// KOTAKU — GAMING
Grand Theft Auto 5: The Kotaku Re-Review
Grand Theft Auto V is the reigning game of all time. One of gaming’s most undeniable cultural exports. An ugly game that casts one unbelievable shadow. A title so massive, it’s become damn near impossible to recreate without burning down your development studio in 2026. Revisiting it in the lead-up to GTA VI’s release later this year has been illuminating in many ways, but the thing I’m perhaps most struck by about the 2013 hit is how miserable it is. What a fascinating thing to exist in the supposed upper echelon of the gaming pantheon.
GTA V is filled with all kinds of missions and objectives—the stuff that modern gaming parlance constantly calls “content.” Really, it turns everything into content for you to check off. It’s got big missions and small ones. Simple, boring ones that occasionally lull you to sleep. Distractions like tennis and drag racing. And, on the other end, massive, multi-part setpieces that get the blood pumping a little more efficiently. A gulf separates these sequences. Sometimes I’m little more than a glorified cabbie, at other times a glorified avatar of the “American dream”—a ball of boredom, rage, and discontent at The Way Things Are, armed with a rifle aimed at nothing in particular.
Lots of it feels utterly meaningless. Stealing the occasional getaway vehicle and quietly parking it in a nearby lot often counts as a mission, one I hate after doing it multiple times in my ~50 hours revisiting GTA V. Not that its more pulse-pounding action is especially noteworthy either. The game’s crosshair, for example, is wholly unremarkable. It’s just a dot. A dot that, by default, magnetizes to the often nameless nobodies on the other end of your barrel, as if to smooth any friction that could possibly arise in the instant between when you see a foe and when you pull the trigger on your weapon of choice.
Many other shooters feature different crosshairs depending on the weapon. A grenade launcher might suggest an arc. A sniper rifle, too. A shotgun blast has a wider spread, and a crosshair usually indicates its range. But time and time again, GTA V plays it cool, calm, and detached with its minimalist crosshair. It doesn’t want to bore you with calculating distances and trajectories. It wants you to endlessly put holes in cops, gangsters, hillbillies, rival drug enterprises, federal agents, clowns, aliens, and everything in between, while occasionally piloting several classes of vehicle in increasingly linear scenarios. It doesn’t feel wholly good or bad; it feels like…nothing.
Driving around the state of San Andreas and shooting things feels like nothing. A kind of nothing that quickly—easily—fills dozens of hours. Like a chore. Maybe that’s the best way to describe GTA V. Well, if it’s going to be such a chore, it feels, at least, like GTA V should aim that tedium at some larger point, shouldn’t it?
It kind of does. Each of its endeavors, be it a mundane task, an odd job to rustle up some cash, or a riotous heist spilled out on the streets of not-LA, does in fact feel pointed. Compulsive, even. At least in part because they feel like the backdrop for the game’s occasionally devastating musings that hit with the force of, well, a getaway vehicle.
The most consequential series of missions among GTA V‘s errands is largely divorced from the thrust of its campaign. It’s got nothing to do with heists and has nothing to do with two-thirds of the game’s playable trio. It’s got nothing to do with the city of Los Santos, even. Far up in the middle of Nowhere, Blaine County, is an unsavory duo called the Minute Men, who are on a collision course with a similarly ugly force by the name of Trevor Phillips—a walking, talking (usually swearing) cancer and truly one of the most detestable protagonists a game has ever saddled a player with.
The Minute Men’s contributions to GTA V are small but important. Over a triptych of morally repugnant descents into darkness that only Trevor can take on, they try to prove the right