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. 

Are you bored?

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 righteousness of their cause. In a move that felt like a cavity opening in my soul, Trevor rides along with Joe and Josef, two members of the “Civil Border Patrol,” as they chase down and detain Mexican-American citizens across the countryside. Or as one of them says, in his native Russian on American soil, “Well-motivated people, eager to do low-level jobs at any wage to support their families.” 

These missions are, like the rest of GTA V’s offerings, pretty unremarkable in their construction. You chase after these poor souls in a patrol vehicle—a park ranger’s van with hardly a new splash of paint—tase them (another drab crosshair) and eventually escort them back to the vehicle, where they are subsequently driven to a somewhat ambiguous fate. The whole thing would only run about 15 minutes if the missions were stitched together, and ends with little fanfare.

All in all, these excursions with the Civil Border Patrol are a perfect microcosm of what GTA V actually excels at: being a banal cascade of senseless violence and bigotry, bookended by a smug but empty wink. A shockingly vivid reflection of our depravity and our inability to break from it. A post-modern vision of what passes for a video game and what can be fun about it. 

Many of GTA V’s most memorable moments echo this particular sensibility, as has become customary of the franchise, which has satirized America and its long-running series of systemic failures over the past 25 years. The mission “Friend Request,” which involves another of the game’s protagonists, named Michael, breaking into the headquarters of a Facebook analog called Life Invader, is a perfect example. In it Michael, and thus the player, live out what has become, in the years since the game’s release, an even more entertaining fantasy, making a very public example of a tech mogul with an inflated ego and a penchant for flagrant violations of child labor laws. A real crowd pleaser, that one. 

But even this fantasy is relatively dry. Breaking in consists of buying some clothes and walking up to the building. At that point, you sit through cutscenes and eventually substitute a prototype device with a bomb for the one meant to be used in the big presentation. Then, once Michael is miles away and watching the mogul’s press conference on his living room TV, you can call the device’s number, triggering the bomb and blowing his head off. A novelty to be sure in 2013, but one that barely masks GTA V‘s boorishness in 2026.

Further down we go

For every win like the Life Invader sequence, there is another return to GTA V’s morose throughline. A throughline which brings you to a mission where you must profile a party through a sniper scope and take out a target at the behest of shady government boys. In the same breath, another of your characters is recreating Gitmo in an unmarked warehouse elsewhere in GTA V’s beautifully rendered facsimile of sunny California and torturing an innocent man. Almost as if looking at the camera and saying, “Of course it happens here.”

I can still feel the haptics of my Dualsense simulating my victim’s palpitations throughout the extended playable sequence, the uncomfortable sensation of feeling like I held his heart in my hands as the game compelled me to waterboard him and smash his limbs with the biggest wrench you’ve ever seen. 

At the mission’s end, Trevor whisks his barely-there prisoner away and, rather than executing him, lets him go. He only does this, however, after berating his victim all the way to the airport and unpacking his own thoughts about the effectiveness of torture, at one point shouting, “The media and the government would have us believe that torture is some necessary thing. We need it to get information, to assert ourselves.” Trevor, who’s just spent the last hour or so maiming this poor soul, reveals that he sees through the lie that America has propped up about torture. What a hypocrite!

He not only recognizes the facade, he explicitly acknowledges that all the violence he just inflicted on the man in his passenger seat—a man who, a short time earlier, he’d tortured with enough electricity to briefly stop his heart—was for naught. Or rather, it wasn’t for the sake of actually gathering information, since none was actually gained from the act. No, it was instead a pretense for Trevor and his FIB handler to get their jollies off by bringing a guy uncomfortably close to death. 

And so Trevor concludes, “Torture’s for the torturer. Or the guy giving the orders to the torturer.” He claims that the only way for his victim to move forward in life—to not get further rolled by America, the government, the world, and men like Trevor—is clearly to abandon his family and morals and become a torture advocate rather than a protestor in light of this experience. To join the side that just did him material harm to not risk further ire. To prop up a lie and man’s capacity for cruelty rather than try to make the world a meaningfully better place. To roll around in the shit with the rest of the pigs.

Though GTA V was first released in the fall of 2013, this whole scene is a grim punchline that smacks of truths yet to come. Look at the world of difference between Kyle Rittenhouse and David Hogg: two young white men whose futures were unquestionably molded by gun violence—another of this country’s failures—and whose trajectories could not be more different. An advocate and a protestor.

The former shot three men, killing two, amidst protests of police and gun violence. In return, he was valorized by right-wing media and segments of America, even meeting the then-sitting president and being acquitted of any wrongdoing. He started up a short-lived YouTube channel where he espoused pro-gun rhetoric, but after being cleared of all charges, he eventually settled back into life as a private citizen. As if he didn’t travel across state lines with a weapon and LARP as a cop as a 17-year-old boy. As if he didn’t kill people.

Nowadays, Rittenhouse and his wife live in Sarasota, where it was recently discovered that he works in a shop doing what he loves: selling and talking about guns. He might even play a bunch of GTA V for all I know. Hell, he probably can’t wait for its quickly approaching sequel this November.

The latter survived a school shooting as a young man, became an anti-gun advocate in the wake of his personal tragedy, and has often been met with derision and skepticism as he’s attempted to climb the political ladder and reform gun policies in the U.S. His election to vice chair of the Democratic National Committee ended in an ousting once it was apparent that his progressive politics threatened establishment Dems. 

Though Hogg made inroads over the years—even being paraded by the political left in the way the right did with Rittenhouse— his attempts to prevent another shooting like the one that set him on this path have constantly been stymied. By who? A governing body and segment of the populace that would rather fight for the right to arm themselves and shoot up another school, or arm a kid and set him loose amid a riot, than protect its children and most vulnerable communities. 

Who does it sound like made out alright in the end? And with that said, can we really say that Trevor, and GTA V as a whole, is that full of shit?

No way out

It’s kind of remarkable how many shots GTA V calls throughout its campaign, how many clear displays of our moral decay were so apparent when this game was released in 2013. How clearly Rockstar saw where things were headed. Later in the game, once Michael takes a job working on a movie, he’s confronted with a problem: A producer on his high-budget, and by all accounts good, movie would rather can the basically finished product and claim the insurance than release it into the world. What extinction-level crisis that has rocked the entertainment industry for the last several years does that sound like?

This prescience makes GTA V a stunning thing to behold at least for its ability to recognize that we’ve always had this kind of capacity for cruelty, both overt and mundane. Whether it’s a barbarous radio ad playing in the background of a scenic drive up to the countryside, or the way that countless white men in GTA V default to calling the sole Black protagonist “homie,” GTA V nails the casualization of our worst base instincts and how it has seemingly bled into every fiber of our being in a late-stage capitalist nightmare and the decline of an empire.

It’s compelling how miserable GTA V is, especially in light of the fantasy the game is trying to sell players. The sunny “haven” of 2010s liberalism that is Los Santos. The promise of upwards mobility, no matter how desperate the measures that the crew takes. Try hard (and rob some banks) and you too can perhaps shoot your way out of every one of your problems. Be bad, be so bad that you somehow work your way back to being good. 

This extends to GTA Online as well: a playground for the rich to torture the average person with lavish displays of wealth and power. A setting where it can be damn near impossible to take in the sights and sounds of the city without getting mowed down by your fellow man in an armored car with mounted guns or a flying bike. A place where everyone else is banging down your door and hitting your line to make money because money is the only fuel for a life worth living.

And while I’d love to assume many of its players “worked hard” to get where they are over the years, GTA Online’s chart-topping microtransactions for the last decade, which have turned the multiplayer suite into a veritable cash cow for Rockstar Games, indicate to me that quite a lot of people were, in fact, fine with taking a shortcut or two to the top, and subsequently made it everyone else’s problem. 

It’s a toxic game down to the marrow, and goddamn does that make it much more interesting a text and much richer a place to walk around in. Especially because it does just look and sound like our reality, our lived experiences, our cities, our prejudices, and our cultures.

We live in a perpetual state of sharp contrasts. Whether it’s a picturesque train ride upstate, an exceptionally designed building, the beautiful art spray-painted on its side, or a random act of kindness observed in the street, we all see beautiful signs of life everywhere we go. And at the same time that those things are true, there have seemingly never been more pointless wars, more humanitarian crises abroad and at home, and more negligence and abject cruelty on the part of our world’s power-hungry leaders. Even video games, a reprieve from many of these woes for many, can’t fully separate themselves from the conditions that brought them into being. How do you untangle one from the other? How do you fix that? Can you? Or can you just sit back and laugh at it?

Perhaps the most miserable thing about GTA V is that it can’t really imagine a way out, just a constant state of being. There is no up for Michael, who dreams of a life like the movies and largely settles for a life with his dysfunctional family instead. Nor is there anything better down the line for the mentally ill and unstable Trevor Phillips or for Franklin, who often feels tokenized by the game and simply caught in the gravitational pull of the former two and their age-old grudge match. There is only a status quo to maintain. 

There is no vision of a Los Santos, or a U.S for that matter, after GTA V that recovers from its many ills. Just as there is probably no version of the series that ever stops reflecting the country’s worst, and perhaps most obvious, tendencies. I struggle to call this unremarkable, like I would its gameplay, or truly unimaginative. Poignant, perhaps. Miserable, yeah. Tragic, for sure.

And for that, and so much more, GTA V is still the reigning game of all time. At least until the next one.