The first decade of Grand Theft Auto’s 3D reinvention, from 2001 to 2011, brought four full-length releases (not counting handheld instalments or DLC expansions) across two console generations: games that reshaped the videogame landscape in their open-world image. In 2023, as GTA 5 enters its tenth year, it remains the series’ only release of the period. A single game following in those footsteps couldn’t, surely, hope to have the same seismic effect. And yet.

When Sony revealed the PS5 lineup in a 2020 event promising the ‘Future Of Gaming’, the very first title it showed was GTA 5 – a game that had first released on PS3. This enhanced edition would bring the game to its third generation of consoles, across the span of which it has sold over 170 million copies. Few games have ever remained in the conversation for so long. But for those who haven’t held onto their citizenship over that time, what’s it like to revisit Los Santos after a few years away?

Old stomping ground

Visually, GTA 5 has grown old with remarkable grace. In close-ups the game occasionally shows its age, but in the sweep of transit, it still convinces. Of course, it’s had rather a lot of work done over the years – what else would you expect from a game set, more or less, in LA? The cosmetic enhancements include cleaner textures and sharper resolutions, naturally, while on PS5 these changes also extend to the hands, the DualSense haptics improving the sense of the city beneath our tyres and pulsing in time with the thick bass of a nightclub.

Most startling, though, are the changes to the quality of light itself. From the searing neons of Vice City to the haze of San Andreas, light has always been a tool Rockstar leverages to establish a sense of place, but here the combination of HDR and ray tracing pushes it further than ever before. Brittle morning sunshine at one end of the day; at the other, Pacific sunsets that bleed out into pink; after darkness falls, the twinkle of lights catching in newly reflective skyscrapers and chrome paint jobs. On a gloomy British day, it’s truly transportive.

Along with the odd newly introduced detail – including stray cats that scurry into alleyways as you drive past – and a first-person mode to appreciate them better, everything works together to evoke the feel of a real city, in a way that’s still unmatched after all these years. Spider-Man’s New York may have the edge in fidelity, but it never feels alive in quite the same way Los Santos does. In part, perhaps, because where the former game posits a city that (for all its supervillain inhabitants) fundamentally works, Rockstar’s game is more honest.

The enormous wealth disparity of the region makes for a virtual world that can be navigated by a sense of altitude and affluence alone. For all that cutscenes might try to sell the cultural chasm between protagonists Franklin and Michael, it’s never realised better than in the climb required to pick up quests from your new mentor, up from South Central’s tightly bunched bungalows and scruffy unused lots into the rarefied air of Rockford Hills, with its playgrounds of the rich and famous. And then, eventually, over the spine of the mountains, the sparsely populated back-country that Trevor calls home, every bit as wild as its inhabitant.

The result is a place as beautiful as it is ugly, where rolling vistas are pocked with billboards crude in graphic design and innuendo, where as much effort has been put into rendering the litter as the architecture. This, at least, helps to explain why – for a world that remains so brilliantly inviting to the player – every character you meet seems to hate living in it so much. This aspect of GTA 5 has aged significantly less well: if its caustic nihilism could be a little wearing at the time, it can feel exhausting now, a relic of ’00s attitudes that prized saying the unsayable and disdained anyone stupid enough to care about anything.

This seems in part to have been a reaction to the reaction to GTA 4, a game that was stupid enough to care about things. The tale of Niko Bellic, with his regrets and tragic backstory, was an early step towards the kind of more mature, prestige storytelling that characterised The Last Of Us, GTA 5’s 2013 contemporary, and then the Red Dead Redemption series.

The early movements of the plot here are roughly in line with those examples. Michael is established as a man out of time, plagued by a kind of American Beauty suburban ennui and a nostalgia for his younger criminal days, while Franklin steps into the classic GTA role of felonious up-and-comer with just a hint of reluctance about that life. Most venom is reserved for what Michael sees as the soft indulgence of modern west-coast American life, and for the supporting cast. Franklin’s cohabiting aunt is faddy and promiscuous. Michael’s daughter is starry-eyed and promiscuous. His wife is ungrateful, unfaithful and, yes, promiscuous. The limited roles available to women were among the few sour notes raised in our review at the time, and it’s only curdled with time. It’s no surprise that Rockstar seems set to address this with GTA 6.

But there might be no character for whom the plot has less respect than Jimmy, Michael’s son, who is introduced screaming slurs into his headset while playing a Call Of Duty-like shooter. To his father, Jimmy represents the ills of the next generation. To Rockstar, he seems to represent the gamer, the worst caricature of its own audience – the same ones, perhaps, who rejected the more sombre storytelling of GTA 4.

Talking Trevor

The introduction of third protagonist Trevor is held back. When he arrives, though, he’s immediately established as an avatar for the player’s ugliest desires, and an embodiment of that rejection – something enacted, in his very first mission, through the application of his boot to the skull of Johnny Klebitz, star of GTA 4’s The Lost And Damned. Development of the 2009 add-on coincided with the height of media discussions about ludonarrative dissonance, and Trevor comes off as the response: a raised middle finger, sticky with blood.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the notorious torture sequence, in which Trevor aids federal agents in the ‘interrogation’ of a seemingly innocent man. It’s as uncomfortable to participate in now as it was then, choosing between electrocution and waterboarding, then tugging on a thumbstick to enact the torment. This discomfort seems to be the intent, something underlined by the speech given by Trevor – rarely the voice of reason or conscience – which concludes that torture is “useless as a means of getting information”. But he also admits to relishing the violence for its own sake. Sometimes it’s hard not to suspect the game does, too.

The moment is indicative of GTA 5’s approach to satire in general, which is often to take real-world topics and give them the Nelson Muntz treatment: point, laugh dismissively, move on. The advantage of this broad-brush approach, though, is that when it picks a target that resonates, it’s easy to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Grand Theft Auto has always been built on a fundamental distrust and distaste for the authorities and the wealthy – timeless themes that have only gathered a wider audience in recent years. We’ll confess, too, to finding a little catharsis in the blowing-up of Jay Norris, CEO of Facebook stand-in Life Invader, much as we did in the downfall of Glass Onion’s own tech-billionaire analogue. It could be called prescient – remember that this was years before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Zuckerberg wasn’t quite the public enemy he has become – but for the game mainly being interested in making jokes about hipster workers and offices that look like creches.

Still, it’s a little terrifying how relevant its concerns – which stem, primarily, from the ugliest excesses of American capitalism – remain today. Once again, this has only gained from the nips and tucks that GTA 5 has received since launch. In 2022, players noticed that some of the game’s transphobic content had been removed, while new radio stations have been accompanied with adverts and talk-radio segments that skewer more recent topics. The biggest additions, though, have come through GTA Online’s new story missions. 2017’s Doomsday Heist update found a fine successor to Jay Norris in the form of Avon Hertz (an obvious play on Elon Musk, another example of Rockstar being a little ahead of the curve of public sentiment), while in July last year Operation Paper Trail introduced a lethal heatwave and an energy crisis to GTA’s world just as real life faced its own equivalents.

Ultimately, most of these are topical reskins stretched across existing mission structures – aspects of the game that have started to creak, as you shuttle between checkpoints and engage in wave after wave of shootouts – but they’re indicative of the kind of fuzzy eternal present in which Online allows Los Santos to exist. New music, coming out of the car radio, in nightclub sets from real DJs, and in the form of an entire new Dr Dre EP. Stories of supporting characters from the singleplayer campaign, picked up years along the line.

Nowadays, Grand Theft Auto 5 essentially means GTA Online. It’s what greets you on the starting menu, the singleplayer campaign tucked away in a tab. It’s what has driven all those sales, and the game’s longevity – a second world built atop and now considerably bigger than the one that launched ten years ago. GTA 5 didn’t invent the concept of a live-service game or multiplayer concerts or virtual hangout spots, and it might not have remoulded the shape of action videogames in the same identifiable way as GTA 3, but it’s hard to deny that it fits perfectly into the modern landscape, even after all this time.

Check out our best GTA games ranking for which to play next!