Grand Theft Auto V Review: The Cultural Juggernaut, A Decade On

The Game That Refused To Die

🎮 This review is part of the The Grand Theft Auto Series – see every mainline GTA ranked and reviewed.

Some games have a release date. Grand Theft Auto V has a tenure. It launched in 2013, outsold nearly everything ever made, and then simply refused to leave. A decade later it is still on store shelves, still topping charts, still being downloaded by teenagers who weren’t born when it came out.

That kind of longevity is not an accident, and it is not entirely about quality either. It is about ambition. Rockstar set out to build the definitive satire of modern American excess, wrap it around the most technically accomplished open world of its generation, and then hand the keys to three different people at once.

It worked. Mostly.

This is an honest 9 — and the gap between 9 and 10 is a story worth telling.

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Los Santos: A City That Hates You Back

Before the characters, before the heists, there is the city. Los Santos and the surrounding county of Blaine are Rockstar’s vicious, loving caricature of Los Angeles and Southern California, and it remains one of the most densely realised playgrounds ever built.

You can drive from sun-bleached beaches through gridlocked downtown freeways, up into the Hollywood-hills mansions, and out into the dusty meth-country desert in a single uninterrupted journey. The transitions are seamless. The density never lets up.

But the world isn’t just big — it is opinionated. Every radio station, billboard, and overheard conversation is a jab at celebrity culture, tech-bro startups, self-help gurus, and the hollow promise of the American dream. The satire is broad and frequently cruel, but it lands far more often than it misses.

This is a city built to be observed as much as conquered. Pull over, turn up the radio, and just listen for a while. The world is doing comedy whether you participate or not.

What still astonishes a decade on is how little of Los Santos feels like filler. Most open worlds pad their maps with copy-paste suburbs and empty stretches of road; here, every district has a personality you can read in a single drive-through. Vinewood drips with desperate aspiration. The docks feel genuinely industrial and unloved. The hills are old money pretending not to notice the chaos below. Drop into a random alley and there is usually a bit of business happening — a film crew, a street preacher, a drunk arguing with a parking meter. The illusion that this place exists without you is the single most expensive thing Rockstar built, and it is the reason people still wander Los Santos with no objective at all.

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Grand Theft Auto V (PS5) (opens in a new tab)

The current-gen edition with improved visuals, faster loading and the full single-player plus GTA Online.

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The Masterstroke: Three Men, One Story

Here is where GTA V did something no game in the series had attempted. Instead of a single rags-to-riches protagonist, you play three.

Michael is the retired bank robber suffocating in his witness-protection mansion, with a therapist on speed dial and a family that despises him. He is midlife crisis personified — and the most quietly tragic of the trio.

Franklin is the ambitious young hustler from the neighbourhood, looking for a way up and out, and increasingly aware that the men he’s chosen as mentors are not role models.

Trevor is chaos given a pulse. A genuinely terrifying creation — funny, repulsive, unpredictable — and the game’s most honest commentary on what a person who does these things would actually be like.

The masterstroke is the on-the-fly switch. Mid-mission, you can flick between all three, watching a heist unfold from the rooftop sniper, the getaway driver, and the man on the ground simultaneously. It turns set-pieces into something cinematic and genuinely interactive in a way a single-character game simply cannot match.

Three flawed men, three perspectives, one converging story. It is the structural idea that justifies the whole game.

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The Heists: When Everything Clicks

The campaign’s spine is its heists, and at their best they are the finest missions Rockstar has ever designed.

Each major job is a multi-stage affair. You scout the location, choose an approach — loud and aggressive or quiet and surgical — recruit a crew of varying skill and greed, and steal the equipment you’ll need. Then you pull the job, switching between protagonists as the plan either holds together or spectacularly falls apart.

The choices matter. A cheaper crew takes a bigger cut of mistakes; a clever approach can change the entire flavour of a mission. The Pacific Standard job, the big jewellery-store score, the climactic gold heist — these are tentpole moments that still hold up a decade later.

The heists are where GTA V’s three-protagonist gimmick stops being a gimmick and becomes the entire point.

What elevates them above simple shootouts is the planning fantasy. Choosing your gunman, your driver, and your hacker — knowing that a green crew member might bottle it under pressure but costs you less — turns each job into a small puzzle of risk and reward. When the loud approach goes wrong and you’re suddenly fleeing the cops across half the city, the chaos feels earned rather than scripted, because the plan was genuinely yours to mess up.

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Driving, Shooting, And The Feel Of It

A Rockstar open world lives and dies on how it feels to move through, and GTA V’s current-gen edition feels good.

The driving is the best in the series to this point — cars have weight and personality without the floaty arcade looseness of older entries or the tank-like heft that some players found in GTA IV. Sliding a sports car down a canyon road at night, the city lights smearing past, is genuinely thrilling.

The shooting is competent rather than remarkable. The cover system works, the gunplay is punchy enough, and the soft auto-aim keeps the chaos manageable on a controller. It will never be mistaken for a dedicated shooter, but it serves the mayhem well.

On the PS5 edition specifically, the improvements are real: faster loading, a higher-fidelity rendering mode, and a smoother frame rate that makes the whole city feel more responsive. It is the best way to play the single-player today, full stop.

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PlayStation 5 Console (opens in a new tab)

The console that lets Los Santos shine at its best, with near-instant loads and a rock-solid frame rate.

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Where The Story Runs Out Of Road

Now the honest part — the reason this is a 9 and not a 10.

For most of its run, GTA V’s narrative is razor-sharp. The character work is excellent, the satire is biting, and the interplay between Michael, Franklin and Trevor crackles. But somewhere in the final act, the story loses its grip.

The threads that should tighten instead get tangled. A parade of shadowy government agencies and corporate villains muscles in, and the personal, character-driven core — the actual reason you care — gets shoved aside for a more generic conspiracy plot. The ending offers a choice, but it lands with less weight than everything that preceded it.

It is not a disaster. It is a phenomenal story that doesn’t quite stick the landing — and after the precision of the heists and the character writing, that final-act drift is genuinely noticeable.

A 10/10 story builds to its best moment. GTA V peaks in the middle.

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The Two Games Inside One Box

You cannot review GTA V honestly without addressing the elephant in Los Santos: GTA Online.

The single-player campaign is a tightly authored, finite experience. GTA Online is the opposite — an open-ended multiplayer sandbox that Rockstar has fed for a decade, and which now funds the entire enterprise.

At its best, Online is brilliant: heists with friends, a sprawling map, endless absurd vehicles and properties. But its direction over the years has been increasingly defined by grind and microtransactions. The most desirable items cost staggering amounts of in-game money, and the path of least resistance is buying Shark Cards with real currency.

For a player who just wants the story, none of this matters — you can ignore Online entirely. But it casts a long shadow over the package, and the relentless monetisation is a real mark against an otherwise extraordinary game. It is part of why the verdict sits at 9.

There is a deeper frustration here too. GTA Online’s success is precisely what has kept Rockstar from making more single-player content. The campaign never received the kind of story expansions that GTA IV got, because the studio learned that selling cosmetic supercars and weaponised flying motorcycles is simply more profitable than writing another twenty hours of Michael and Trevor. You can’t blame a business for following the money, but as a fan of the campaign, it is hard not to feel that the best version of GTA V — the one with a second story chapter — was quietly traded away for a slot-machine economy. The game we got is brilliant; the game we might have had is the one that nags at me.

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👨 The Dad Angle — Strictly After Bedtime

Let me be unambiguous: Grand Theft Auto V is not a game you play with kids in the room. It is rated M for Mature and it has earned every letter of that rating — strong language, nudity, drug use, brutal violence, and one infamous torture sequence that is genuinely difficult to sit through. This is an after-the-kids-are-in-bed game, headphones on, door closed.

With that boundary firmly set, here’s why it works for dads specifically. GTA V is brilliantly suited to fractured time. The mission structure is episodic — you can pull a heist, do a quick job, or just cruise the city for half an hour and put the controller down without losing the thread. Unlike a slow-burn RPG that demands four-hour sessions to find its rhythm, GTA V rewards the stolen hour after a long day.

There’s also something pointed about Michael’s arc for anyone in their forties. He is a man who got everything he wanted, hates the life it bought him, and can’t stop reaching for the chaos that ruined him. That midlife-crisis comedy hits differently when you’ve got a mortgage and a minivan.

On setup: the PS5 edition is the one to get. The faster loads matter when your play sessions are short, and the visual upgrade makes a ten-year-old game feel current. A good controller with customisable triggers earns its keep across long heist sequences.

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FAQ

Is GTA 5 still worth playing in 2026?

Yes. The single-player campaign holds up as one of the best open-world stories ever made, and the current-gen edition looks great. GTA Online is still active, though the grind is a different commitment.

How long is the GTA 5 story?

The main story runs roughly 30 hours. Add side content, Strangers and Freaks missions, and exploration, and you can easily double that before touching GTA Online.

Do I need to play GTA Online to enjoy GTA 5?

Not at all. The single-player campaign is a complete, self-contained experience. GTA Online is optional and a separate type of game with its own grind and microtransactions.

Why three protagonists instead of one?

Switching between Michael, Franklin and Trevor lets you experience a heist from multiple angles and gives each character a distinct arc. It is the structural masterstroke that sets GTA V apart.

Is GTA 5 appropriate for kids?

No. It is rated M for Mature for violence, nudity, strong language, drug use and intense themes. This is firmly an after-the-kids-are-in-bed game.