This game has not aged well on 360.

Wheelman : a moronic story and character saved by pretty good action driving in an open world city.

Also, there are lots of side-missions : 8 missions types for a total of 120 missions; you can see the picture here the map is dotted with markers like in a Ubisoft game lol. These side-missions, even if they give a "by the number" feeling, are actually pretty fun to play. They're very well balanced, so it's not that hard to get the "A" level (good), and not impossibly difficult to get the "S" score (perfect). This good level of positive feed back make these side-missions addictive for me.

8/10

If Rockstar get stuck in the GTA franchise by the success of GTA 5, maybe they have chosen to go other directions for new games, like LA Noire 2.

If they do LA noire 2, I guess they will make it less serious than the first, where the hero would be corruptible or ambivalent, getting into shady business, with less emphasis on detective things and more on action, while the game would keep a seprate flavor than the GTA franchise. this could ba a possibility.

The future is for games that mix SP and MP like GTA 5. You can have both a story driven campaign and a multiplayer in the same game. Nobody seems to understand that. These games could sell tens of millions copies while generating huge microtransactions revenue from the multiplayer.

For example, taking the Mass Effect concept, you could have both an A/RPG story driven campaign, followed by a empire-building, galaxy-spanning multiplayer "à la GTA 5" except you switch San Andreas Country for a whole Galaxy.

@jscummins: I'm personally not THAT interested in linear games. Non-linearity, side-quests, open-world is what makes gaming interesting for me (I only play SP games, never connected any console to the internet).

Rise of the Tomb raider is a good example of a traditionnaly linear series that has gone successfully non-linear without becoming fully open-world. That could be a way for the future of SP gaming (in parallel to full open world).

@playstationnovusx: You should take english lessons and anger control therapy before continuing commenting here.

@lostn: very interesting comment. But I would add that Horizon is a First-party title, and maybe console builders will continue making big budget SP games for the reputation of their console and ecosystem, more than to make a big profit on that particular games.

For PC maybe purely SP games will in the future be more "AA" than "AAA" with lower budgets than multiplayer games. This could be disappointing but actually not necessarily a bad thing for the educated gamer (a little like the distinction in Hollywood between blockbusters and authors movies.

Strange how nobody thinks the best thing for everybody (publishers, players) would be, like in GTA 5, to mix a huge single player campaign with a huge multiplayer, all in the same game. You could even delay the beginning of multiplayer by several weeks (like GTA5 did at launch in 2013) so that people have some time to focus on SP before beginning MP.

I guess the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout could be that way : first an awesome SP experience (with like 100-150 hours gameplay), followed maybe 1 or 2 months later by the start of a huge MMO experience driven by microtransactions ("Elder Scrolls Online 2.0"), all included in the same $60 package. This could sell more than 50 million copies.

@moose3469: EA, Ubisoft and of course Activision

Excellent game. I'm more into GTA and FPS kind of games usually, but I have to agree this is outstanding.

Also, one thing often overlooked in the S.M. Galaxy reiews is that the game is graced by a "just right" (for me) difficulty level. Actually this means "pretty easy" as I'm no fan of having to restart levels from scratch and very difficult bosses.

But here, the game very intelligently throws extra lives at you in a pleasant way and put bosses that, even if they present some challenge, are rarely that difficult and never too long. This is a big plus for me and one of the reasons I loved the game. (it's also a reason I usually dislike japanese games, often unnecessarily difficult). This one played like a breeze ! A milestone in gaming.

My only "negative" is a lack of immersivity, with a world and levels that are too "abstract" to get a sense of being in a real place. But I accept this is part of the Mario setting.