GTA Online First Impressions: Crew Up And Throw Down With TSA

We’ve been playing GTA Online, and due to the nature of the game (or game mode, whichever you’d prefer to call it) a standard review just wouldn’t do. You see, GTA is all about the individual stories and experiences, meaning that no two games are ever the same. So we’ve all banded together, recorded and spoke over some video of a recent TSA staff match and then given a few paragraphs of our own thoughts, choosing our best little stories and moments of the game.

Aran: An air raid on a military base may seem like an impossible feat, but here we were, five of us in helicopters flying toward Fort Zancudo, making it our mission to steal a jet. It was a real Ride Of The Valkyries moment, that didn’t at all succeed. I managed to land my helicopter next to a jet just as the army responded to the attack.

Instinctively I ran to the jet as quickly as I could, with panic kicking in as the jet hatch took an age to open, but I achieved the impossible; I was ready to fly! Ready to deal major damage, I took off, debating what I’d do first, but my time in the air was cut short as a missile took out my engine. Helplessly I watched as my jet fell out of the sky and into a mountain, exploding on impact. My comrades did not fare much better and after respawning, retreat was the only option.

Fort Zancudo had won.

Gareth: While I was driving around downtown Los Santos I encountered someone in a car. At first I thought nothing of it, but he followed me for a little while, beeping on his horn, and soon totalled his vehicle. In a perhaps inadvisable lapse of judgement I backed up to him and beeped. Thankfully he got in the car instead of shooting me in the head and so began our fanciful love affair; we drove around drive-by-ing random pedestrians, robbing stores, until we made our way up to the Kortz Centre. Here, my dashing young friend jumped out, hit his head on a lamp post, and carjacked a sports car.

From here we roamed the lush green hills of Banham Canyon gaily, like glorious gazelle on a sunny Sunday morning. Our balletic dance ended when we launched ourselves from the summits of hills like dancers and raced to the bottom, only to collapse in an elegant whirlwind of shredded steel. Soon after, we parted and we haven’t been together since. He’s moved on; he’s now a whole 10 ranks ahead of me, but we’ll always have Banham Canyon.

Dan Jones: I’ve not had the best of times with GTA Online. Every time I play, I’m constantly greeted with disconnections and general connectivity issues. However, once I’m past these problems it’s been a brilliant affair.

I’m only a low rank at the moment, as instead of completing missions and jobs I’ve been hunting down other players in Los Santos and giving them a face full of lead. One such player was Crazy_Del, who I spotted on the map and thought it would be funny to try and kill them. Turns out Del is really good at the game! He killed me quite a few times.

I also played for a few minutes with the TSA staff, and managed to die pretty much instantly on our first mission. I also don’t think they were too impressed when I beat a bystander to death with a night stick. I’m certainly looking forward to playing more of the Online section, but probably not until all the issues have been ironed out.

Jim: Truth be told, I’m not a massive fan of Grand Theft Auto Online. A shame, really, considering how much I had been anticipating its launch after being left fatigued by the game’s single-player offerings.

That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed it at all, however. Jumping straight into jobs with fellow staff was a laugh and I was somewhat in awe of how well Rockstar’s trademark open world worked in an online environment. Though I didn’t linger, I still had fun being escorted to job sites by other writers. Being a passenger isn’t usually much fun but one thing I did discover was how unarmed co-drivers can use the action button to make a rude gesture, flipping off bystanders and other players alike.

Of course, the jobs themselves were the highlight and I also found myself surprised by how consistent GTA holds up no matter if you’re racing, shooting, or just exploring Los Santos.

If I had to choose a specific highlight, it would be rallying a group of players for an impromptu raid on a convenience store. Kitted out with an arsenal of weapons, we soon had they poor cashier empty his till into a bag and throw it over the counter, instantly triggering pandemonium. Not content with cudgeling, head-stamping and shanking the poor shop-owner, our gang soon turned on each other.

The fight spilled out onto the streets of Los Santos as robbers sprinted towards vehicles. In short, the player who grabbed the cash managed to escape with the money (I was never going to catch him in my tractor), leaving me to reflect on a superb dose of emergent gameplay.

Blair: While the deathmatches, skydives and races offer a bit of organised chaos, complete with Mario Kart style power-ups in the latter, it’s with the more unorganised chaos that GTA Online is at its best.

It’s the moments where you grab a helicopter and, instead of having a race, head straight to the Wind Farm, populated with fast-spinning and colossal windmills, with one wrong move costing you – and your passengers’ – lives. It’s a sort of good adrenaline rush, in that you know there’s a sense of danger but you’re comfortable nonetheless. It’s fun, it’s crazy and with friends it’s just a downright laugh, with trickier manoeuvres leading to weaving between satellites.

Then there are those other moments of genius when someone shouts, “Let’s land inside the prison and attempt to escape. Prison break!” and you do. As we fly to the prison – Aran and I, along with community members sciontc1 and wick15 – I start to hatch a devious plan, though keep quiet. We land. Sciontc1 and wick15 sprint straight for the gates, avoiding gunfire as they go, but Aran and I stay. I’m not quite sure how Aran knew, perhaps due to some TSA-powered telepathic abilities, but he gets back in the chopper beside me, and we fly off.

We’ve escaped, as our comrades are stuck inside the prison walls trying to avoid the gun-loving guards. As we’re notified of their deaths, we laugh, and head back to the Wind Farm.

Adam Garrett: Myself and some friends were driving around deciding what to do, when we came up with our own mini-heist, which was very mean but, then again, this is GTA! First we stole a helicopter from the airport, which we then flew to Fort Zancudo to try and parachute in, in an attempt to steal a Cargobob helicopter. Unfortunately, I had forgotten the most important part of this attempt: the parachute! I quickly fell to my death, and our helicopter was shot down so it was complete failure.

We return to the airport to try and get a new helicopter and, lo and behold, there’s a Cargobob sitting on a helipad for us! We quickly get in and put our heist into action. We fly straight over to the nearest Los Santos Customs and grab the fastest car that we can see that has a real player driving.

The heist was complete, but what to do now? If the player has ownership of the car then it could be useless to us. We debated what to do with the car, which still had the owner inside. Drop it in the ocean? Fly it into a bridge? In the end we flew back to Fort Zancudo, jumped out of the Cargobob, and let gravity and the military decide!

Greg Turner: After several timed out connections when trying to join the rest of the TSA staff, I had to concede defeat, but fortunately another of my friends was online so I jumped into his game. We had an absolute blast – firstly with a mission called Crooked Cops, which involved us battling each other to steal evidence and deliver it to a garage, but the icing on the cake was started by randomly robbing stores while doing our best to evade the police.

After two robberies, things started heating up and a frantic car chase ensued up the side of a mountain. Tracked by police cars and helicopters, it was going fairly well until I decided to bail out of the car and try to get away on foot. This was a big mistake as I ended up getting cornered by the cops behind a barn and taken down in spectacular fashion. I ended the session by creeping up on an NPC, knocking him out and stealing his money, before feeling bad about it.

Peter: I die a lot in multiplayer games. I never really enjoy the staccatto rhythm of them – the spawn-die-spawn cycle that negates all emotional attachment or positive association with my on-screen avatar. I’d already died a lot in GTA Online, of course, the laser-focussed narrow-mindedness of the vast majority of players had seen to that. Their need to attack, to kill everything that can be killed, when I just wanted to wander around a bit or perhaps steal my car back from the impound. So, as is so often the case in competitive online multiplayer games, I wasn’t able to play the game I wanted to play.

And then I played with friends and it was all completely different.

My memorable moment, then, is one which led on to a whole new feeling towards the game. When I joined that first game with the TSA guys, I stole a car and drove to the bar in the desert. I had a little difficulty with the police on the way and had to do a few laps of the one-horse town around the bar but I shook them pretty quickly by getting ahead of them, ditching my car and hiding in a bush until they stopped looking. Then, as I emerged from the bush and ran towards the road, Blair had come out to meet me. “We’re gonna go to the pub and play darts.” He said and I thought to myself “well, that’ll do for me.”

GTA Online leaves you thinking about what you’re going to do next. Perhaps an unorganised Skydive across the city, leading to Peter landing perfectly – by complete chance – on wick15’s car? Another raid on the military base? A small raid on a convenience store? Or even a pre-set job? No matter what you choose, as long as you’re with friends, it’s always a lot of fun.