Yo, homie! Where ya bin? Damn fool, you bin missin' out big time, y'know, but it's aiit now, coz you're in Los Santos and we're gonna look after yo - hell homie, you're one of the brothers now! And if yo thought you'd seen it all, well, once you come see what's in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you'll know you ain't seen nuthin' yet - I'm tellin' ya, that shit is whack!

Welcome To Da 'Hood

So, the nostalgia has finally worn thin and you've had your fill of Eighties-based Vice City. This can mean only one thing - you're ready to undertake Rockstar's greatest game yet and play the jewel in the crown of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy. It's time to visit San Andreas.

You are Carl 'CJ' Jackson, and you've been away in Liberty City for a while. The year is 1992 and you return to your home of Los Santos after a rival gang murders your mother. Some of your old friends, like chubby Big Sweet are pleased to see you, but your brother is less than enthusiastic about your return - as far as he's concerned, you should never have left, and now you're back, it's up to you to prove yourself. One of the many changes in San Andreas is a stronger storyline with better characters than ever before - each of the members of your gang has real personality, as do the many people that you come across on your travels. As the story gradually unfolds, you really feel like you're in the centre of the action, rather than just taking on missions from various crime bosses like you did in previous instalments of the series.

The main format of previous GTA games is retained; a free roaming cityscape within which you perform a series of missions to progress the story. However, San Andreas truly revolutionises things with more new additions and side quests than I'll possibly have room to mention. One of the biggest changes comes in the form of all the extra things to do outside of the main missions. Elements of The Sims are brought into play and you can now develop and customise your character and your skills, bringing a strong sense of role-playing into the gameplay without removing the action-packed nature of the proceedings.

Yo, Check Out My Fly New Threads!

For starters, there are a host of barbers and clothes shops dotted around the three massive city areas of San Andreas, so whenever you're getting tired of your current look, you can simply get a new hairstyle and buy some fly new gear. The range of clothing and hairstyles on offer is phenomenal and anything you buy is available to wear from your wardrobe back at your home base, where you go when you want to save the game. Tops, trousers, shades, watches, jewellery and footwear, it's all here to fully customise your own unique look as often as you like. As well as how you dress, your lifestyle affects how you look physically. So, if you want to be a buff stud, then simply head down the gym and pump some serious iron - you're limited on how many reps you can perform each day, but after a couple of weeks (in the game) of hard training, which you must actually go through by pressing buttons to pump the weights, you'll be looking massive and you'll get plenty of compliments when wandering around the streets from the bikini-clad babes and hookers that you meet.

Rather than searching out hearts to restore your health, you can now simply grab a bite to eat in one of several fast food chains, the funniest of which is Cluckin' Bell, where you can buy chicken meals and the staff are dressed in chicken suits to boot! If you don't workout and you eat loads, you'll gradually get fatter and fatter, so if you feel like being an out of shape bloater, that choice is yours too. However, this does have an impact on the gameplay - you build stamina by running around, cycling on bikes, or using the running and cycling machines at the gym, and the higher your stamina gets, the further and faster you can sprint and run, which is very handy in a tight spot. So bear that in mind before you become a fat porker!

Then there's your skill sets - whenever you drive, ride a pushbike, ride a motorbike, or use a weapon, you're building up your skills and each time you increase them you become more proficient and they become a little easier. As before, a range of weapons is available - pistols, machine guns, rifles, sniper rifle, grenades, bazookas, plus melee weapons like a knuckle duster, knife and chainsaw, so there's plenty of choice for how you take out your enemies. Eventually you can dual wield certain weapons, while with motorbikes you become better at pulling off stunts and staying on your bike after a collision. The addition of cycles is a superb one, and it's great fun to speed around the city on a BMX, weaving in and out of traffic, skidding around corners and bunny hopping over low walls - indeed this is one of the most enjoyable ways of getting around, even though you don't have the radio stations to keep you company.

Another enhancement worthy of a mention is the new and improved map - no longer do you have to memorise the locations of the many places you need to visit - everything from the clothes shops and burger joints to the gym and Pay 'N' Spray are now clearly marked on the map, and you can even place a waypoint at any location to guide you to the point you want to get to. This really does make the task of getting around the sprawling cityscape and finding your destination much, much easier.

Life On The Open Road

Your body isn't the only thing you can customise either - when you get hold of your first low rider, a car with suspension that bounces, you can kit it out at various garages with new paint jobs, bumpers, exhausts, nitro and various other body parts, to a level of customisation that approaches the likes of Midnight Club 3. You can even buy nitros, which come in dead handy for those illegal street races, some of which are part of the story and others are available as and when to indulge in.

As far as vehicles go, the range is bigger than ever - a huge range of different cars, vans and trucks is available for the taking (as always, you can run in front of any vehicle then pull out the driver and nab it) and there are military jeeps, tanks, huge trucks including car transporters, plus the usual taxis, ambulances, police cars and fire engines, each with their side missions of picking up customers, taking the wounded to hospital, killing criminals or putting out fires respectively. There are police bikes too, so you can now run those vigilante missions mowing down criminals with your machine gun, rather than with a police car, plus you can even take control of helicopters!

However, one of the best parts of San Andreas is the fact that the three city areas are interconnected with massive, largely unmapped countryside terrains, dotted with small villages. So you can go roaming around the countryside simply to explore or even just take in the sights, and this sense of scale, combined with a complete lack of loading times, is a real achievement; it as never been so much fun just meandering around the place and checking out the scenery than in San Andreas.

Lookin' Good Home Boy!

Graphically, San Andreas is a definite improvement upon its predecessors, but it's still not as polished as dedicated Xbox games. This doesn't matter one bit though, because there's more than enough detail here in every respect to immerse you completely into the sprawling game world. The amount of detail put into every aspect of the game is quite staggering - every different model of car can be damaged in various ways, with hoods, trunks, doors, panels, bumpers and windows all getting smashed up if you have collisions, while the streets are packed with many vehicles and pedestrians of all shapes, sizes and colours, including various gang members that will take pot shots at you on sight, plus police officers who get involved if shooting breaks out. As before, you'll often see the police chasing suspects, or muggings and gang warfare taking place completely independent of your actions, really giving the feeling that you're in a living, breathing city where everyday life carries on regardless of your actions. Every shop and building is rendered in amazing detail, with windows and decoration accordingly, while the countryside looks great, packed with trees and bushes of all shapes and sizes.

It's a shame that the characters still look a little 'action figure' at times, with polygons clearly visible, and the clothes are clearly painted on, rather than being worn. However, one element that's really been improved is the animation of the characters - in cut scenes, the use of body language with each character is excellent. As they talk, they gesticulate accordingly, waving arms, slumping shoulders or squaring up to each other, depending on what's going down. It adds a new dimension of realism to the characters and makes them that much more lifelike and convincing.

Damn, It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta

As to the gameplay of the main missions, well, it's more varied than ever before. One of the new elements is being able to burgle people's houses, and the first time you do this is during a mission. You don a ski mask and sneak slowly around the house at nighttime, grabbing valuables and taking them out to load into your van. As long as you're done before daybreak and don't wake up the inhabitants of the house, you'll get away without a police chase at the end too, and you can do this any time simply by hopping into a certain type of van. The fact that each house you can enter is fully decorated and furnished is a huge achievement, and it gives a real Sims vibe to the proceedings. Another new element is stealth - you can sneak around to avoid guards, hide in shadows and even execute melee stealth kills from behind - silent and deadly.

As you gain respect, just one of the many stats that you develop, you can recruit gang members to accompany you, backing you up with extra firepower, and many of the missions involve you teaming up with your homies to go and take part in one crime or another. One mission with Big Sweet sees you chasing a train, riding a motorbike along the tracks next to it, while Big Sweet shoots the rival gang members standing on top of the train. Another one reverses the role and it's one of the most exciting of the early missions - Big Sweet is driving the bike while you have to use your machine gun to take out the many motorbikes and cars chasing you. There's even a car transporter in pursuit, which at one point gets ahead of you and releases its cars, which Big Sweet deftly dodges and they smash into the pursuing cars in a massive explosion! It's very reminiscent of the chase in Terminator 2 when Arnie and Connor are on the bike, pursued by the T1000 in his massive truck cab.

Other examples of missions include putting hits on rival gangs, stealing a DJ van from a beach party, street racing, burning a house to the ground with Molotov cocktails, raiding a compound for supplies, and many, many more - the list is endless and the sense of repetition is less than ever before; each mission really is completely different to the last. There are now rhythm missions too - in one mission you have to bounce your low rider car in time to the music to prove your skills, and at a beach party you again have to hit buttons to the rhythm to dance and impress the female DJ enough for her to let you get in her van, which you subsequently steal! One mission sees you stealing the car of a bodyguard to a famous rapper, then picking him up at an award ceremony and driving the car straight off the pier and into the drink - bailing out at the last second, of course!

And this time around you've actually learned to swim! It's a huge advantage that you don't have to be careful around water any more, and if you do end up driving into the drink, you abandon your car and swim to shore - you can even swim underwater, holding your breath for a limited time, and the more you swim, the better you get. The depth of this game, the skills you develop and the size of the world you explore is unparalleled. One more example of yet another new element is that you can get yourself a girlfriend, and must take her out on dates to keep her happy!

Surfing The Waves

Not the actual waves, the radio waves fool! San Andreas packs in more music than ever, across no less than twelve radio stations. The focus is largely on rap, soul and R&B, which isn't music that I'm particularly into, but the selection of tunes is excellent and really complements the gang feel of the game. There's also a rock station, a country music station, a house music station and more, each hosted by a quirky DJ. Sadly the DJs of before are largely missing, which is a shame (I miss Lazlow, Andi and Toni!) but the new DJs are all very well voiced and the things they say, as well as the many fake commercials, are just as funny as before. The talk show channel now has a range of different shows on them (including Gardening with Maurice, which was mentioned in GTA III) although I have to say that the subtle wit of the previous games isn't here any more, largely replaced with parodies that are over the top and as subtle as a sledgehammer, making them a little less amusing than before. It's still funny, but it's not as funny, because it's not as intelligent as the previous games.

The voice acting throughout the game is excellent, as usual, with a host of big names voicing the heroes and villains, including none other than Samuel L. Jackson as corrupt cop Officer Tenpenny. The script is very well written and delivered in authentic gang speak in a way that's movie quality, although there's a lot more swearing than before. I guess this is necessary, as these types of people do curse a hell of a lot, but still it does feel a little gratuitous at times.

Size Matters

There is simply so much content jam-packed into this game that if I was to start getting into too much detail, the word count would go into orbit, and that's something I want to avoid. The fact is, this is arguably the biggest game ever made, and if you were to complete it 100%, it would take you several hundred hours, I'd estimate 400 to 500 at least. And there's so much depth and variety that this massive amount of time will be split into literally dozens of different aspects and tasks, like spraying over the 100 rival graffiti tags hidden around, or buying every item of clothing, or purchasing the various properties on offer, or finding all those unique jumps (ramps to drive up)… the list simply goes on and on, and there's about a hundred times more things in the game than the tiny amount I've actually covered in this review.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a truly groundbreaking game, using the previous GTA formula as its foundation and building and expanding upon it far more than anyone could reasonably have foreseen or expected. It is more like a living, breathing city than ever before, with a huge area to explore, dozens and dozens of missions to carry out, and an almost endless array of things to do on the side, like burglaries, street racing, buying new threads, customising your car, working out in the gym and so much more. The gameplay is more enjoyable and addictive than ever, the story is even better than before and the city is so full of detail and variety that the fun literally never ends. Revolutionary in every respect, this is one game that every adult simply has to play and despite just how amazing the other GTA games are, San Andreas really is the greatest part of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - just be warned that the 18 rating is more appropriate than ever, and this is most definitely not one that the kids should be looking at.

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).