Wondering where the score is? Our GTA Online review will remain scoreless, as a score does not properly reflect its continuously changing nature. Here's how and why we decided to do it this way.

As a single-player game, Grand Theft Auto V is defined by its characters more than by the player, for me at least. It’s the story of three equally troubled criminals with different backgrounds and motivations, and their personalities and proclivities shaped the way I played. GTA Online is a space away from that story, a place for players to run riot together. San Andreas is the same, but your role within it is different, and as a result it’s more conducive to the kind of open-world mayhem that can feel out of place in the context of Rockstar’s single-player story. Like most multiplayer games GTA Online is as fun as you and your friends make it, but the world of San Andreas is a bigger and better playground than most.

The two weeks following GTA Online’s October 1st launch can be fairly described as disastrous. In fact, that's how I described them in my GTA Online review in progress. The lack of an open beta was a serious mistake – if everyone involved knew that they were playing an unstable, untested game, then the furore surrounding lost characters, money and progress, cloud server availability, and frequent glitching might not have erupted with such volume. Rockstar clearly did not anticipate the level of disruption that would be caused by such a high volume of players.

Most of this is now resolved, meaning that you can both actually log into GTA Online reliably and play without fear of losing progress or money to Rockstar’s server hiccups. As of today, October 21st, it’s now running smoothly, and the promise of $500,000 for everyone who played during launch month is quite the generous apology – although I for one would rather have had my original, sadly departed, rank-27 character back.

Arriving in Los Santos and stepping off the plane without a cent, the character you create in GTA Online slips straight into the criminal underworld, greeted by the ever-likeable Lamar at the airport and quickly gifted a pistol and a car, the twin foundations of GTA Online’s castle of chaos. (Amusingly, he also brings a rose, if you choose a female avatar, but his romantic overtures don’t go down too well.) It is essentially a rags-to-riches story, like most of the single-player GTA games have been, and there’s an addictive rhythm to its progression. The more you play, the more you earn, and the more guns and missions you unlock.

Plenty of GTA 5’s single-player characters make an appearance in GTA Online, but the story isn’t as prominent as it initially appears. After the first hour, in which you’re guided through the basics of driving, shooting, and taking jobs, that authored story fades into the background as you take on jobs, team up with friends, or make new ones. The presence of these characters nonetheless anchors GTA Online in GTA 5’s world, giving it context.

Your own character, meanwhile, is a mute avatar who feels out of place in scenes with Lester, Trevor et al – and probably has a weird face, as the character creation system uses a strange genetics-based formula to calculate your appearance. Everybody comes out looking just slightly wrong, and weirdly similar to one another. You have much more control over what they wear – hair and clothes have become the basis of a character’s (and a player’s) individuality in GTA Online.

Jobs, GTA Online’s missions, come in three predominant flavours: racing (usually in a car, but sometimes on a boat or a bicycle), deathmatches (either in teams or free-for-alls, sudden death or traditional), and capital-M Missions, which are usually cooperative and involve more complex objectives, more similar to GTA 5’s single-player missions (but usually simpler, and without the entertaining script that enlivens the single-player’s long drives). Cooperative Heists are still to come, Rockstar says. The vast majority of GTA Online’s Jobs fall into the first two categories, and they start to repeat themselves surprisingly quickly. They don’t have the variety of the single-player missions, at least not yet.

It’s good, then, that shooting and racing are a lot of fun in themselves, to the extent that I could play hours of them in a row without feeling like I was grinding. They’re also sufficiently different from everything else out there right now to make them interesting. GTA 5’s default aim lock-on recalibrates the deathmatch, as any enemy that sees you will probably kill you. Matches become about not being seen, finding good spots for cover, quick drawing, and headshots. The tensest modes – last player standing, with just one life each – have everybody creeping through the map, trying to stay off the radar, squeezing the left trigger and firing at the slightest sign of movement. The maps are recognisable slices of Los Santos and Blaine Country, specifically rejigged to create hiding spots and verticality that make them fun locations for shootouts.

The races too are good, if predictable, fun. There are slices of Los Santos that are exquisitely well-suited to racing, whether it’s a looping race across the freeway, a circuit round the airport, or a street race downtown with tight corners. I’ve spent a lot of time racing dirt bikes and BMXes around off-road Blaine County tracks. The addition of weapons – which the host can opt for in the lobby – transforms these races into utter, almost Mario Kart-style chaos. It’s clear from the extraordinary language emanating from the headset during such matches that a lot of people find having their tyres shot out in the middle of a race intensely frustrating, but for me the random element can enliven otherwise-formulaic races, especially when you’re nearing the mid-ranks and have had enough of the default settings.

It’s in the open world that you can have the most fun, though, if you’ve got the right people. I’ve been on store robberies and escaped in helicopters, caused a 30-car pile-up as my crew of four was pursued down the side of a hill by overzealous police, run into the mountains to escape a Wanted level and parachuted down from the highest point. Subtle changes to the map rebalance it for 16 players – there’s no open access to the military base or the airport, though you can make your way in if you’re determined. Now and then you’ll hear a jet zooming overhead and think, “How the hell did they get that?”

Ranking up unlocks new guns and vehicles for purchase, and broadens the selection of missions you’re allowed to take part in. Once unlocked, these must be bought with in-game cash, which you can either earn or buy with real money. It seems strange to lock some of the most exciting missions – like anything involving air vehicles, or parachuting – away from lower-rank players, as it makes the first 15 or so levels of progression feel like a repetitive sequence of races and deathmatches. If you want to get around that, join a group with higher-rank players – it waives the rank requirements.

Higher-rank players will start with better weapons that they’ve unlocked and bought for themselves, a big advantage that’s mitigated by the small selection of hardware that litters each multiplayer map and can be used freely by anyone who picks it up. Happily, the matchmaking is also smart enough not to throw players with vastly different ranks together randomly, so it’s rare for one person to dominate a session. Other than that, rank means little. Once you’ve earned enough money you can buy and customise your own car, but it seems like very few players are bothering to do that at the moment. Any given race lets you pick a good car from a wide selection, so it doesn’t feel like you’re at any disadvantage if you don’t have a sports car of your own – or like there’s much of an advantage to owning one.

My initial concerns about the in-game economy have been allayed over the past two weeks. At launch, you were charged extortionate amounts in medical fees for dying, both on-mission and off-mission, meaning I’d sometimes come out of missions having barely broke even. This has since been adjusted, however, and you can now earn money at a good pace, even factoring in the charges for ammunition, vehicle destruction and the occasional, much-reduced medical bill. I was also suspicious that this nickel-and-diming was an unsubtle way of pushing players towards paying real money for in-game GTA$, but that no longer feels like the case. It’s still being adjusted with every update, however – the latest one halved the rewards for repeating more lucrative missions, preventing people from spamming them.

GTA Online’s main problem right now is motivation. The missions are fun, but they also become repetitive, and though they don’t often feel like a grind, the majority of them are races or deathmatches, the occasional helicopter deathmatch, or jets-vs-bikes chase aside. Part of what drives you through them is money – the first thing I wanted to do was save up for an apartment – but once I’d bought one, there wasn’t an enormous amount left for me to shoot for. After two weeks I had already gotten to the stage in GTA Online where there wasn’t an enormous amount left to aim for. With $500,000 landing in the accounts of every player before the end of the month, people are going to reach that stage more quickly.

The player population at the moment is also predictably antagonistic. Happily, there are options to enter a session alone, with just your crewmates or with just your friends, and for a $100 fee you can activate Passive mode and make yourself immune to damage. These options all actually work now, so if you want to avoid being continually harassed by maniacs when you’re just trying to explore off-mission, there are ways and means. Harassment by maniacs, though, sometimes feels like a vital part of this anarchic experience. I’ll never forget the time a kind stranger rescued me and two friends from halfway up Mt. Chiliad and was thanked with a shotgun blast to the chest from my trigger-happy companion, initiating a ridiculous miniature gang war.

I’m left with the overbearing impression that Grand Theft Auto Online as it stands right now is still a colour sketch of what it will probably one day become. In the short term, the promised addition of heists and tools to let players create and publish their own content is likely to significantly broaden the selection of missions, which would be welcome. But in the long term, new cities have the potential to transform GTA Online.

It makes you realise what an extraordinary world Rockstar has created in this modern San Andreas, that so many individual areas can support whole game modes in themselves. Snipping out little sections of the map and letting them shine alone reveals almost every inch of Los Santos to be meticulously designed, if that wasn’t already evident from GTA 5. All those places that you might never have explored in single-player – those secret skate parks, the dirt tracks, the hiding places – find their purpose in GTA Online, where they can be discovered and explored together.

Verdict

GTA Online’s technical issues have finally fallen away to reveal a game that has its quirks, but that offers an experience like nothing else out there right now, harnessing the potential of open-world multiplayer. The actual missions, though, get repetitive once you break rank 20 or so, and there needs to be more here to keep people playing. Basic things like matchmaking and the in-game economy, meanwhile, are now running smoothly, but there’s still room for improvement. GTA Online is good, then – properly great, even, when everything comes together – but not as good as I suspect it’s one day going to be. Wondering where the score is? Our GTA Online review will remain scoreless, as a score does not properly reflect its continuously changing nature. Here's how and why we decided to do it this way.