Дата публикации: 21-04-2026 10:33:16

Introduction
 
GTa2 has a reputation as the best of the vertical camera games. It blends what I assume is the gang and reputation system from later games (I don't know, I haven't played them) and combines it with the earlier graphics and gameplay style of Grand Theft Auto. 
 
Welcome to the future
 
GTa2 opens with a surprisingly long and expensive looking video. It's pretty much GTA IRL, showcasing various criminal activities as they might appear in reality. It's also set in New York - you can even see the twin towers in there (you probably saw that in your history book, sonny). You also see the characteristic police cars of New York, one of which was rented out just for this video.
 
But, this new style of realism seems to begin even before the video - in the installation screens, and then in the settings program - the settings are a program...uh huh... Each page features a different photo of the underworld. It's very fresh and provocative, and it implies that the cartoonish action of Grand Theft Auto is about to be translated into something more visceral and realistic. 
 
Well, you can forget about THAT notion; I would call Grand Theft Auto the more realistic of the two games. I don't get it. They seemingly were aiming for at least the implication of realism, but in the game itself, GTa2 goes in a very strange direction that I would liken to...what? Animé? "Steampunk?" It's the future, I guess? But with payphones. And yes, you've still got your mobile phone, for when you step away from the payphone. That little conceit survives at least until now.
 
The character designs are goofy looking. The cars are, well, at home in some cartoon. The labels for city areas are pretty silly (and rusted - apparently the GUI is exposed to the elements), and the names themselves are at least as silly as those in Grand Theft Auto. It's a strange, cynical, and again, goofy interpretation of what was previously a rather straightforward parody of real things.
 
GTa2 takes place in some city. That's really all we get. And I think it's a downgrade of what you get in Grand Theft Auto. In that game, there is a progression of your "criminal career" or whatever it is, or as you migrate from city to city, and find obvious bits and pieces of the real world like the Golden Gate Bridge or Miami Beach. I would have been fine with the real thing, but perhaps in the service of the gameplay and plot, in order to build an arbitrary city that is just a reference to a real one, instead of making a factual reconstruction of a city, it was fine to make fictional areas. There's a real sense of accomplishment, a thrill as you leave Liberty City, and then San Andreas, and you've made it to the big time, where the biggest grifts are, and you get to sightsee.
 
Again, GTa2 is set in "some city" which, first of all, is a single city, broken up into regions. Imagine Tokyo, but then again, who cares, it's literally called "Anywhere, USA" which is a rather dismissive European sounding sort of label. It's like they got tired of putting effort into making parodies of actual places and just said "f*ck it, we're just making a generic city and focusing our design efforts on the saved game feature instead." That's what it felt like to me. Is there someone out there who has played both games that thinks it's a cool upgrade that they stopped making "real cities" and instead made this...Tokyo-Moscow-Detroit whatever, who cares? Haha, I'm sure there is.
 
Nevertheless, the opening video did lead me to expect great things for the cutscenes of GTa2. AHH yes, the cutscenes of GTa2. So much to say about them, in particular with respect to the very interesting cutscenes of Grand Theft Auto. Where do I even begin? Ok, I'm just f*cking around, there aren't any! Yep. Hope you didn't like the cutscenes of Grand Theft Auto, hope you didn't look forward to them, hope they didn't add something like excitement, storytelling, and sense of place to the game, because all that extraneous sh*t has been removed from GTa2 in favor of nothing. Ahh, the purity of nothing.
 
I was unable to believe that, and unable to reconcile the production quality of the introduction video with the complete and barren absence of a reward after completing a mission area. So I went to YouTube and found that the introduction of GTa2 is, in fact, composed of excerpts of a longer and more coherent video - one which, logically, could be broken into segments that would make fine cutscenes. But in spite of all that, the game simply eschewed cutscenes. 
 
Colin Anderson, an early DMA employee who created the music for Grand Theft Auto and GTa2 wrote: 
 
"'…I feel like marketing and the designers forgot to have a chat…'
 
Truer than you realise! ?? There were a lot of “creative differences” between DMA and Rockstar on that project, and there wasn’t much of a shared vision across design and marketing unfortunately. And, it shows."
 
Cars
 
The cars of GTa2 leave much to be desired. In Grand Theft Auto, a conscious effort went into incorporating real cars in the game - frustratingly under dumb aliases, but they were real cars nonetheless. I don't know what year GTa2 is supposed to be happening in. Maybe it's some alternate reality, where Earth based crime happens, but everything else exists in a fantasy context that I don't imagine GTA players are searching for. It feels very "cyberpunk," as they say, especially at night. The cars all seem futuristic but also somehow antique, like a 1960s ambulance, and cars that look a bit like 1960s concept cars maybe. They remind me of the hovercraft in Full Throttle. Although they got rid of motorcycles. At the same time, there are still real cars in GTa2 - or maybe I'm just ignorant of the wild car designs predominant in Europe when GTa2 was made, which they freely incorporated into a game about the United States. For instance the Bug is back again, (that ubiquitous part of 20th century traffic), as well as some kind of Thunderbird.
 
The first car you get sounds a lot like a vacuum cleaner. The handling is just as bizarre. They accelerate like they're all manual transmission (again, back to Europe on this one), and they handle like go-carts. Well, Grand Theft Auto was never a highly accurate car simulator, but at the same time, obvious efforts went into translating the real cars being represented on screen into the game engine and its style. That effort seems to be absent in GTa2. 
 
Pedestrians
 
The pedestrians are a source of continual frustration in GTa2. There are tons of them, blended in with gang members. Police don't care if you kill gang members, if they don't witness it. To be honest, they don't care much if you kill other people, either. You can run over a fairly high number of people before the police get involved. In Grand Theft Auto, 2-3 vehicular homicides meant the police were coming, and you were going to a spray shop if you hoped to continue your missions. In GTa2, the number is probably closer to 5-8, and I have a feeling this number decays with time, as the single talking police head decays after a minute or so without contact with the police.
 
This change has a major impact on gameplay. You're pretty much expected to run over a fair number of people - they've been changed from people to some kind of indigenous insect, like ants you can't help but to step on as you move around the city. Because these pedestrians have a suicidal tendency to run out into traffic. They did too in Grand Theft Auto, but perhaps more so now in GTa2. Driving on the road near pavement is enough to set off a pedestrian panic, which drives them to predict where you might drive next, and run in front of you, seemingly fulfilling their grim prediction. Driving on sidewalks is a major source of frustration, and it's not just because of the police - gang members don't make way for you on the sidewalks, and if you run THEM over, it will immediately start impacting your reputation with everyone.  
 
Using the horn on your vehicle helps, although the gang members ignore that too, but it does burden the player with having to lay on the horn a lot for basically an in game workaround for a problem that isn't fun to deal with.
 
The spray shops
 
The spray shops have had a major makeover, and in my view, a major downgrade. Although they work the same way, there seem to be fewer shops available (generally one per gang, I think). The biggest change, however, is that the spray shops have been turned into large automotive service bays. Each bay does something different. Probably 99% of the time, you just want to get the police off your ass, or to fix your car. But 4/5 of the bays don't do that. There's one that gives your car machine guns, another that gives it mines, another that fits the classic car bomb, another that gives you some kind of oil attack, and the last is the spray shop, which, no, is NOT on the edge of the building, but in the middle somewhere. Each little shop has its own narrow lane, and it is a huge pain in the ass to find the right lane and squeeze into the bay.
 
I don't know if this was done to deliberately make spray shops harder to use, or what. The various car arming options are interesting, but they are never required for missions (except the occasional car bomb, just as in Grand Theft Auto). They are also very expensive. Imagine how I felt being asked to fit a car bomb, not knowing the difference between the bays, and spending $75,000 on pointless upgrades before finding the $5,000 car bomb option. There is also the very real question of why you're going to spend gigantic amounts of money on very disposable cars. They can only take so many hits, and then you have to abandon them. What did a car bomb in Grand Theft Auto cost, $500? By making the upgrades so hard to locate, and so expensive, they largely prevent this player from using them in a goals oriented playthough.
 
Furthermore, many missions require you to use gang cars. Gang cars are associated with a specific gang, and are used when the plot of a mission has you impersonating a rival gang, or just to represent that gang in traffic. For some reason, you're not allowed to repair gang cars. You also can't get the police off you using the spray shop in a gang car. So, if you have a police problem while driving a gang car, you have two problems: getting out of the gang car and finding a random car without being caught by the police, and then getting that new car to the spray shop. Then you probably need to go get a new gang car, since you probably wouldn't choose to drive one outside of a mission.
 
Although I'm not sure how much sturdier the logic of driving a random car into a service bay to immediately lose the police is compared to the logic of doing the same thing with a gang car, this rule makes many missions considerably harder and more tedious, as you have to swap cars every time you dump the police. 
 
Respect is everything
 
Although I was excited to try the reputation system with the gangs, I found it was pretty disappointing. In order to complete a scenario, you will need to do jobs from multiple groups. And they mostly mutually hate each other. This is a problem, because when the Rednecks (rednecks lol) tell me to kill 50 Zaibatsu and 50 Scientists, both of those factions then hate me - and that was an entry level mission. There are also middle level and hard level missions which, problematically, are only available to those whose reputation with the group is high enough. In this specific case, I got locked into doing missions for the Rednecks: besides the dullness of that lack of choice, there might be a mission I have difficulty with, but it might be the only mission I am allowed to take.
 
Furthermore, when you fail a mission, that also problematically degrades your reputation with the gang - even to the point of them shooting at you. But most of the time, gangs attack you because an opposing faction gave you a mission to harm them. That makes sense, but the reputation status persists after the mission concludes. So you have a choice to make - if you take another mission from, say, the Zaibatsu, they may send you back to beat up the Russians again. There would not be too much point in repairing your relations with the Russians, and you probably wouldn't want to repair relations by harming your Zaibatsu friends, because that also prevents you from taking more missions from them. The next mission may or may not involve the Russians, but even if it doesn't, it can be quite difficult to pass through or accomplish anything in a part of the city controlled by a hostile gang. So what? Go run over some guys you need to work with? You can't be everyone's friend in this game. The closest you get to that is the start of the scenario, where everyone is willing to give you a mission, and no one is shooting at you.
 
Also, depending on the scenario and gang, they switch to deadlier weapons depending on how much they hate you. Gatekeeping parts of the city is a huge issue - a game stopping issue with some factions. I can handle them switching to machine guns, but when the Zaibatsu start firing rocket launchers down the street when I drive past, that makes missions against the Zaibatsu impossible; you have to stop the game and go run over some dudes to calm them down temporarily. Even missions that have nothing to do with Zaibatsu will fail when a rocket flies up your ass as you are passing through the city for some reason. Apart from the fact that there's no counterplay to rocket launchers, or flamethrowers, or even molotov cocktails - basically, if you get hit, you're dead - why is that fun? I would have stopped at machine guns; in the real world the gangs don't pull out rocket launchers and flamethrowers at cars passing though their 'hoods.
 
In the first part of the game, I only had a few missions remaining to reach my money goal, and so I needed to build a lot of respect to even attempt these missions, which are difficult and likely to go wrong. But it's still sort of ridiculous; let's say I want to do a medium level mission for the "Loonies" gang (not sure what they are meant to represent but whatever). I only have enough cred with them to do an entry level mission - and I already completed their entry level missions! Design flaw? So, as the game literally states if you answer the pointless "contact phone" of a gang, you have to go massacre some other people in a gang they hate in order for them to trust you enough to give you the next mission. In this case, it's the ZAIBATSU, which are in GTa2 a specific gang, I guess, and not zaibatsu in general. The same could be said of the yakuza, right? 
 
And in this scenario, the Zaibatsu are friendly with me, as I've done high level missions with them. So I go over to their territory on the other side of town, which features armed gang members swarming around the sidewalks, and run 15 or 20 of them over. The Loonies are pleased, offering me a higher level mission. The Zaibatsu? "Eh, it was probably an accident!" They don't seem to be particularly concerned at all.
 
I then go to the Loonies and try their mission, which fails for some reason, it may have been my sloppiness, or it may have been a random car in traffic running over my contact and destroying the mission - for which the Loonies will blame ME, damaging my reputation with them, and preventing me from retaking the mission. But how could I? The contact is DEAD. Well, in GTa2, death is no obstacle to you retaking a mission, I'm sure it will work out somehow, there is a time machine function on those payphones you still use, regardless of your mobile phone. It's just silly. 
 
But just as before, in order to retake the mission, I have to go kill more Zaibatsu. This is considered gameplay, and fun. It's exactly the same process. Drive over there without mowing down so many suicidal pedestrians that the cops get in your hair, then deliberately run over some gangsters, who politely allow you to rampage around their compound. The Loonies' faith in me is restored somehow, and the Zaibatsu are pretty much fine with it.
 
This mission kept failing - some of them are just hard. Sometimes you are driving a slow car that gets beat up or blocked in easily. Sometimes the police drive wildly into the path of your objective and mess it up. Sometimes you can't respray your car, or you can't get into the damn shop, or you don't have the cash for it. Sometimes you get run over!
 
I began to feel a longing for the simplicity of Grand Theft Auto. Why is it fun that you do jobs for a faction and then can't do jobs for other factions until you do some pointless violence? Or that you get shot at by generic gang members throughout a third of the city? Are you not supposed to do jobs for other factions in the same run? I mean, you can, but I find the reputation mechanic to just be a pointless pain in the ass. It doesn't really add anything to the game. I could understand if more advanced missions were only offered after simpler missions were achieved. I could also understand if your anonymity as a freelancer allowed you to just take missions from whatever gang. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I'd rather just take the next mission as you would in Grand Theft Auto, than some tedious and dangerous (in terms of getting busted) routine to reset the reputations with the gangs yet again, which are as elastic as your loyalty to them.
 
Although GTa2 presented factions and reputation as the main innovation of the game over Grand Theft Auto, I also found myself wearying over the types of missions I was given. I don't know how many times a mission simply consists of "we're starting a gang war, grab gang A's car and run over some of gang B, then grab gang B's car and run over some of gang A." Ok cool, f*ck up my reputation with everyone else, and we're doing this yet again. I know if you look at GTA missions critically, you're doing a lot of the same kinds of stuff - fetch quests, delivery quests, assassination quests, quests to move cars around - but I swear I relished the quests that weren't about attacking some other gang, not only because I began to dread dealing with the consequences of the mission, but because of repetition. 
 
Time machine telephones
 
One of the major innovations, if we may be so bold as to call it that, of GTa2 is the ability to save a game. Remarkable. But, in characteristic DMA fashion, it's still a pain in the ass somehow. No seamless auto saving here, and not even the standard opening a menu and selecting "save game" and going through a perhaps slightly amusing Windows formatted dialog in the middle of your game to decide which subdirectory is best to keep your files in... You can only save your game by going to an in-game location. One specific location - which is your starting location. Oh, and it costs $50,000, which not only means you must complete at least two missions before being able to save your game, but that you significantly set your progress back by saving. It's basically like erasing your entire first mission payment (but not the multiplier). Furthermore, you have to FIND the saving location - it gets to the point where you want to scout it out carefully, because if you just run off and play, and you get to a situation where you need to save, and then the cops get on your ass, you could lose your multiplier and equipment in the struggle to save your game. 
 
Now, I'm not criticizing the apparent hesitation of DMA to add game saving into their game. But they hardly could have made it more cumbersome, and to cloud the water further, you do NOT need to save your game to repeat a failed mission - very confusing, given the typical mission's relying on the element of surprise and the life and death of specific individuals. GTa2 takes the hardcore continuity of Grand Theft Auto and says "f*ck it." It would indeed make more sense if you had reloaded the game at that point, because reloading a game is not a part of a game's gameplay, and a saved game, in normal cases, represents a point in time.
 
On the other hand, you may very well save your game so you don't lose lives or equipment or reputation you've worked to build, so the fact that you can repeat the mission without reloading the game is academic. There is a certain take-it-or-leave-it verisimilitude in Grand Theft Auto with difficult missions and the complete and total absence of game saving: it just didn't work out, and you move on, leaving that "replayability" for another incarnation of the story. You don't reload it to try to make it better than it is, or to try to adulterate the story in your favor; you can't. And you will definitely fail missions for unfair reasons in Grand Theft Auto - they should have worked on that element more in GTa2.
 
The idea seems to be, as missions are repeatable, that you don't save and load your game for that reason. And I agree with the design up to that point; I mostly don't save my games (at my age) except as a bookmark when I am closing the game to go do other things, or to ward against bugs and erroneous bullsh*t that invalidates a large amount of effort; I'm looking at you, Europa Universalis 2.
 
So, in essence DMA cheated on the topic of game saving by making game saving somewhat pointless. They must have envisioned every player religiously saving before each mission (which seems pretty likely) and then reloading when their car got blowed up. One random detail is that some missions in Grand Theft Auto are not failed by either being wasted or busted. I'm not even sure if it's intentional - 100% of GTA London missions are failed for either of these conditions. When you fail a mission in GTa2, you have a choice to make - will you reload? There's not much downside to reloading a game if you just saved it, although it will cost you your armor for some reason. 
 
The modern style of saving, if I need to recite it here, would be for an auto save to be placed at the start of, or immediately preceding the taking of a mission. This allows you to repeat the mission ad infinitum without any awkward questions about time travel or tedious, repetitive in game tasks to repair reputations that are injured by failed missions. There really is no middle ground; you either allow saving, like a normal game, or you don't (an extremely unusual choice, especially for a game as long as Grand Theft Auto) - or you end up with a crappy system like GTa2 has.
 
The beatings will continue until morale improves
 
What I don't generally do is save and reload because I didn't succeed. I just take the loss and accept it as a part of the story. Well, not all games let you do that. In an adventure game, you have to do everything more or less perfectly, or the game is over. I don't like adventure games. 
 
But should I really need to go back to run over Zaibatsu 5 times because I am bad at this mission? It felt like punishment, and it also felt ridiculous, because why would the Loonies or Yakuza be so fickle as far as believing I'm the right guy for the job, and then blaming me for every failure regardless of the cause, and then just...forgetting that incompetence or whatever it's supposed to be about, as soon as I run over enough dudes in some other neighborhood to make them feel like I am sympathetic to their cause again? It's a kind of logic you can't apply logic to. 
 
I found myself not exactly angry that a mission could be repeated - after all, the hardcore style of Grand Theft Auto has some limitations, like gatekeeping you from playing a lot of the game's content - but very disappointed that the only way to work for a gang if they don't like you enough is to run over guys in a tedious exercise that reduces a depraved crime to a sh*tty arcade game mechanic. There was no "run over 50 guys" mission I'm aware of in Grand Theft Auto - although some missions would best be run by doing that; it was your choice. But I'm not even talking about a mission in GTa2 (although there was exactly that, run over 100 guys); you will likely have to do this in a normal playthrough over and over again just to manipulate your reputation enough to play the game. 
 
There were so many other ways they could have handled this. Maybe they pay you more if you have a higher reputation. Maybe they don't hate you for screwing it up - hey, you can just reset reality and do it again, right?? Maybe you bribe them for the job (boring, but it makes more sense than running over some guys who don't even react to you, and it isn't tedious at least). Maybe you do some alternate job if the hardcore job didn't work out at first. You know what I mean? It just feels like punishing filler you've got to go do, which by the way shits all over the storyline as far as missions and the sequence of events goes. I wish they had come up with something.
 
Who are these niggas?
 
The gangs are the main feature of GTa2; the main difference in gameplay over the original game. They are both intriguing and somehow reflections of each other. In other words, kinda the same. But each gang has its own avatar, which are both strange, but also a little delightful. 

The first part of the game includes the "Loonies," the Yakuza and the Zaibatsu. Again, I don't know what "Loonies" are, and the game wasn't any help in establishing what they represent. In the game they are an anarchic, crazy group that is resisting the efforts of the Zaibatsu to medicate them into compliance. So, for story points I guess you can say that is different. But I still don't know who they are and why they want to be insane or whatever their agenda is - again, it's so vague (although perhaps the GAME MANUAL explains it, but nevermind) that it just comes off as they're the joker, which makes the comic book flavor that much stronger.
 
The Yakuza are just some gang, as I can tell. They hate the Zaibatsu, which makes some kind of sense, and this setup led me to believe that this was going to be a Japanese style battle royale, which I guess if you use your imagination really hard it kinda is for a little while. And then there are the Zaibatsu, which, again, in this game it's a consolidated gang representing dastardly corporate action kinda. The Japanese gangs exaggerate the feeling that you are, in fact, in some kind of Toyko.
 
The next section of GTa2, the suburbs, surprised me. I turned the sun on (more on that later) and found mostly new gangs: Firstly, the Rednecks, who have a delightful trailer park with dirt roads on the outskirts of the city. They have sexy orange hair (although the avatar for your contact for the Redneck leader is a black haired "Elvis impersonator" - actually, any Redneck in dialogue is presented as Elvis). Speaking of which, I don't get it - why are Elvis impersonators in the game, and why do they travel together like the work gangs of Grand Theft Auto?
 
Then there are the Scientists. Yeah I don't know. The comic book flavor is quite strong. The scientists perform "experiments" like 'what happens when you shoot a bunch of rednecks,' and, according to the Scientist contact, as intellectuals, they are the natural enemies of the Rednecks. I found the humor of the Scientists to be a little better than most gangs', but the majority of the humor in GTa2 is delivered in the form of cynical parody.
 
And then there are the ZAIBATSU, ever hear of them? Yes, yes, they're back! Boring! They have a bunch of weird corporate sciency mumbo jumbo going on, and as usual are obsessed with pitting the criminal gangs against each other and so on. Well, if they had changed the name of this gang and modified the theme slightly, would that have made them better? Or would it just be more of the same? I've heard people refer to the Rednecks as a branch of the Loonies gang. I guess that analogy can be made, but why? Same sh*t, different telephone.
 
The final area, the industrial zone (cue Sonic theme) includes the last group of gangs: The Russians, who are...Russian, and cannibals (seems edgy, working new types of depravity into the game). That is, the Russians are cannibals, there is no Cannibals gang, although that's just about the level of sanity that is included in GTa2. They could have just called them "The Cannibals," but I'm glad they made them Russians, since we know a lot about Russian degeneracy without having to hear it from GTa2; it's a nice classic villain theme even if nothing seems to add up in this game.
 
Then there are the Krishna, possibly my favorite gang in the game. They are a religious cult, presumably Hindu adjacent. They all dress like Hindu monks. The missions are not that interesting, but they present the Zaibatsu as villainous capitalists, which was a long time coming I think, with tasks like "destroy a polluting Zaibatsu truck." There is a fun Krishna radio station as well - probably there's stuff for the other gangs too, but I couldn't hear the damn radio when I was playing those levels. 
 
Finally the last gang, I already spoiled it, but it's the ZAIBATSU yet again. I don't know why. I think it would have been more interesting to have 3 new gangs, or at least one of the 4 that we had only seen once before, but no, it's the Zaibatsu with their characteristic Zaibatsu style and whatever. Some of the missions in the industrial area are absurdly difficult - and several in other areas are very hard too, keeping up the tradition of a wide blend of difficulties, even on the introductory levels. I delicately passed on the final Zaibatsu mission, which seems to require you to cheat the challenge somehow.
 
Lots of music
 
The sound design of Grand Theft Auto is a highlight; you can hardly think of a game of its age with such sophisticated and high quality music; and indeed, as Mr. Anderson explained, the very concept of "radio stations in a game" seemingly was baffling to the publishers of 1995, and they had to be beat over the heads with it for some time before there was acceptance of the design and promotion of it. There is a fair bit of music in that game, and it is catchy and somewhat memorable. So they decided to change things up for GTa2.
 
To be clear, DMA put a lot of energy into the soundtrack for GTa2; I estimate it has at least 3 times as much music. But I really couldn't tell you much about the music - all I could make out was "generic radio underscoring." There are far more lyrics in GTa2 music than in Grand Theft Auto's music, which mostly consisted of some inscrutable samples and simple beats. So, the music is much more reliant on those lyrics and their audibility. Most of the way through the game, I realized this, and set the game sound to 50% of the music sound, which helped considerably. From the parts that I heard, the advertisements are more interesting than the songs themselves.
 
Where GTa2 succeeds in the soundtrack is in making their songs and radio stations sound like a radio playing. Each gang in the city has their own radio station, and different cars are tuned to these stations by default. DMA also included a feature that degrades the quality of game songs to simulate poor radio reception. Although I felt the effect was well done, I do think it came at the expense of enjoying the soundtrack.
 
But the songs tend to be inane and not engaging. Let me reiterate, I really liked the clear rhythms and samples of Grand Theft Auto. GTa2's music is much more authentic sounding - if there is humor, it tends to be subtle and the beats just don't stand out as much as the cruder songs of Grand Theft Auto. I did enjoy some songs; "Southpark" is a banger and you have to feel "Love that feeling" of getting high and, I guess the implication is that your crime spree is drug fueled, although the game itself never really concerns itself with those details. That sort of belongs to the "GTA IRL" side of the game branding.
 
I am reminded of the end song of Grand Theft Auto, which is hard to hear, but has a guy planning a heist talk to his getaway driver, 'Any questions?' 'No!' replies the driver, which becomes the hook in the song, I suppose. So the question becomes, is it voluntary? And who are you hurting? And what lines do you cross working for these gangs? It turns an arcadey parody into some dark statement about crime and desperation and victimhood ...not really anything that fits in the game at all. So, GTa2's credits song made a tradition of that.
 
A tale of two reputations
 
Trying to repair relations before I began a mission felt gamey and manipulative to me. Whenever possible, I did the missions with the existing relations. This is a task for a masochist, though. Consider the following events:
 
When you spawn at your save point, there is always a thief that steals some money from you. You can shoot him, hopefully without one of the ubiquitous police witnessing that - and in fact, if you let him rob you of a few hundred dollars, and the police witness that, they will shoot at him. Just shooting a weapon is enough to cause the thief to run away. In this case, I had molotov cocktails equipped when I saved my game, and therefore when I loaded the game as well. I shot at the thief without thinking about what was equipped, and the molotov fell at my feet. Mercifully, considering the rudimentary aiming, your own molotovs do not hurt you. But they knock you back - straight into the save point, costing $50,000.
 
I began the LEGAL drug mission for the Zaibatsu. This requires you to take a Russian gang car and drive to a spot near the Russian base, where they will get in the car and then reject the offer. If you're hostile to the Russians, this is a death wish. Stealing the car is no problem. You can expect to be shot at when pulling up, but that's not such a problem. The gangsters will get in the car, and then immediately get out, rejecting the LEGAL drugs. And then they'll pull you out of the car like the police do, and beat you to death like the police do, ignoring the armor you carefully re-equipped after loading your saved game.
 
THAT didn't work. Load the game and try it again! I pull up to the sidewalk I need to drive on. Some big rig is moving at walking speed, and for unknown reasons, stops directly in front of where I need to go, while hostile Russian gangsters walk around on the other side of the street. You can't just stop in a hostile area. I try to drive around the truck. There's a huge swarm of pedestrians blocking the way. Now the gangsters are shooting up my car, until it catches fire - it doesn't take long with a machine gun. It's time to leave.
 
I have to leave in a hurry before the car is destroyed, and I have to get out of the car in a safe spot. I try to get away, and a convenient cop spawns in front of me, I hit their car, and the police are now after me. Since there's a random rule against repairing gang cars, even if the police are not involved, I have to grab a third car and go all the way back to the spray shop to get these cops off my ass. Then I have to drive up to the area where the gang cars spawn in traffic, and get a new one.
 
The police are gone again - here's a new "bulwark!" Let me just block it in *suicidal pedestrian instantly dies under my car* OH GOOD THE POLICE SAW THAT, time to head back to the spray shop again, what fun. This happens regularly. The police density seems incredible. There are more police in this city than any city I've ever been in, although New York does have the world's largest police force. The chance of a random cop witnessing you hitting a pedestrian is close to 50%, and it's not too uncommon to see multiple police cars at an intersection. And although you can clear a one-talking-police-head alert by simply behaving, you often times need to hide to accomplish this, because the chances that a random cop will stumble across you before the alarm clears is quite high.
 
The traffic - assuming time and your safety isn't an issue - moves at a lethargic pace and has weird variations in speed. Sometimes they drive at a reasonable speed, and other times, they crawl, or just stop in the street for no apparent reason. You are strongly encouraged to drive around them, but the pedestrians are like little mines waiting to explode; staying off the sidewalk offers weak protection against their nihilistic jaywalking. 
 
After another car swap and respray, I grab the "bulwark" and go to the meeting point. Now, I didn't even know what killed me the first time I died there. But as I said, if Russians are hostile, after they exit the car, they will pull you out and instantly beat you to death. There will be no running away or shooting back. I tried that multiple times. That was a lot of "bulwark" hunting and respraying. Anyway, the way to survive it is to immediately pull out as soon as a gang member enters the car. Don't worry about it. The mission will proceed. But there will be about 4 guys chasing you to kill you.
 
Whatever! I'm leaving, get on with the mission; there's a group of Zaibatsu by the train station. I delivered the drugs, and exited the train station, and ...who's that guy? Some guy in red chasing me. Who is it? I can't get away from him, and I can't turn around or he'll punch me to death! *PUNCH* "wAsTeD!"
 
Ah, so...apparently they will chase you all the way across the city. Maybe they will even chase you after the mission ends; who the hell knows? Starting over again. The proper method seems to be to run them down. Of course, the police can't see you do this, even if they're shooting machine guns at your car, and you definitely can't bump a police car when you're getting away from them or maneuvering to run them down. Make sure you get them all. One, two, three, oh the fourth one didn't get hit hard enough, *BUMP* OH GOOD THE POLICE ARE HERE, things just got interesting. I swerved around to get the police out of the way, and then returned to the boulevard in the direction I last saw the last gangster. Where did he go?
 
I waited for some time, but the gangster did not reappear. Did the police get him? Well, he wasn't there now, nothing to do but go clean off the police and get on with the mission; I went to the train station. I delivered the drugs, and exited the train station, watching carefully for a rogue Russian trying to punch me. Nothing. The police must have picked him off. The next group is another Russian group, but the second Russian group is unarmed or something; they won't retaliate after rejecting your LEGAL drugs, and your mission is literally to kill them. You chase them up this strange set of stairs and pick them off. Finally you need to visit more Zaibatsu, but it's completely safe. I went down to my car. Suddenly I got pulled OUT of my car, the Russian was back! *PUNCH*
 
I fled to try to put distance between myself and the Russian, but it was impossible. The Krishna, to the south were also hostile, since I was doing Zaibatsu missions. I tried to spin around *PUNCH* "wAsTeD!"
 
Cool. Having learned all these various pitfalls, the mission can go much more smoothly. But I still had to do it over and over again. I began to get flashbacks of London 1961. But not really, the repetition was there, but GTa2 is actually very, very reluctant to use timers. And I would definitely agree that poorly set timers will ruin a mission. So that was a plus.
 
I did the whole mission up to the second Zaibatsu group, and "Uno Carb," one of the bizarrely named characters, asked me to lift some truck from the Russians. Ho boy. I followed the path to the objective. It leads deep into Russian territory, basically to their base, and a door locked by "Soviet generators" you need to destroy. I set to the task nervously, since I was surrounded by hostile Russians. I tried tossing molotovs at it, but the walls are too high. I went up on the stairs of the sewage plant (cool base guys), and then up on the roof. There you can find a GTa2 token, whose purpose I never discovered, and some rocket launcher. I fired some rockets south, and threw some molotovs from the roof, but I concluded it couldn't be done. So how do you get over there?
 
Well, I began by exploring the perimeter. There seemed to be no way in...I tried to explore on the ground, and got swarmed and then wasted. Nice. Start all over again. On a later attempt, I found a route behind the wall on the edge of the map - the intended route. But first, I got wasted again due to the various hostile Russians back at the platform (a strangely situated station behind walls in the corner of the map), as well as hostile Russians which are placed exclusively for the purposes of this mission. Fun!
 
Finally, now having a complete step by step instruction guide for the mission, I did all the dealer tasks and drove a car up towards the train platform bridge, as I had the first time. As I approached the tunnel, *HONKKKKK* "wAsTeD!" Yeah, apparently when a train collides with your car, it doesn't get bumped out of the way, it instantly explodes. Fun place to learn that!
 
After several more repetitions of the mission, I carefully approached the tunnel again, treating the tracks as radioactive, and waited for a train to pass before daring to enter the tunnel. After that point, the mission was simple, just drive a really slow truck through hostile territory to a garage.
 
I later watched another player run this mission, fully expecting him to be murdered by the first group of Russians. But they just ignore you if you don't have a negative reputation with the Russians. It made a lot more sense, too. This makes the mission orders of magnitude easier, even though you are running the mission against Russians and will be shooting at them later. Yes, yes, "reputation is everything," but I am wondering about this "feature" of a mission being completely different based on reputation. In theory it is a good feature - but in practice it's backed by crappy reputation mechanics. 
 
You can of course run over Zaibatsu after taking the mission to make the Russians happier. And should you? Does that make some kind of sense? Are you "with" the faction that gave you the job? You're just going to end up shooting at each other before the end of the mission anyway. But at times, the weaponry employed by a gang that bitterly hates you means you MUST go kill some other gang to calm them down, so they only want to murder you a lot. The gaminess of trying to get the reputations where they "should be" is a huge downside for me. I played through GTa2 trying to avoid whenever possible roadkill runs, but it's just part of the game.
 
I am reminded of Grand Theft Auto, which is considered by many players to be a less sophisticated game. But in that game, you aren't forced to do much of anything. If you want, you can ignore the missions and sell cars to the crane all day. Sometimes I topped off my score after failing a lot of missions that way. You can begin a mission whenever the hell you want to, and you don't have to please anyone first or do gamey bullsh*t to "fix your reputation" before going to a certain part of town or taking a particular mission. I don't hate the gangs, but I hate how reputation is implemented. I really wish reputation took the form of incentives rather than mission gatekeeping and roadkill filler.
 
KiLl FrEnZy!
 
There are a few refinements to the Grand Theft Auto formula: I wouldn't say they are major, but they are noticeable. Kill frenzies are no longer based on dollar amounts. This was a significant issue with Grand Theft Auto kill frenzies: They were either too hard, or too easy. Instead, they give you a weapon and a certain number of victims to kill within a time limit. These challenges aren't easy - and they are the perfect way to ruin a mission in progress. Gambling your mission progress by attracting police attention is a problem with taking a kill frenzy.
 
But the biggest problem with the kill frenzies in GTa2 is that they, like everything you do in the game, impact your reputation with the gangs. You can't go hog wild attacking people who are either on your side, or people that shoot back at you. It is a very different experience to the conscience free killing sprees of Grand Theft Auto with the police being the sole opponents. I found the attendant issues with kill frenzies to take a lot of the fun out of them - the simple but flawed formula in Grand Theft Auto of building multipliers and then doing kill frenzies was ultimately more fun to me (assuming you even knew where they were; they were technically invisible in Grand Theft Auto, because they appeared as weapon pickups).
 
Technical changes in GTa2
 
The "police bribe" token has been upgraded. All items in Grand Theft Auto appear in boxes - and I miss these; I found them exciting to hunt for, easy to identify, and you never knew what you were going to get. But, in that game, you could carelessly take a police bribe token even if the police were not looking for you. In GTa2, this is less likely. Firstly, because you can see items outside of a box, and secondly, because in most cases, you won't take a bribe token you don't need. But it's not reliable, for unclear reasons. It's still a useless token, moreso in GTa2 because a level 1 police alert can be cleared without a bribe or spray shop visit. The player will know ahead of time that he's stepping into sh*t by allowing a level 2 or higher police alert. And to be frank, the level of planning needed to map out a police bribe token is higher than that of just retreating to a spray shop that you will regularly need to visit anyway.
 
The graphics system has been significantly modified. I don't hate the bizarre design of Grand Theft Auto, though I wouldn't say I love it - it's a product of its time. GTa2's graphics are similar, but immediately distinctive. The most obvious change is that there's a night mode, referred to as "dusk." The streets of the city are filled with neon glows, imparting a weird otherworldly atmosphere that again calls to mind "cyberpunk" or comic books or Toyko. The weirdness goes up from there. There's a day mode too, called "noon," and you likely expect that some scenarios go by day and others by night. Well, no! Of course not. You can CHOOSE the time of day - (it is fixed). 
 
This alone is a strange feature. AFAIK there are no gameplay changes to the time of day; it is strictly for your preference what the level looks like. But again, the strangeness increases, because the way you pick the time of day is in the settings menu, yeah. And again, one more little strange detail: GTa2 settings are controlled by an external program. The game minimizes and opens this program if you pick settings. Very unusually, the settings are changed in real time in the game. The stink of the console permeates the menus of GTa2.
 
Beyond that, the infamous camera of Grand Theft Auto got a sophisticated update - the screen no longer zooms out in steps, but more or less smoothly (and less noticeably) zooms out as you increase in speed. When you stop, the camera gracefully (and less noticeably) zooms in over a few seconds. This addresses some of the major issues with Grand Theft Auto's strange visibility problems. There is still a general need to pick up speed to see what you're doing - it isn't the "zoom out key" that you ought to have, but it is much more seamless than before.
 
There is also a special new key included, which allows you to pan the camera for some distance in any direction. I still find it cumbersome and of limited benefit, but DMA obviously worked on improving the concept while making the game less dependent on managing camera behavior. I had no clue what this key binding was until after I completed the game.
 
One weird little detail is that the camera seems to weirdly lag when you're moving at a high speed and hit a car. It's mostly a curiosity though, because there's not a whole lot of high speed in GTa2. I want to say the traffic density is just ridiculous; fast cars are mostly better because they accelerate better, not because you're going particularly fast. You're always bumping into sh*t that kills your momentum and trying to accelerate away from the cops.
 
Another change in GTa2 is simply that the maps have much more depth and elevation changes than in Grand Theft Auto. Well, San Andreas exists - but GTa2 likes to play with elevation more broadly, with numerous overpasses, ramps, elevated platforms, bridges, tunnels, and more, and frequently there's no barrier to driving off of elevated areas, or simply jumping off.
 
And although it can be easy to forget, or simply never to think of at all, if you compare the graphics of Grand Theft Auto to GTa2, you will find a higher texture quality in GTa2 as well. Which makes it all the more unsettling that I like the graphics of Grand Theft Auto better - I find they reflect reality better, and are not as fictional and otherwordly as what you see in GTa2 - particularly at night.
 
It's the game in the series that doesn't seem to fit in - moreso even than Grand Theft Auto, or even the obscure and even more realistic Grand Theft Auto London. GTa2 is Grand Theft Auto with a dash of science fiction, and the latent knowledge that GTa2 is secretly a DOS game made by Europeans. Because if Americans made this game, it would be framed differently in subtle ways. There is a quiet message in Grand Theft Auto about culture. It's a parody, and yet at times it reads more like commentary - but never forget who is doing the commentary - the British!
 
I am reminded of some other of Europe's greatest hits. MAFIA was a game made by Czechs about the United States, and the city of MAFIA, "Lost Heaven," was an amalgamation of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. That seems very familiar here, with this generic mashup city, although I take pains to note that the GTa2 city is featureless and gamey compared to what was shown in MAFIA. There is a flavor, or perhaps an odor, of the Kafkaesque to GTa2, which is inescapable. It was present in Grand Theft Auto as well, and there's no escaping it in MAFIA. 
 
Whenever there is parody, there is Kafka. Kafka is known for surreal, humorous, almost poetic tales, and he "loved" to put sexual entendres into his writing. When he died, he had published very little, and his posthumous editors had a devil of a time figuring out which parts of a story went where. With unfinished work, it remains open to interpretation. Cause and effect is warped in a world where you see what you believe, even if you don't know how much of it is truth and how much is fiction. GTa2 makes it simpler; it is more obviously made up, and stylized, with "comic book" style art and lighting, factions that tax the mind as to know what they are supposed to represent, and missions that reflect our worst impulses. Is GTa2 really about the United States anymore? Or has it gone full parody into a parallel universe populated by bits and pieces of the USA?
 
The train makes a return to GTa2, and it has also been updated. Firstly, there are more train routes, and many of them meet at stations, so you can choose which to board. There is no indication of where they go, but one step at a time, I suppose. The trains start off slow before moving at high speed. They also frequently move below ground. I think the size of the train circuits may also be smaller. Therefore, trains arrive frequently - which is practical for the player. 
 
The gang territory system also imparts new significance to the trains, which exist as a kind of safe zone outside of the game area. You can pass through hostile areas, or travel to and from them. And as usual, you can run from the police on a train. Now how useful that is in practice, I don't know. The train stations likely aren't going where you need to go, and even if they do (the save point at the train station in the suburbs comes to mind), it's likely you will board the wrong train and waste time traveling to other areas of the city - there's no color coding or signage or anything to indicate which trains go where. I like the feature, but it's of limited use.
 
Conclusion
 
GTa2 is a game that is pure to its concept, unapologetic about its weirdness, and a very clear sequel to Grand Theft Auto. Yet I could never overcome the feeling that it was a "corruption" of the even more clear design concept of the previous game. I've tried to point out some examples - perhaps not very well - of how Grand Theft Auto plays like a wild, free crime spree with a sense of progress to it, in a world that is clearly a parody of our own. And GTa2, whatever else you can say about it, has discarded all that in favor of getting locked into service with one gang, then locked out of parts of town, in a very weird, futuristic setting. Some people love that stuff, go play neuromancer. 
 
Personally it is not at all what I was expecting from the sequel to Grand Theft Auto - I mean functionally the gameplay is very similar, but the atmosphere just got wrecked. And I never felt, whatever the benefit of the reputation system (I am lost on this), I never felt that it justified the tedious "reputation management" one must practice to do missions throughout the game. I just don't get it. Yeah, gangs sound cool, it's realistic for them to hate you for working with their rivals, but back in the real world, we're playing a game, and the way they modeled these interactions makes sh*tty gameplay. I don't like being blocked from going to parts of town because of missions I did earlier. I don't like having to stop and run over 50 guys (whose missions I MUST be done with before doing this) if I want to take a different gang's mission. I don't like being unable to pick missions of higher difficulty without enough reputation. It's dumb that their answer to every problem is "run some guys over" and it's dumb that their opinion of me is so easily swayed when I do. Because this whole issue wasn't a thing in Grand Theft Auto. If you ran over people in that game, it was usually because you were a morally empty character or because you were being shot at by someone. It wasn't a core part of the gameplay, and that was a good thing.

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