It’s puzzled me for a while that these days, if you want to play a GTA game, the last thing you actually want to do is play a GTA game. The GTA franchise has become bloated with its own self-importance, with the developers preferring to tell tedious gangland stories in the not-so-charming delusion that they are auteur filmmakers while the vehicle-based mayhem the series made such an impact with all those years ago has been firmly relegated to the back seat. It’s telling that this gap in the market is now being filled by a whole raft of pretenders to the GTA throne, which try to sell themselves on the open-world sandbox gameplay rather than plot. Mercenaries was the most effective one (with the apt subtitle Playground of Destruction), and then Saints Row 2 (never played it), and now there is Just Cause 2.
