Rockstar's most refined skinner box. GTA Online has interesting aspects but is ultimately dragged down by greed and spaghetti code. Recent events may come to mind, but the reality is that the writing has been on the wall. Shark cards were always around, servers were peer-to-peer, shareholders had their meetings. It was only a question of "How" Rockstar will try to screw over players, not "If" or even "When".
As a skinner box, GTA Online acts somewhat like an idle game: Spend time to build up your resources, and use those to get more resources. Higher rank means more weapons and health, higher stats give small but useful benefits, more money lets you buy more content to play as well as more methods to make money. It contrasts from traditional idle games by... being GTA, so to speak.
Of course, the fundamental flaw here is that Rockstar doesn't respect your time. No, it might be better to say that GTA Online is designed to waste as much of your time as possible while you try to make progress. The various businesses players can purchase will take several hours to fill up to capacity, but can easily have all product turned to dust with raids or by encouraging the entire lobby to sabotage sell missions.
The heists are the best and worst part of Online. The most interesting content by far, self-sabotaged by legacy code, greed, and plain old bad game design. Enemies randomly firing off their entire magazine in one short burst, limited healing that can only be refilled in free roam, challenges that can't be retried from checkpoint, damage reducing payout and said reductions carrying over between checkpoint restarts, and full restarts only being possible by exiting the heist entirely and going back to free roam.
Not to mention the jury-rigged stealth mechanics that never get fully explained AND have variable rules every time they appear. Some stealth encounters require you to stay pacifist (and don't tell you), and others have guards with a 0 second delay before they alert everyone. Even in the new Kortz Center Heist, the stun gun is silent for the entire heist until you exit the building, where it's so loud that even using a melee takedown will alert guards halfway across the map.
The two most recent heists, Cayo Perico and the Kortz Center, have severe tonal dissonance. Even ignoring the numbers, they fail to live up to the fantasy of looting of a large island or museum. You can put in the time and effort to do every prep mission, clear every guard and avoid every camera, but in the end each person can only carry a handful of loot. It silently begs the question: Is it really a heist if you leave so much behind?
Rockstar is never going to fix that dissonance, nor do they care to. With the recent patch that came with the Kortz Center Heist, it's clear that Rockstar does not want players to experience GTA Online in any way they please. They want sessions to be weekly, they want players to wait on timers before playing, and they do not want people to experience everything too fast without putting real cash in.
Considering this is the Legacy version's review, it's worth noting how horribly unstable the netcode is. Infinite loading screens make it nearly impossible to play for half an hour without needing to restart after entering/exiting an interior, moving to a new session, or entering/exiting any mission. Even years ago it wasn't great, but trying to play this recently felt like all the exaggerations you could make about bad netcode coming true.
Even before this patch, I wouldn't recommend getting into GTA Online. It asks for a lot of time and effort from you without giving nearly as much in return. If you really have to play it, find a way to bypass the grind (not with shark cards) and only do whatever catches your eye.
If you're crazy about idle games that hate you but love your wallet, maybe play it. Otherwise, find another game.
Oh, right. GTA V Story Mode. It's... okay, I guess. The story and characters are nothing to write home about, neither great nor bad enough to say much about. The ending is arbitrarily split into 3 decisions with 2 bad options that no one wants to pick. Felt like there weren't that many missions, maybe partially because the Story Mode DLCs got retooled into some of the Online ones. The gameplay is fine, someone else might find it more appealing but I don't have much to say about it.
GTA V Story Mode is probably worth the price, on sale, but seeing how they've made GTA Online so hostile to its playerbase, Rockstar does not deserve the money.
