Video Game Review: Grand Theft Auto V Is a Return to the Comedy of Violence

Video Game Review: Grand Theft Auto V: Rockstar Games’s newest installment of Grand Theft Auto V is set in a fictional version of Los Angeles.

As video game players have gotten older, as antiheroes have become routine across the culture, as sex and violence have permeated prestige television, the controversies that once surrounded the Grand Theft Auto games have begun to seem like sepia-toned oddities from another age. Sure, the new installment, to be released on Tuesday, contains plenty that might offend those who enjoy taking offense, and it is still disturbing to see parents giving these games to preteenage children. Among the interactive pastimes Grand Theft Auto offers — alongside pursuits like yoga, sky diving, tennis, scuba and golf — are bong hits and lap dances.

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

Characters in Grand Theft Auto V.

But while the franchise has lost the ability to shock, it remains the most immersive spectacle in interactive entertainment. And with the profane and hugely enjoyable Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar Games has produced the best plotted, most playable, character-driven, fictionally coherent entry in this 16-year-old series.

The game is set in an immense, parodic vision of Southern California, a West Coast counterpoint to the caricature of New York City in Grand Theft Auto IV (2008). While Los Santos — the game’s version of Los Angeles — and its surroundings exist in an alternate reality, it is also a contemporary one that evokes and satirizes the anxieties of 21st-century life. There’s a fake Facebook (LifeInvader), a fake Twitter (Bleeter), a fake Apple (Fruit), a fake Kickstarter (Beseecher), a fake “50 Shades of Grey” (“Chains of Intimacy”), even a fake Call of Duty (Righteous Slaughter 7, a first-person shooter game that advertises itself with the tagline “The identical art of contemporary killing”).

Grand Theft Auto V is still an action game about hoodlums and thieves; we start with an extended bout of cop killing and proceed to a series of increasingly ambitious heists. But the structure feels more logical than before. Your character doesn’t arrive as an outsider in a new city and start carrying out the requests of people whose only purpose is seemingly to delay him. Instead, the events flow from situations and desires.

For the first time, there are three controllable characters instead of only one: Franklin, a repo man on the make, loses his job; Michael, a witness-protection retiree, miscalculates after finding his wife cheating on him with her tennis instructor; and Trevor, an oddly lovable psychopathic meth dealer and gun runner, learns that Michael, his onetime partner, faked his death 10 years ago.

“I’ve got an imbalance,” Michael tells his psychiatrist. “One minute I’m one person, and the next minute I’m another person.”

A retired — or newly unretired — bank robber, Michael is examining his struggle to control his criminal impulses. He might as well be analyzing the dissonance that afflicted Grand Theft Auto IV. That game’s protagonist, Niko Bellic, would fret in animated sequences about the costs of his life of violence. But under the control of many video game players, Niko would subsequently embark on acts of gleeful, creative murder that belied the story the game wanted to tell about him. Were these two men — the one in the story’s animations and the one manipulated by the player — really the same person?

With the three-character structure of Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar finds an answer to that riddle.

“That seamlessness between narrative and interactive is something that we have worked on everywhere,” said Sam Houser, the sometimes reclusive co-founder of Rockstar Games, who agreed to be interviewed after I had spent more than 45 hours inside the game’s world.

Most video games are about repeated actions, about mastering a skill and exploiting it. Grand Theft Auto games are about variety. There’s the array of content, including radio stations D.J.’d by the likes of Bootsy Collins; entire TV shows with names like “Republican Space Rangers”; and a fake Internet. And there are the missions the characters execute, encompassing car, boat and plane chases; paparazzi ambushes; train robberies; and triathlons. Failure in the new game is less frustrating than in previous iterations, since a generous checkpointing system means that players don’t need to restart a mission from the beginning if they don’t get it right the first time. There’s even an option to skip the action sequences after repeated attempts have gone awry.

For all that the game does right, it has a genuinely problematic aspect that is not its enthusiasm for violence or sex but its lack of interest in women as something other than lustful airheads (notwithstanding a late-game cameo by Mr. Houser’s mother, Geraldine Moffat, a British actress of the 1960s and ’70s). One of the only young women in the game not oversexed and under-read is sucked into a jet turbine.