Reviews from

in the past


i.. don't like this game. gameplay is good for the first 3d game but the missions are just not good at all! the characters can be entertaining but that's about it.

This game will look you straight in the eye, tell you there's 9 stalls to find shrug SOMEWHERE across the ENTIRE MAP, oh and here's a TIME LIMIT.

There's a likewise mission where you must retrieve specific gang vehicles, with no instructions on where or how to do so. The game knows you're exploring the world outside of the story, so designs missions around your knowledge of it. It's an abstract way of connecting the missions and open world in a way the series would never do again. It's genius, they're my least favourite missions.

The rest of the missions are designed around NOW. QUICK. NOW. DO IT. NOW. SNIPE THESE ENEMIES. TAKE TOO LONG TO AIM? YOUR FRIEND DIES FOREVER. RUN OVER THIS GUY IN A PARKING LOT. NOT DRIVING FAST? 600 NEARBY MAFIA MEMBERS ANNIHILATE YOU. TIME LIMITS. EVERYWHERE. ALL THE TIME. NOW. TICK TOCK. TICK TOCK. SPLOOPS. TOO LATE. YOUR CAR EXPLODES OR SOMETHING GET FUCKED. It's a sloppy mess. It's so fun.

Player Empowerment. Encourage progress by rewarding the player with enhancements to their abilities. A time proven design philosophy surging through many of gaming's greats.

Every time you progress the story, this game will look you straight in the eye, shower you in millions and tell you YOU'VE DONE IT as victory fanfare plays you into the horizon. It'll then tell you an entire mafia now hates you and that one third of the island can no longer be traversed without that mafia one hit exploding your vehicle and then keep doing that with more and more mafias every single story milestone your grand reward for beating the game is one of the mafias getting their weapons upgraded to AK47s the strongest assault rifle in the game.

I wouldn't recommend this game to my worst enemy. But I will 100% it 7 times over the span of 20 years and rank it as my 20th favourite game of all time on Backloggd

si gta vice city fuese menos bueno:

nonsensical mission objectives and some of the worst traffic ai with overly aggressive gang members makes this one of the worst gta games for plain free roaming (not like theres much to do outside of the story anyway)


Black-handed tomfoolery in three dimensional havok. You see, it's grandly outdated- You can't even shoot a pedestrian through it's invisible windshield and everything SCREAMS prototype hell. But this is an atmospheric witchcraft. Antiquated commonplaces of gaming, floating icons to affordably wreck mayhem and peaks of infuriating, faulty, hair-ripping difficulty rooted to laborious ballistics and open-roam incompetently forcing you to go hell-and-back just to replay a mission before dying stupidly. It's challenging roughness makes it an equally gratifying circus if you brace for it to be a time-consuming maelstrom of jumping through hoops of fire. I just know i grinded my TIME on my PS2 back in the day, some of it i cried out of furious anger, but a sheer lot of it i stood hypnotized by blowing up police cars and driving boats in a fit of a nervous breakdown until achieving meets end. It's gonna drive INSANE anyone accustomed to modern GTA V gameplay. But it's a challenging, gratifying hood classic that comes off as cathartic when you almost seemingly impossibly let it. Also, the simplicity of everything seems funnily fresh for taking place on such a big fictional universe, someone as cryptic as Claude deserves a glorious comeback somehow.

Eu amo esse jogo, amo a ambientação, o humor, as coisas doentias do mundo de Liberty City, amo as facções, as guerras de drogas, e, principalmente, amo o nível elevado de desafio nas missões: mas vocês são frescos que foram criados com GTA V que tem checkpoint a cada 30 segundos e não conseguem zerar o joguinho pq é muito difícil ainnn

Best atmosphere of the trilogy

Story is just a vessel for missions, basically non existent.

Clearly outdated in terms of gameplay.

IM COMING BACK WITH THA BLOOOST



GTA is surely one of the franchises that made part of my life. This one is a classic and never gets old enough to play. Its timeline is after the San Andreas events, even though this game was released before.

Keep in mind that this is the first 3D GTA ever created by Rockstar, but it never ran away from its origins: Open world, with a criminal protagonist, and the missions.

Grand Theft Auto III is the one big step in the evolution of the GTA franchise, it is one that revolutionized the formula and cemented itself so much in the gaming space that afterwards every game wanted to be like Grand Theft Auto. After a series of top-down arcade-y crime simulators with very mixed reception and a null story comes a complete overhaul of everything that was known at the time; a vast and expansive 3D environment for the time you could do all sorts of things within, a completely voiced story of considerable length inspired by 90's crime drama films with actual characters in it, actual functional weapons that you can aim down with a new layer of stategy because of the added dimension, and just being able to drive through the living parody of New York City, filled with pedestrians and actual traffic to give it life would be just enough to blow someone's mind back in 2001. (Biggest selling point could probably be the fact that you can choose to be a psycho and rack up kills and explode cars like crazy as well.)

With the 3D revolution came a way more delectable way of progressing through the game, something that was kind of prototype'd in the last few games but was never really the focal point, so far to progress in the """story""" you had to rack up points by doing little missions in order to progress and eventually move zones. In this game the way of progressing is the missions, usually point A to point B stuff, with eliminating or escorting someone in between those but the idea is that the way to advance is simpler but highly appreciated, and even if this story is very simple and has not a lot of depth it seems to have worked for them to keep using the formula in this day and age. Also, for some reason GTA2's gang system is still in there somewhat, if you advance to a point in the story where Claude does something to piss off a gang they'll actually try to harm you when you go to zones populated with these, very subdued but noticeable where the idea came from.

So, the formula change is very nice but it's only until a couple hours in where you stop appreciating it and then start focusing on the worst aspects of the game, GTA3 is the very first 3D entry in the series, and thus the sloppiest at its job of being A Functional Video Game. For starters the mission for the majority are all Rockstar peeking over Sega's shoulder when they did Crazy Taxi, there's a buncha driving involved and sometimes you need to take a character somewhere, chase down somebody or drive to someplace really fast and none of this would really be a problem if the driving feeling wasn't so bad... Cars in this game feel like they're made of paper the way they are so light and can get tipped by absolutely anything and float everywhere even with the littlest of crashes, and they break like LEGO, getting set on fire just by crashing a couple of times or getting sprayed by an enemy. This shouldn't even be an issue but when the game is so reliant in the driving at a time limit or having to keep your car in a good state then its something thats kind of rage-inducing for the most part, it can be used to your advantage but it's generally very annoying for it to happen during the longest missions. I also had major problems with driving boats for some missions that require you to do so as they're the stiffest vehicle type and don't really move how you want them to, especially when the missions themselves require a certain point of precision thats just bothersome.

Because there's a lack of movement while you aim with any heavy weapon, and there's a severe lack of cover or even a cover system in the first place then most shootouts end up in everyone spraying at Claude at once and then him dying immediately after, the game is significantly harder just because of the unfair advantage of the AI aiming capabilities, so most combat in this game is done from a safe distance and it gets stale quick. And that's pretty much everything in GTA3, it's nice and cool to see everything new having played the 2D Universe entries but ultimately its a game that doesn't do much with its resources and usually opts for doing the same things over and over again, it gets a lot of merit for being the GTA game that changed everything but going back and playing it nowadays requires a lot of tweaking and patience to get a satisfactory experience out of it, and even then it doesn't really amp up and get better as you progress either.

Grand Theft Auto III is a game that has aged like fine milk in the desert of Sahara, and it really never got any better outside of revisiting the city in Liberty City Stories, which is a shame, I remember the game being more fun.

Envejeció mal, no tiene mapa y los autos duran menos que un Peugeot.
No se si yo tengo alguna discapacidad o no le entendi la historia, asumo que tampoco le presté demasiada atención.

Unlike the first two, I actually bothered to finish this one. This is also my first time beating a GTA 100%. This was also my first GTA.

GTA III is a good game but it suffers from being the first 3D entry in the series, with it's biggest shortcomings being the lack of a map screen and a lack of camera controls. This next issue mostly affects during rampages but the sniper rifle aiming controls like shit on PS2, the worst example of this is in the Columbian headshot rampage.

As I said, it's a good game, the story and actual missions are quite fun, but unfortunately it's just dragged down by those other stuff, and whenever I'm in the mood for some classic GTA, I'll usually play either Vice City or San Andreas. However, I will always respect it for being an extremely important game because the open world genre today owes itself to this one.

el peor gta 3d, pero sigue siendo un buen juego

Un sólido precursor de los mundos abiertos a pesar de su mal envejecimiento y dificultad a veces injusta, aún así sigue siendo muy divertido.

Back then? Wow, I loved it. Today? It's a bit silly and simple.

talvez o maior jogo da história mas claramente ultrapassado, em tudo...
pra sua época um grandioso jogo, hoje em dia é tipo um soulslike não proposital de tão frustrante que é jogar essa porra, mas ainda consegui me divertir, dá uma sensação meio que "obscura" que só esse jogo tem na franquia. (boa trilha sonora também).

One of the first games my dad gave me, unfortunately I didn't speak English at the time and had no idea on what to do so I'd just spend hours, days, weeks in the first map in my orange prison outfit, running around, driving cars and beating people up, hoping that I'd be able to beat up a cop and escape unscathed just so I could have their gun and then hole myself up by the Hospital.

Difficult to compare to newer versions, but still fun sandbox game.

GTA 3, the seminal open world game of its time.
I would like to preface this by saying I played GTA 3 after vice city and san andreas. I would also like to mention that game is an experience and a half for the time it was released.
Unfortunately, it is quite a flawed experience. Its also a very very fun experience, but the story is sometimes quite random, the music is better in future installments and the characters are not as fleshed out as future entries.
It should be acknowledged for forming the base for Vice City and San Andreas to build from, the grandfather who walked so the kids could soar.
Unfortunately, as both vice city and san andreas really completely blow it out of the water, I cannot recommend it for any reason except nostalgia and to experience gaming history.

This review contains spoilers

GTA III is one of those games that had been sitting on my shelf for years and, for one reason or another, I could never get into. I'm really glad I did give it a proper go, however, cause 2001's Liberty City has such a unique atmosphere--one you really don't find in many open world games.

The City is bathed in litter, it always rains and it's full of murderous assholes, but they're fun assholes, considering none of them actually get much development. I was impressed at how well the structure of the game holds up--I was seriously blown away by the game's scale the first time I arrived on Staunton Island, and though Shoreside Vale didn't offer much in the way of story content, I feel like I spent a lot longer exploring it than either of the other two islands.

Of course, GTA III is not a perfect experience. It's marred by performance issues pretty much throughout and some of the missions can be seriously frustrating (maybe it's just a skill issue but I remember having some real trouble with Bomb Da Base Act II and Kingdom Come). The combat controls can take some getting used to as well but this was something that would be refined in Vice City (but mostly San Andreas) and it's mostly owing to the game's age, so I can't fault it too much. The shooting controls are, naturally, much better suited to a mouse and keyboard than a Dualshock 2.

GTA III's story is a fun, if simple, parody of New York gangster movies, but because it wears this so earnestly on its sleeve, and the characters, while incredibly archetypal, are nonetheless entertaining, I can happily overlook the rather limited mission variety. Running into Catalina again at the end of Portland's missions was a pretty cool "Oh shit" moment.

I think if you can get over this game's age there's a lot to love about it, especially if you're partial to early 2000s media like myself--the game is absolutely bursting with Y2K energy so it's a really neat time capsule for enthusiasts, and it's also just a pretty good time.


Nostalgia is a bitch and so is this game. It has it's place in history, but the cracks are very noticeable.

O jogo é bem ok para ser jogado hoje em dia, não é tão legal quanto o san Andreas, pelo fato de ser EXTREMAMENTE DIFÍCIL em algumas partes,e pra que for jogar recomendo bastante pegar o borguine táxi no início do jogo,ele salva bastante,ta falando algo de entorno de 10 missões pra eu zerar mas acabei dropando por eu não estar mais me divertindo enquanto jogo. Mas pretendo voltar um dia e completar o 100%

I want to like this game, it did a lot really well!
It just happens that most of things it did well were done much better by every game that followed