I got it, and I have to say, i've been enjoying the heck out of it. So much so that I wasted the entire day playing it and into the night as well, without stopping for more than an hour. GTA online is addicting as well. It's very limited compared to say SAMP for san andreas, but the overall presentation is amazing, and the things you can do with friends is just plain awesome.
The graphics are good. Not enough to absolutely blow me away crazy good, but they definitely got the lighting to where i can say "Wow that looks good". When on the los santos pier at sunset, the lighting is so beautiful it reminds me of the first time I played Vice City strolling down the beach. The textures are your typical console-port-to-pc-attempt-at-high-res at best. Polygons are plentiful on models, vehicles look good, characters have plenty of polys. But the lighting on characters just looks unrealistic to me. The character models I would say, don't even rival that of Half-Life 2 from 2004. The facial animations/expressions, the texture of the characters, and the overall look still lack.
World textures just scream 'upscaled' to me rather than true HD in many places. In others, it definitely looks like they took the time to remake things from scratch.
All the screenshots that rockstar posted showing lots of grass and shrubs where there used to be nothing on PS3/360.. sure there is grass now. But it's NOTHING like the grass in Far Cry 2. This grass is just 2 dimensional planes with a swaying transparent texture. When will developers realize that grass is not flat? Far Cry 2 did full 3D modelled grass in 2008, why can't rockstar? Anyway, enough about the graphics. The vehicle physics sucks. The entire way the vehicles handle, the suspension and all, just feels wrong. It reminds me of the horrible arcade controls from Watch Dogs. Cars grip the ground too much. Even with a controller, it just feels out of place in a game like this.
Sound is good, but I can't believe they couldn't so much as replace the horn sounds from GTA 4. All the vehicle horn sounds are identical to it, and I never liked the horns in GTA 4 to begin with. I also seem to notice the same engine breaking down sounds, and also the same ignition sound. For a game that took millions of dollars to develop, they could have at least recorded a few new horn sounds and changed the sound of the ignition on cars. Sound effects overall aren't all that special. Glass breaking sounds like your typical glass breaking in a game, not like you would hear in real life or even in a movie.
Music is subpar. So far I've had to just disable all the music because I was sick of hearing nonstop rap music come on everytime I got in a vehicle. What happened to all the great tracks from GTA3, Vice City, San Andreas?
Game controls for PC are actually not that great. There are some decisions rockstar did on default key combinations that just made me say 'what the hell were you thinking when you decided i need to push THAT key to do THIS'. Luckily you can change it. But I still can't figure out how to use push to talk on a controller. I spent 15 minutes and gave up. It just doesn't exist.
The performance on the other hand, fairs very well for single player. I ran it totally maxed out with an i7 3770k, 16 GB of ram, and 2x GTX 770 4GB between 100-144 fps at all times. But the fps suffers in multiplayer big time. I had to completely lower all my settings to minimum just to make the mouse stop lagging. And even then, it feels like there's this constant delay to my mouse movements. It doesn't feel at all like a PC game in terms of mouse control. In single player it's tolerable, but in MP it's just unacceptable. Using a controller is much better.
Sorry for the wall of text. I hope you enjoyed my review of GTA 5 PC.
