It's an understatement to call Vice City the biggest game of the year. In the last decade, there hasn't been a single game anticipated quite as much as Vice City. Since Grand Theft Auto III hit stores last year, it has sold millions of copies, and is quickly becoming the best-selling video game of all time; it's already been named the best-selling PS2 game. To say the very least, it's one of most popular games of all time. Now, its sequel, GTA: Vice City, is here, and it's better than its predecessor in every way possible. Not to mention the fact that it's already sold a couple million copies itself, and is already in third place for the best-selling game of 2002.

In Vice City, you play as Tommy Vercetti, a mobster who has just got done with fifteen years in a Liberty City jail. He's lost his boss's money and drugs in a deal gone sour. Tommy's boss, Sonny Forelli, becomes furious when he finds this out, and the game progresses from there on out. Tommy is then sent on a mission to the tropical, Miami-based Vice City in order to get the money and the drugs back for his boss, and he builds an empire of crime for himself while he's at it.

Vice City has a superb soundtrack, with outstanding voice-acting talent (Ray Liotta, etc.). There are nine radio stations you can tune into while cruising the streets of VC (seven of them music, two of them talk). Rockstar crammed over 100 songs from the '80s onto the disc, and they are distributed evenly throughout the seven different radio stations that play them. The styles of music range from rock, to pop, to rap and hip-hop, to love songs. Lazlow returns from GTA3 and he's the rock-station DJ in VC, playing the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Quiet Riot on the airwaves of V-ROCK. Fernando hosts EMOTION, the love-themed station. Mr. Magic is the host of WILDSTYLE, the rap & hip-hop station, playing Run DMC, and other various notable talents. Plus, the talk shows on VCPR and KCHAT are hilarious! I don't have time to go into any more details regarding the soundtrack, but let me just tell you that it's definitely one of the most ambitious ever to be found in a video game.

The graphics are the only part where Vice City comes up a little short. Sure, it's a large improvement over Grand Theft Auto III, but Vice City still has its glitches. Some of the people are not detailed too well, but when there are thousands of them, you can't really blame Rockstar for taking the logical path. If they would have perfected every character's face, hands, and other properties, Vice City probably wouldn't have been released until around 2007. Also, the AI has some problems, but nothing that will subtract from the game's overall fun factor.

The controls are a major improvement over GTA3 (thank God for the new and improved auto-targeting system!). They're not perfect, but close. Controlling Tommy Vercetti will become second-nature. The learning curve is only about 30 minutes, and even less if you've played GTA3.

This is probably the most fun I've ever had playing a video game. I've beaten the game, I've found most of the secrets, and I've played it for 100+ hours -- I'm still addicted. If you own a PS2, then you have no excuse for not owning this game. No, I take that back -- if you own a PS2, if you don't own a PS2, if you've never played a video game before -- it doesn't matter. It's worth buying a PlayStation 2 just for this game. Rockstar has created an absolute masterpiece, and what is possibly the best video game of all time.

OVERALL SCORE: 10/10

Review by ForestRanger