Vice City Stories still offers engrossing Grand Theft Auto fun despite considerable carelessness.
Unfortunately and surprisingly, such entertainment is restricted to the in-car radio and Vic's encounters with supporting characters. Failing to return to the franchise is a compelling plot. The central story spirals into a sad pattern of repeating mostly one type of event: Vic foolishly beckoning to the call of his idiot brother and then complaining when things go inevitably wrong. Furthermore, a potential relationship between Vice and a troubled housewife leaps from curiosity to fed-up with no portrayed development in between. The story was just half-cooked, simple as that, and unbecoming of Rockstar’s reputation for interesting storylines, despite the voice cast's best efforts to breathe life into their characters.
Luckily, the colorful supporting cast spices things up and mostly saves the day, such as a wildly flamboyant scene-stealing filmmaker trying to finish an action movie. At one point Vic is even trusted to protect an actual celebrity: Phil Collins, voiced by the man himself. You can even enjoy a GTA-style live performance of one of his best songs, “In the Air Tonight.” Also, one of the series' greatest stars, the in-car radio, makes a triumphant return with amusing talk, great eighties music, and hilarious fake commercials (although one of these, which promotes children's underwear, is so creepy it's not even funny). Such memorable moments and characters manage to pick up the slack left by subpar storytelling.
Thankfully, you can take a break from the Vance brothers’ annoying bickering by partaking of what has always been a GTA specialty: side missions. Most of the expected tasks have returned such as checkpoint races plus taxi and emergency vehicle jobs. Two of the four hospitals now offer air rescue missions, which are essentially ambulance missions with a helicopter. These are slowly paced but still offer a new way to kill time. Most of the usual missions are the same as ever, but being a vigilante seems significantly more difficult than in previous games unless you’re blessed with a long-range weapon or a powerful military vehicle; chased criminals seem nearly as well-armed as feds this time.
The most significant additions to the list of extracurricular activities are the widespread “empire sites” you can conquer. Each is owned by one of three gangs: the Cholos, the Bikers, and the Sharks. Taking over one of these hubs consists of destroying a vehicle parked outside, picking off all the weak punks inside and out, then shooting up their merchandise. Then you can assign one of six types of “businesses” to the structure, such as prostitution, smuggling, and robbery. Each one earns you a certain level of income based on a set value and will deposit daily earnings directly, eliminating the tedium of driving all over town collecting money.
Frequently, gangs will attack a random site and you must stop them before they destroy it, but this does not become the threat that the developers presumably intended. For one, repairing a site to its original state never costs more than $1500, a pittance in this game (a potential issue we'll address next). Moreover, gangs often target sites they’ve already destroyed. Stopping their attacks is fun but seldom necessary, as their stupidity will likely never threaten your income.
Building an empire can prove ridiculously lucrative quite early. In fact, you could easily be a millionaire within the first half of the game without making a concerted effort. Once you've taken over about a third of the empire sites you could earn five figures each day. Plus, everything is so inexpensive that your money has little purpose other than to buy enough firearms to outfit a drug cartel. No question that the wildly unbalanced economy can be fun, but buying hundreds of grenades and rocket launchers without making a dent in your funds feels too much like a cheat.
VCS doesn’t offer further improvements but there's little point in doing so with GTA IV on the horizon. However, those wanting exactly the same graphics quality as PS2-native GTA titles are in for some ugly, as VCS was ported directly from the weaker PSP. Be prepared for even muddier textures, fewer polygons, and occasional drawn-in/slowdown issues.
We GTA fans are all too familiar with smeary storefronts turning sharp before our eyes, especially when driving fast as if we’re out-running the CPU; that’s just the nature of the last-gen GTA graphics engine. But VCS can ruin your getaway by showing you a palm tree after it has already stopped you cold; same thing with mailboxes and street lights oftentimes. Most games in this genre turn choppy when the action gets intense, but VCS turns unplayable occasionally due to severe slowdown, and for no discernible reason. As a matter of fact, this sluggishness usually hits when there's very little activity on the screen. I failed a certain mission because this happened while trying to snipe thugs on rooftops, and I couldn't draw a bead on any them. Although none of this really happens often enough to kill the game, more of an effort should have been made to squash these bugs.
Despite these issues, Rockstar has kept intact what is solely responsible for the success of the entire GTA series: the ability to become such a catastrophic threat to an open city that it could literally take a tank to bring you down. Car chases, shootouts, explosions... endless amounts of unmitigated fun so addictive that a whole afternoon can escape your notice. It's all back, just as you like it, and is still perfectly capable of overshadowing the series' flaws, provided you can forgive the undercooked story and tolerate its widespread graphical issues.