Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition Reviews
Rebuilding GTA Trilogy could have taken a variety of ways, and the builder chose the worst.
Review in Persian | Read full review
GTA: The Trilogy is an acceptable but loveless remaster that incorporates some welcome updates, but also new quirks.
Review in German | Read full review
CJ’s return to Grove Street in the opening sequences of San Andreas feels like a metaphorical foretelling. You’re returning home, much like he is, but things feel different. There’s an uncanniness to it all. You know the places and the faces, but they’re not the same. Rockstar Games has swooped in like Officer Tenpenny and taken your money from you, too, so you’re bitter about it all. To make matters worse, you’re stuck with what you’ve got. The Definitive Edition of these games is all we have now. Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas are worth playing if you can - but we’d find it hard to recommend the Definitive Edition versions over hunting down an old PlayStation 2 and booting up the originals. The improvements just aren’t worth the price.
After a campaign of threat and terror against the mod makers who had kept these titles alive for the better part of two decades and de-listing the original versions, we are offered this magnificent piece of failure and while playing it, you just keep wondering about the inner workings of QA departments of the publishers and console manufacturers that time and again have let titles this functionally broken, slip past them.
Review in Persian | Read full review
The remaster of three of the most important games in video game history in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition fails in almost everything that it proposes, even if you can ignore a few contextual merits. However, this definitive version is far from the respect it owes to the originals and, mainly, to the audience.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition is inferior to the original games and represents these phenomenal titles in the worse way possible.
All three mainline GTA games from the PS2 era are seminal pieces, and they still hold up to modern scrutiny – the outstanding GTA San Andreas especially. But as remasters these are weak: they chug on modern hardware and are undone by questionable artistic decisions. Rockstar built its reputation on attention to detail, and while all three of these games still come highly recommended, this disappointing compilation will go down as a stain on the label's record.
So, to recap my advice at the beginning: stick to your original copies if you still have them. If you need to see this mess in action for yourself, either wait until developer Grove Street Games heavily patches this collection or wait for a deeply discounted sale.
While it has its rough edges, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition is a worthwhile remaster of three classic titles. Its visual overhaul prevents these games from feeling overly dated, and the quality-of-life improvements modernize the experience in a way that meets today’s standards. Sure, its new art style and character models won’t mesh well with everyone, but it may grow on gamers as time goes by. And sure, while these aren’t the “definitive” editions we expected, this is an admirable attempt to introduce three groundbreaking games to a new generation, and I’m glad it exists.
Two of the three games are still pretty great, but this is one of the most brazenly offensive cash grab releases I've seen in recent memory.
But this trilogy is just plagued with so many bugs, glitches and performance issues that really ruin this long-awaited comeback. Fans will have to wait in hope that any patches that are being planned happen right away.
Rockstar's remastered trilogy is, appropriately, an absolute car wreck of creative neglect.
Bugs may vary in degree across titles in the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition release, but whether or not they are tolerable, it is puzzling to see how this got past Rockstar, especially with the output that you know they can bring out.
Overall, the final edition of the GTA Trilogy is a disingenuous reset, although the quality of light and shadow, map compared with the original has significantly improved, but the game is full of a variety of poor-quality modeling, as well as many f bugs.
Review in Chinese | Read full review
Here’s the thing, though; despite every issue that the GTA: DE suffers from, I’ve still been having a good time with it. Which is simply a testament to how well-written the Grand Theft Auto series is. The GTA: DE needs a patch. Or, maybe, it needs a boatload of patches. Though, I still find myself enjoying the over-the-top storylines, ridiculous dialogue, and outrageous mission structure. It’s hard to call these definitive, but still easy to call them classics.
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition deserved better. Never mind the lack of parity across all the versions- each platform gets its own flaws to deal with. Sadly, Nintendo Switch is the console that gets the absolute worst way to play any of the games in this trilogy.
GTA: The Trilogy has a total lack of attention to details. At times it seems that Rockstar Games didn't even bother to oversee the work of Grove Street Games. There are some moments and small details that lead one to think that an algorithm was responsible for remastering the graphics and that no human reviewed the final product. GTA deserves more.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition is kinda rough and kinda janky, but it isn't quite the disaster that the dogpile claims it is. Sure, the character design looks rough in high resolution and there are a fair number of bugs, but the games largely function as they did three generations back when they released. It ain't great, but we've certainly seen worse.
GTA: The Trilogy is an experience that suits fans of the original version and who are willing to overlook the technical problems to play the game again other than that it is recommended to wait for updates coming from the company for the game.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Grand Theft Auto takes us back to the trilogy that gave the franchise legs, only to make a few stops for some unwanted additions along the way.