t temper the fun. In a stroke of genius, you don’t only perform stealth missions for the story-led portion of the game, but can do them on-the-fly. When the day turns to night and you see a black van easing past, make it your own and you’ll be able to toggle thievery missions on and off.