GTA 3 is one of my all time favorites. If Rockstar would’ve created an app with the radio channels alone it would’ve been a justified purchase and perhaps a massive hit too, so bringing the full game to iOS is a treat. For that I thank Rockstar.

A treat that sadly has its caveats. So many even that the game is unplayable on my iPad (1). Literally. It crashes in between missions so frequently that after a few hours of trial and error I were forced to give up.

So while I await an update to fix these errors I wanted to share my thoughts on what could’ve done to improve this title’s playability on iOS. I won’t review the game, and many glitches where already mentioned in the TouchArcade and TechCrunch reviews (such as the crazy lock-on system). 

1. Add quick-save

Ten years ago it seemed like a good idea to save your game by driving to a safehouse, parking the car in the garage and entering the building. Times have changed, and especially for iOS this is a no-go. When I’m about to leave the train I want to save my game in a second; tap menu, tap save, done.

2. Add auto-save when a mission is completed

The game crashed so many times for me that it was hard to finish a mission. When I did finish one, I immidiately tried to reach a safehouse prior to the game crashing, often without success. So if the crashes aren’t fixed, and the beforementioned quick-save isn’t added, the least Rockstar could do is auto-save after completing a mission. Right?

3. Extend the free-look touch area to the right side of the screen

Right now the touch-area is limited to the center of the screen. In the screenshot below, your right hand thumb usually is in the area of the wall you see there:

Right now you can’t look around when your hand is resting there (which is the default control scheme for many 3D shooter/action/RPG-like games). In GTA3 you have to lift your hand and touch the center of the screen to look around. Pity.

And there’s no way to change this touch area either :(

4. Don’t auto-pan on free-look and give us precise controls

When you look around, the camera feels laggy and tries to shift its panning and view back to a certain position that I really don’t understand. I’m sure it’s some perfectly sane calculation to optimize the viewport and prevent clipping issues, but the camera doesn’t feel free, nor does it feel responsive. Many iOS games have proven better camera controls, so from a company such as Rockstar I expected more.

5. Remove the unnecessary scrolling in menus

The menu options are a bit over-designed. Sure, they look really nice, but their big size requries you to scroll around to reach them, which really slows down navigation a lot. For instance, when you open the briefs option and return to the main menu again, it looks like this:

I am accustomed to hit the Play button in order to continue my game, but in this case it always shows “Start game” which causes a restart. In the screen above, the “Resume” button requires a swipe to the right in order to make it appear. It may be a minor detail, but details matter.

6. Make the target icon on the map more clear

When you’re on a mission, the destination is marked on the map. This marker is a small 5x5 green square on a brown map. So there’s hardly any contrast and it’s extremely easy to miss. I found myself searching for it quite often.

Add to these the ridiculous lock-on system when in a firefight and the huge amount of buttons they’ve put on screen without merging some into a more ambiguous trigger button and it feels the UI team should be sent back to the drawing board.

The thing that strikes me most is; most of these things feel so obvious that I don’t understand that the GTA3 iOS team itself didn’t feel bothered by these issues. I mean; we all know GTA 3 is a gem, so why not polish it?