Is San Andreas Definitive Edition Worth It

[Bridget Peral]

Editors Note. Given the sheer number of releases these days, it is impossible for us to reassess individual games in the weeks, months, sometimes years after our initial review. When post-launch updates reportedly improve the experience, we insert a note at the top of our reviews stating such, but the body of the review text and the score remains untouched.

This particular Switch release, however, was an especially notable disappointment given the prestige and iconic status of these titles in video gaming canon. So, we've made a very specific exception and asked PJ to redownload the trilogy to see how it compares to the GTA Switch ports he first played just over 18 months ago...

Back at the tail end of 2021, Rockstar Games unleashed the ludicrously named Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition on Nintendo Switch, bringing a distinctly indefinitive, problematic, and shoddy port of three stone-cold classics to the eShop.

"Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition on Switch delivers three of gaming's true greats in a shockingly rough package that manages to suck pretty much all of the fun out of Rockstar's stellar crime epics. This is a poor port, a shoddy, stuttery, low resolution mess full of bugs, glitches, audio problems and more besides."

Ouch. And in all honestly, after spending more time with the games in the weeks that followed our initial assessment, we continued to find more and more issues with a package that was genuinely a complete and utter waste of your time and money.

However, such is the compelling nature of the three juggernauts of open-world gaming contained within the GTA trilogy, we have found ourselves waiting and watching, occasionally redownloading and checking online to see what sort of state these games are currently in.

The last update dropped in October of 2022 and was described by Rockstar as simply "stability updates", which isn't helpful in the slightest, but it was actually the previous patch, 1.06, that seems to have made the most difference overall to the performance of all three titles.

The first thing you'll notice, across all three games, is that they now have much-improved frame pacing and frame rates in general. Where the initial release was an absolute mess in terms of how it juddered and stuttered along, these ports now run at a pretty much locked 30fps, with a few slight drops to the high 20s here and there. They feel much more playable and smooth as a result and it's great to see that the most immediate, egregious, and noticeable problem has, for the most part, been ironed out.

Of course, this is a definitive edition of three fairly old games, Rockstar and Grove Street Games shouldn't be getting any brownie points whatsoever for finally making them run kinda smoothly, but we'll take what we can get at this point.

The second major issue that we had at launch involved an awful draw distance combined with vehicles that would materialise out of nowhere, making driving feel like a real chore. Add some serious scenery pop-in to this mix and you had a visual mess to contend with.

Once again, as of patch 1.06, most of these issues have been improved, if not fixed entirely. The draw distance is better, the pop-in is nowhere near as bad, and the materialising cars, although still very much present, at least have the decency to appear out of nowhere slightly further down the road.

Again, this is all stuff that should never have been a problem in the first place but, if we're to let bygones be bygones, combining these small wins with the frame rate and pacing improvements you've got an experience that is much improved over the dog's dinner we first sat down to. These improvements apply to all three games, although in terms of slight stutters and blurry effects, San Andreas does still chug here and there.

With regards to finer details, all three games are definitely less Vaseline-smeared than at launch, both GTA 3 and Vice City are approaching what we would describe as sharp, especially in portable mode, and San Andreas, although still a little blurred, is much better than it was. These, of course, are differences we're noticing without any special equipment or Digital Foundry levels of assessment and know-how, so this is all stuff you should be able to feel and see for yourself pretty much as soon as you relaunch into the trilogy.

All of these niggles and problems were, for us, the major setbacks that made the original release of this trilogy on Switch an experience that we recommended everyone avoid, and now that they're all somewhat sorted, we'd be tempted to very tentatively say this is a package that's now worth picking up.

However, there are still problems here and this is still very far from any sort of definitive experience. These games remain disappointing ports in our eyes, regardless of some nicer visuals and the now-reasonably solid performance. There are also still plenty of bugs to go around.

We've spent about ten hours all told revisiting these games and in that time we've seen plenty of clipping issues, with our protagonist failing to connect with scenery properly whilst clambering and climbing around, we've spotted a few flying cars and floating NPCs here and there, and noticed some audio issues to boot.

18 months down the line, this very slapdash experience is also sat at a premium price tag, a price tag that demands a much better overall experience than this, even with the improvements, nips, and tucks we've seen since 2021. It has been on sale in that time, and in the end we still wouldn't really recommend it unless you can pick it up discounted.

A definitive edition, though, should bring with it noticeable improvements, embellishments, and surprises to an original experience. This particular Definitive Edition is still struggling to match what players were treated to with these games back in the day. It's passable without being in any way impressive at this late stage.

We've seen rumours, alongside a now-deleted tweet, that the base code of this trilogy has been changed, we've heard that Grove Street Games is now off the job and Rockstar will be handling things from here. However, all of this stuff is way too late for the many, many people who got burnt to the tune of fifty notes when three all-time greats launched in one of the absolute worst release states we've seen on Switch.

PJ is a staff writer across Pure Xbox and Nintendo Life. He's been playing video games pretty much nonstop since the early 1980s, loves his RPGs more than most, and continues to pretend to himself that his reflexes haven't slowed at all over the past four decades of continuous play.

Thank you very much for reassessing this trilogy. I've been wondering lately if it was playable after all the patches. Will probably hold off still, as I only feel any nostalgia for Vice City. I wish I could buy it for 1/3 of the price tag, at discount

So basically still a sub-par-experience. In summary, if you have no other way to play the games then this is a good as it will get. Retro City Rampage and Shakedown Hawaii are probably better choices if you are looking for driving around and shoot things.

No lol. The developer on this one is absolute low level trash. Despite being a huge fan of their latest eshop release, something with as much scope as this should not have been left to them. What an oversight.

They are generally better, though the new style still ruins a lot of these games uniqueness....

Alan Wake may be worth a second look, one patch made a big difference to the performance, though the resolution is still some of the worst I've seen on Switch.

There were objectively rough things about the ports at launch, and my own fair bit of time with the trilogy has seen a couple crashes here and there, but overall, the GTA games on Switch are more than decent by now and predictably blessed by the portability granted to them (which you'd think should be common knowledge since Gen 7 at latest). But if you're too sensitive for their current state, there are equally meaty alternatives like Saints Row and LA Noire (plus all the top-down homages from Retro City Rampage to American Fugitive to Rustler) on the same platform.

I think I'm still keeping my standards incredibly high for this. They should've developed this game with the Switch as a priority, because there really is so much you could do with making a "remake" with "old textures" or something like that. This was inexcusable quality for something so simple.

I could understand botching a port for GTA V (if that ever came around). The game has a huge file size, even for the PS3 and 360. This, however, could have been avoided entirely had they decided to focus on the Switch, then make massive improvements on other platforms. They seriously need to start thinking like Capcom.

I think this makes sense on a Switch simply as a portable GTA trilogy, and the games look better on a handheld anyways. When I played this on my Xbox I was amazed by how bad the performance was, totally not worth messing around with.

I did runs of 3 and Vice City on PS Plus and while they had issues they were functional. I keep meaning to pick the collection up on either PS5 or Switch if I can find it cheap enough but I never see it lower than $30.

I played the games post patch and while not perfect, it's fine. It's a shame these games weren't optimized better for all platforms for that matter, but at least they're not totally broken. The ability to play these on Switch outweighs the issues.

I know there's issues, but at it's current state they aren't game breaking and even so I don't care. I'm just happy grand theft auto is finally on switch. We were stuck with saints row for the longest time now we finally have GTA. They are still playable and look fine and play fine, after the updates. I really really really wish they'd port GTA IV (yes, 4) to switch. I loved IV the most of the entire series. Hard to believe it's still stuck on decades old consoles (PS3/360).

While it's admirable that they've made improvements to what seemed like an absolutely disastrous launch, my initial interest in revisiting these games (and I only briefly played GTA3 back in the day, VC and SA passed me by) has long-since dissipated. It's also pretty much put me off going in on games on day one, knowing full well that there'll be patches and updates at least a couple of weeks after launch, and I feel like a dodged a pretty sizeable bullet.

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