Recent reviews by Xena: Warrior Princess

I initially bought GTA5 because a few friends recommended it for the single player story and gameplay. Rockstar has done an awesome job of making the game engaging and no longer do I have to fight the controls to make anything cool happen like in prior games in the franchise.

I don't recommend it because Rockstar sprang a custom games launcher on us that you must download in order to play, even offline. Oh, also it broke offline mode on PC, so there's that too. If you're coming for the offline mode then be prepared for an awesome story, as long as they allow you to play it.

Edit: Checked again 2 weeks later. Still totally broken.

Terrible writing: check
Weirdly sexual beach scene: check
Obviously an allegory for Japanese high school: check

Overall, fairly obvious and formulaic anime plot.

BUT

This is a startlingly good game, both in gameplay and engine. It's more like chess than anything, providing a set of units with specific abilities and weakness and leaving it up to you to determine how to best use them. I've done a couple playthroughs and legitmately enjoy it every time, despite the hamfisted translation and/or writing. The only bummer is that the controls can get wonky on PC, but they seem to have fixed that in VC4, which is also worth checking out.

I got this on sale, discounted from $19.99 to $6 and even then I paid too much to have to deal with Games for Windows Live.