“In many ways, Grand Theft Auto V is a culmination of the current generation; it’s a summation of everything we’ve seen in the last eight years, a love letter, if you like, to the 360 and the PS3.”

I wrote those words in the closing paragraph of my original GTA V review just over a year ago, and I meant every one of them: Rockstar’s last outing on the previous generation was an exceptional, larger-than-life crime caper that still managed to recreate a living, breathing world better than Watch_Dogs did eight months later on new hardware. Rockstar know what they’re doing, and they should, because in almost every way counts, this is their genre.

But in moving their blockbuster onto next gen consoles, ? How do you make it definitive? For most, this is achieved by a higher resolution, faster framerate and, if you’re lucky, a bundle of DLC. Rockstar have done this and could have stopped there, but they’ve also gone a step or five further.

The first time it really stood out to me was when I found myself back in the shoes of hoodlum-with-a-heart Franklin Clinton. Stepping into a litter-strewn alleyway alongside wannabe gansta, Lamar, I was startled by a stray cat that leapt into my path before shooting into the road where it was promptly squashed, causing a mini pile-up in the process. I immediately restarted to see if it was a scripted way for Rockstar to show off the increases in wildlife, traffic, and dynamic events, yet to my delight it was simply a classic GTA random occurrence. That simple happenstance certified one thing for me: this may look like the San Andreas I tore up last September, but it is not the same beast. Not quite.

“Denser” is a word Rockstar used in their pre-release marketing quite a lot, but it’s no buzzword. The PS4 version contains every ambient detail that the PS3 version did, only there’s more here, all packed tighter within a smoother, cleaner framework. Stepping out of that alleyway in the wake of the unfortunate moggy, I drank in San Andreas afresh, and found it just that little bit sweeter. I saw birds in the sky, more stray cats in the alleys; a group of cyclists trundled by at a sedate pace and I caught myself idly wondering if they were friends, before I reminded myself that what I was looking at wasn’t real. Don’t get me wrong, next gen GTA V is not photoreal, or even any more truly alive than the next game, but the illusion is a powerful and enduring one.

Source: www.godisageek.com