Finally playing VC DE..

[Chazza354]

I played SA on gamepass when it launched, and although I reached 100% on that version, I was wholly dissatisfied with the overall package. Now I have decided to buy the trilogy for my Series X as it's only £23 on Amazon, and I have gone straight to Vice City. 

 

I am about 5 or 6 hours in, and my biggest gripe is the character/clothing models. They all look like shiny, plastic-y, action figures, and Tommy looks like an entirely different person. My favourite outfit (the burgundy tracksuit) looks awful, and many of the cars also share this odd plastic-y look. I find it odd how the windshields are pretty much opaque on vehicles, it's a shame because they had an opportunity to bring these vehicles and characters to life in a new way. They completely missed the mark with the visual style, and it looks like some weird fan-made remake or something. 

 

My second biggest gripe is the handling of both the vehicles, and Tommy. The vehicle handling has been completely changed - cars are now much heavier and less responsive, but without any interesting characteristics to make them fun or challenging to drive. It is just slow and boring to drive in this version - why did they change the vehicle handling? The issue with light smoke turning to fire without any dark smoke is still present, which is hugely frustrating to not have a better indication of your vehicle health. Tommy's movement seems a lot more sluggish now too, and the aiming suffers with the same slow lock-on system that SA DE has. You can't quickly snap from target to target anymore - it's a slow, clunky process.

 

Sometimes I am impressed with the environments, particularly looking at the city from a boat, I think it looks quite good and the lighting has moments of relative greatness, but overall it's not very impressive visually. The performance is good on Series X, it seems to maintain a solid 60fps on performance mode, but that should be expected from the start.

 

Even with the major bugs ironed out, and several patches rolled out, this version is still a bit of an embarrassment and doesn't deserve to be titled the 'Definitive Edition'. Once I finish the achievements, I am sure I will never touch it again. 

[boomboom5950]

VCDE looked by far the most cartoonish of the bunch and looks very cheaply made, the buildings on the second island are still rectangles with a single stretched ugly texture applied. while i dont hate the DE and im glad they exist, its a shame that we probably wont see any more remasters of these games anymore (or at least for a very very long time) because we have these. I cant believe take two would outsource these games to the absolute cheapest studio they can find that were already understaffed and overworked to one of the most beloved trilogys of all time