The framerate has been improved a bit, maybe not leaps and bounds on average, but it's much more steady than last time out. Being able to swim this time out is nice, but we've seen that before and it really just feels like we're getting something back that we've already had.Īs mentioned, Vice City Stories makes a number of technical improvements over what we saw with Liberty City Stories last year. We suppose that'll have to wait for Grand Theft Auto IV, and we're more than willing to hold our breath, but it seems like this would be the perfect platform, literally and figuratively speaking, for some new experimentation. Sure, it's a big technical improvement over Liberty City Stories, but there's nothing substantially new to the series here. In fact, after remembering our time with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, we can't help but feel that Vice City Stories isn't quite everything it could be. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as Vice City Stories is still easily one of the best games on the system, but if you've began to grow tired of the franchise's mechanics, mission structure or overall feel, this likely won't renew your love of the series. By that we mean that while things have been cleaned up or expanded a bit here or there, it's still largely the same game that we first saw with Grand Theft Auto III.
Still though, it's Grand Theft Auto through and through.