Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – Ulasan Legacy

I’m taking a look back at each of the core Grand Theft Auto games and replaying them in the lead-up to the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. What we’ll be putting together won’t be traditional re-reviews, and they won’t come with any new IGN score, but they will re-examine what made each GTA remarkable upon the time of its release. By the end of the project, using GTA’s previously six-star wanted level, you should be able to get an idea of where each of these games roughly rank in my long-term love for this series.

Today it’s time to go home to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Whether you remember it or not – or were too preoccupied being spoon-fed puréed fruit from a jar at the time – it’s impossible to understate what a banner year 2004 was for now-legendary video games. Just look at the line up. World of Warcraft. Half-Life 2 and Halo 2. Burnout 3 and Metal Gear Solid 3. Gran Turismo 4 and more – much more. I could absolutely go on. To emerge as the bestselling game of what may well be the greatest year we’ve ever had – in an era where it felt like the rulebook was being torn up and rewritten every other month – you had to be remarkable. You had to be rich, surprising, innovative, and essential. Simply put, to be the bestselling game of 2004, you needed to be more than great. You needed to be Grand.

While GTA III defined the fundamentals of 3D open-world design, and Vice City layered that sandbox with vibrant ’80s style and a big dose of yacht rock and yayo, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas pushed the formula to the very limits of what was actually possible on the world’s then-favourite DVD player. Despite shipping just two years after Vice City, San Andreas expanded Rockstar’s formula exponentially by introducing three full-scale cities – all housed in what amounted to an entire fictional US state: the titular San Andreas. Best of all, it was still retro-tinged, set in 1992. A slightly less dramatic leap into the past than Vice City but, as someone whose adolescence was forged in the ’90s, an awesome period to revisit.

At the time, it was a mindblowing achievement. The state itself covers an area roughly six times larger than Vice City. Its three major metropolises – Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas – each have their own unique visual identity. Los Santos is draped in smog, giving the whole cityscape a distinct orange haze at certain times of day. On the hottest days, a shimmering heat rises from the asphalt – a fabulously effective flourish that gives the city a truly tangible sense of temperature. San Fierro, defined by its severe hills and stretches of tramline, features an entirely different sort of climate. It’s more akin to GTA III’s Liberty City, where the tall, dense skyscrapers of the CBD create quite a bit of shade below. Las Venturas, San Andreas’ gambling haven, is dry, flat, and is at its best at neon-lit night. Each city is connected by open stretches of rolling fields, redwood forests, and rocky desert. There’s even a selection of tiny towns, farms, and factories between the major hubs.

However, while the size of the map was one thing – the fact that you can travel all over it and move from one major city to another without a single loading screen is something else altogether. Coming from Vice City, where you couldn’t cross from one island to the other without being briefly stalled by a loading screen, it was a genuinely amazing advancement. Rockstar had concocted a way to constantly stream in the world immediately around us in real-time. For its debut on PS2 – the platform that accounted for more than 17 million of San Andreas’ 27.5 million sales – this meant a neverending juggling act with the system’s limited 32MB of RAM and a relentless assault on its disc drive. You probably could’ve forgiven the Rockstar North team for not adding a high-speed fighter jet to a game perpetually pulling data from its dual-layer DVD in a non-stop race against time to rapidly build the world in front of you before you reached it.

They added one anyway.

Some Kind of Wonderful

It’s arguable San Andreas’ greatest victory isn’t simply the immense geographical scale it boasted for its era. Rather, it’s the remarkable density of its various systems, ideas, and side activities.

I played an aggressive amount of San Andreas back in the mid 2000s. I tortured my PS2 until it started making weird noises, then I borrowed my sister’s and tortured it, too. Perhaps the ultimate testament to how supremely stuffed San Andreas is with things to do is just how many side modes I’ve encountered over the last week of playing that had honestly slipped my mind over the last 20 years. The valet activity? Forgot that. Trucking missions? Forgot those. Duelling lowriders? Oh, yeah! It’s like putting on an old pair of trousers and finding $20 notes in every pocket.

San Andreas almost never stops giving. Take its vehicles, for instance. Not only do they all handle with a genuine sense of heft that puts most GTA clones to shame – seriously, just watch as they subtly wiggle on their springs if you jerk them to a sudden halt – but there are also around 200 of them. From the minute it puts you on a bicycle, new vehicles are in virtually constant supply. Combine harvesters. Quad bikes. Articulated semi-trailers. Monster trucks. Functional forklifts. Hovercraft. A jump jet, and a jetpack. No, not one or the other. Both. It’s like someone took a bunch of scribbled brainstorm notes and executed on every suggestion, without trimming any of them.

To be honest, there are times playing San Andreas where it almost feels like no idea was trimmed. Rob a house, go dancing, and stop at a minimart to play an arcade machine. Hit the gym, then hit the casino. Run a triathlon, and run a business. Go parachuting, unwind with some pool, and… role play as a pimp. I guess, strictly speaking, there was at least one idea that was famously pulled out at the last minute: a sex minigame. It just wasn’t pulled out enough, so to speak. Ruled out so late in development it was impractical to completely remove it without jeopardising San Andreas’ vast, precarious, and otherwise interwoven code, Rockstar locked off the minigame beneath a non-interactive wrapper – keeping the camera entirely out of the room where the magic was happening. Modders discovered and re-enabled it in time for the PC version in 2005, triggering what became known as the Hot Coffee controversy.

The pearl clutching and hand wringing that followed was deeply embarrassing, even by mid 2000s standards. The US ESRB re-issued all versions of the game a commercially crippling Adults Only rating, and Australia temporarily banned it until the abandoned content was removed. It didn’t matter that it literally wasn’t even accessible for the majority of players on console – the matter had become politicised and the subject of massive media attention. The concept of two blocky PS2 characters goofily grinding against each other was apparently too much for adult gamers to bear. We would have to be content with wanton vehicular homicide and burning cops to a crisp. I’m hopeful that things would go a little differently more than two decades on, but I guess we have our own problems. These days I don’t know if I’m still killing people in video games, or if I’m only unaliving them.

Killing in the Name

The explosion of side activities is still only part of the San Andreas equation, as Rockstar also introduced a number of light RPG mechanics. This goes beyond the ability to customise leading man Carl Johnson’s appearance, via outfits, haircuts, tattoos, or munching down too many burgers. CJ also has a large number of improveable skills, and the more you do something, the better and more efficient he’ll get at it. Flying, fighting, driving, diving – you name it. Have a weapon you prefer? Use it as much as possible to level CJ up to ‘Hitman’ proficiency, where you can move and strafe while shooting, your lock-on range will extend, and (in the case of the four specific weapons) even dual wield them.

The improvements to the third-person shooter component in San Andreas are significant, with most of the clumsiness that tended to characterise GTA III and Vice City ironed out. A bulk of that is thanks to the ability to finally use the right analogue stick to control the camera at will – as opposed to the previous games, where the right stick was only used to look around in a stationary first-person camera. It’s the first GTA game to feel akin to a modern third-person shooter in this regard, which makes it a breeze to get accustomed to in 2026. You can also aim all weapons freely now, rather than just a select few – and the auto lock-on is otherwise intelligent enough to automatically prioritise and target threats rather than random civilians or, worse, your own gang members. Light stealth was even introduced, on the back of Rockstar’s own experimentation with the controversial Manhunt earlier the same year. CJ is able to crouch to reduce noise, a suppressed pistol has been added to the arsenal, and there’s a simple stealth kill you can perform on the unaware, indicated by the same raised-arm trigger used in Manhunt.

Express Yourself

With more cities, more cars, and more depth than ever, you might have been wondering just how much more more San Andreas could possibly have in store.

Well, I haven’t even touched on the radio stations yet, which are neck and neck with Vice City as the best they’ve ever been in the 30-year history of the series. It’s an impeccably curated soundtrack that’s one part perfect ’90s time capsule, and one part historical hip hop odyssey. That is, it didn’t just feature some of the most iconic rap tracks to emerge from the early ’90s, but it made sure to include stations dedicated to the entire ecosystem of complementary music hip hop found itself drawing inspiration from. Funk and soul. R&B and New Jack Swing. There’s perhaps no better example of that than the fact San Andreas didn’t make a choice between Charles Wright’s signature hit Express Yourself, or the 1988 reimaging from N.W.A. It simply included both. Eleven stations and over 150 songs is the bullet point, but there’s so much more to it than that. It’s the fact that they now air dynamically, meaning the song order changes and you won’t always hear the same slice of DJ banter introducing them.

Want more? Well, how about arguably the greatest arsenal of cheats codes ever assembled? Cheats to make the game easier. Cheats to make the game harder. Cheats to spawn all the greatest vehicles. Cheats to arm civilians with rocket launchers. Cheats to trigger a map-wide riot. Cheats to turn off the gravity!

Still want more? How about a same screen co-op mode that allows you to bring a friend into the world to wreak havoc alongside you. Is it slightly janky? Yes. Did that stop my friends and I from messing around with it constantly? Absolutely not.

Interestingly, about the only thing San Andreas seems to have fewer of is major Hollywood celebrities in the main roles. Following Vice City, San Andreas moved away from having a big-shot celebrity on deck to star as the lead character. Instead, CJ was capably and memorably played by an LA-based rapper named Young Maylay, with no previous acting experience. There are a number of recognisable names here as side characters, though, including James Woods, Peter Fonda, Charlie Murphy, Ice-T, Chris Penn, and the inimitable Sam Jackson as the iconically slimy Officer Frank Tenpenny. Is there a better GTA villain than Jackson’s Tenpenny? I don’t think there is.

Verdict

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the single bestselling game on the most successful console in the history of the business. That’s not an accolade you can just earn by accident. Its unprecedented scope and astonishing depth were nothing short of witchcraft, and the incredible attention to detail was staggeringly impressive for something of its size. Its ability to support endless experimentation kept my friends and I busy for years, fooling around with its industry-leading list of cheats and its same-screen co-op chaos long after we’d all finished the story mode several times. Its soundtrack is the stuff of legend; so one-of-a-kind that not even Rockstar itself could quite reassemble the complete thing for subsequent re-releases. In 2004, GTA San Andreas was one of the most extraordinary games I’d ever played. In 2026, the hood done took me under all over again. Sure, the technical limitations of the mid 2000s are always obvious through a modern lens, but you can’t measure ambition in polygons – and GTA San Andreas is overflowing with it.

For more reflections on the incredible Grand Theft Auto series, you can read our new Legacy Reviews of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto 2, Grand Theft Auto III, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, with more to follow before November.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.