You can only embody a vicious psychopath a short time before it becomes boring, at best, and soul-crushing, at worst. Forcing players to murder people, not in a gamey “I killed you to complete a goal” way that defines this medium, but in a terrorizing and demeaning way, is not what will make videogames great. Rockstar had a chance to elevate, and they wasted it on portraying characters you don’t want to spend five minutes with, let alone the hours it would take to play through the game’s story.

 Escapist Magazine

One second it wants to be satire, the next simple parody. Pure pornography one second, high drama the next. These storytelling techniques can live side-by-side—just look at the Quentin Tarantino movies that Rockstar honcho Dan Houser so clearly adores—but just like the character identity divide, GTA5 lacks the courage to commit to anything and feels weightless as a result. It’s a waste of its astounding digital landscape.

 Gameological

Playing GTA used to feel like sneaking out behind school for a quick, illicit smoke. The smoke still tastes good, Niko; the nicotine still nicely javelins into your system. But when you look up, you have to wonder what you’re actually doing here. Everyone is so young, way younger than you, with the notable exception of the guy handing out the cigarettes, and he’s smiling like he just made a billion dollars. Your friend always, Tom

 Grantland

Yes, these are exaggerations of misogynistic undercurrents in our own society, but not satirical ones. With nothing in the narrative to underscore how insane and wrong this is, all the game does is reinforce and celebrate sexism. The beauty of cruising in the sun-kissed Los Santos hills while listening to “Higher Love” by Steve Winwood turns sour really quick when a voice comes on the radio that talks about using a woman as a urinal.

 Gamespot

When joking about any form of oppression out there, you need to make the oppressor the punchline, NOT the oppressed. When joking about any form of inequality, you need to make privileged people the butt of your joke, NOT the marginalized and disenfranchised.

 How To Not Suck At Game Design

Time and again comments like this emerge, revealing a deep dis-ease with the presence of women (and to varying extents, LGBT people) in the gaming community. Note how the transmisogyny all but forces an incredible cognitive dissonance here: for what is a game review but a professional opinion? An opinion can be well-argued and empirically supported (problems that none of these commenters appear to be suffering from, I might well add), but it is still an opinion; reviews are solicited, consumed, and sought-after precisely because they consist of pointed opinions. Yet when, suddenly, an opinion about misogyny is offered, there enters an off-key chorus of people suddenly whinging about “facts.”

 The Border House

This isn’t just about women – it’s robbing every single one of us of the opportunity to have intelligent, interesting discussions about how our medium deals with gender, sexuality, race, class or any one of a host of other fascinating, complex topics. We’re reduced to shouting and throwing rocks. It’s frustrating, it’s stupid, and it’s downright boring – and it risks making our games stupid and boring too.

 Games Industry Biz

Any supposed member of the supposed community that expresses anything less than unbridled enthusiasm for the product is labeled “hipster,” “pretentious” or “elitist.” Anyone who says that the product is anything less than peerless is labeled “hipster,” “pretentious” or “elitist.” “Do you think you’re better than me?” is the subtext. The people who shrug their shoulders at the impending existence of this product in a marketplace are trying to spoil the fun, rain on the parade, are being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. They’re dissenting to simply to raise a ruckus and to get attention, while the people who are giving them the most attention are typically the ones loudly complaining that these dissenters are just trying to get attention.

 Gamasutra

“GTA”, so heißt es oft, ist eine Satire auf Amerika. Doch im Grunde ist es vor allem ein erboster Kommentar zu einem Land, das – zumindest in seinen Medien – zu seiner eigenen Karikatur geworden ist. Wer einmal den USA ferngesehen oder Radio gehört hat, wundert sich nicht mehr über die Abbilder in “GTA V”. Hier ist kaum etwas allzu sehr überspitzt. Es gibt liberale Laberrunden genauso wie reaktionären Wahnsinn. Die Gesellschaftskritik ist nicht subtil. Sie wird Spielern mit dem Holzhammer eingebläut. So, wie es Jon Stewart in seiner “Daily Show” macht. Man greift sich die schwachsinnigen Höhepunkte der Sender und stellt sie heraus, isoliert sie. Mehr muss nicht sein. Die Idiotie entlarvt sich selbst. Und damit es auch der Letzte mitbekommt, wird es anschließend erklärt. So wie im Slogan des “GTA”-Nachrichtensenders Weazel News: “Wir bestätigen Ihre Vorurteile.”

 Spiegel Online

The political moves of Grand Theft Auto V make a lot of sense in the context of the ever-more-sanitized late 1990s. In a decade where the body, the fetish, and violence were increasingly seen as the only aesthetic ways from breaking out of the “end of history,” Grand Theft Auto makes a lot of sense. Lampooning Democrats and Republicans on in-game radio hit so hard in 2001, but in a world where pundits and politicians are already sounding like parodies of themselves, these jokes don’t really land. When the world you’re creating as a parody is hardly distinguishable from the real world, the parody might as well not exist.

 This Cage Is Worms

Als der Horror vorbei war, stand meine Figur wieder draußen am Straßenrand und ich war völlig fertig. Ich bin auf dem Gehsteig sinnlos hin und hergelaufen. Ein vorbeifahrender Radfahrer hat mich angebrüllt: “Get out the fucking way!” Du hast Recht, habe ich mir gedacht. Es hat einfach keinen Spaß mehr gemacht. Ich werde nicht mehr nach Los Santos zurückkehren. Diese Freiheit kann mir “GTA V” nicht nehmen.

 Puls

Denn anders als in z.B. Call of Duty wird hier nicht ein Terrorist gefoltert, auch foltert man nicht um Informationen zu erlangen, die mögliche Menschenleben retten. Nein, man foltert einen unschuldigen Fernsehtechniker, der unglücklicherweise zur falschen Zeit am falschen Ort war und von Anfang an zu jeglicher Kooperation bereit ist. Und das Ganze geschieht auch noch auf Befehl eines egoistischen Dritten, der sich daraus nur persönliche Vorteile erhofft.
Dies klingt nun natürlich ungleich härter. Und das ist es auch. Aber genau aus dieser offensichtlichen Sinnlosigkeit ziehen die GTA Folterszenen ihr kritisches Potential. Es wird Folter in all seiner Härte und Sinnlosigkeit gezeigt. Sie wird in keinster Weise durch das größere Gute legitimiert.

 Dis+Positiv

It’s particularly troubling because torture conjures up such intense empathy in the viewer that it is a really hard thing to employ effectively in visual art like film, TV and games. Used carefully, it can be transformative, not just for the victim but also the torturer, and raises all sorts of important questions in the mind of the viewer. In GTA5, however, it has no lasting effect on Trevor, while the victim is quickly and completely forgotten about, which just leaves the player to suffer through and remember the whole unsettling experience.

 Eurogamer

How evil should a video game allow you to be?

Fictional characters, whether they appear in novels, films, or video games, are never fully independent entities. They are conjured by words on a page, directions in a screenplay, or lines of programming code, existing only in imagination or on a screen. A creator has no moral obligation to his or her fictional characters, and in that sense anything is theoretically permissible in a video game. But a game creator does have a moral obligation to the player, who, having been asked to make choices, can be uniquely degraded by the experience. The game creator’s responsibility to the player is to, in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, not waste his or her time. But it is also, when it comes to solemn screen violence, to add meaning to its inclusion.

 New Yorker

It’s difficult to defend in any rational way. It’s wrong. But then again, that’s the point. Grand Theft Auto is a playground of the wrong; a virtual holiday to a world of reprisal-free sin, where the rep meets you at the airport with a gun and a can of petrol, and innocently points you towards the nearest traffic jam. Admittedly, a glance at the average comments page and you’d be forgiven for thinking some people doesn’t so much need a holiday to this place as to be permanently deported from it, but for the rest of us, it’s cathartic and deliciously wrong.

 Edge

Now this is where those of you who are not parents will sound off with “you should let them judge” or “I killed hookers in GTA III when I was five and I turned out fine.” That is great. I accept your opinion. Although, when your daughter comes home from elementary school crying because someone called her a b***h, you might change your tune.

 Kotaku

Even this cartographer loves Grand Theft Auto 5

The depiction of Los Angeles rings true of hedonism run rampant. The layout of the megalopolis itself, isolated on the southern tip on the peninsula, seems not so much planned as hastily developed for profit.

 Kill Screen

Size matters, doesn’t it? Not just size, but length, am I right? How big and long is the map compared to other maps? How many minutes does it take to drive around the map? Can you fit other, smaller maps inside this map? Does the map have secrets? Is this map really as big as they say it is? Is this map girthy enough to really satisfy a gamer’s needs? Have I squeezed all I can out of this analogy?

 Geek Empire

GTA V is that character — the $800 million man who doesn’t know what to do next. Who used to be a rebel, who pulled the same damn tricks until they stopped working, and then kept doing it.

 Gamasutra