Listen I'm going to keep these games but in short, no, do not buy this crap lol. I only got it because I did my annual "B*tch to the ISP for a free $100 gift card" phone call and waited specifically for the sale. I was even pleasantly surprised to see it go down to 60%, the lowest its ever been on PC as far as I'm aware. I only played the first two missions, explored a bit, and I already have a handful of notes. There are some positives I do want to go over but, to put it mildly, this is still a turd. You can dress up a turd to make it pretty, but at the end of the day it's still a turd. Sorry, not sorry.

Anyway~

THE GOOD
The return of the classic lighting is honestly so welcoming, and seeing the Unreal's lighting in the streetlights turning on under the bask of the orange sunset is so gorgeous. The screen space reflections on cars really tops the atmosphere complete with a pretty bow to tie it all together. The baked in lighting? Really good, actually! Especially on the updated main character models which actually look surprisingly decent now.

THE BAD AND THE FUNNY
That doesn't apply to the minor NPC, though! That Ticket Agent in the beginning? Holy yikers what a horrendous model! There's honestly just a lot of uglification everywhere, and some of it isn't even Grove Street Game's fault. This is just the result of blowing up a game meant to play at 480i (not p) on HD displays. Even with the touch ups made to the visuals, there is just sharp angles that stick out like a sore thumb due to the low polycount. I couldn't stop staring at the blurred, stretched and sharp lines at the police car door in the intro scene with Tenpenny. Speaking of, I don't know what the f*ck but their police car's rims dude??? The rims on the wheels was so pronounced and was about as thick as the tire itself. It looked like a cop themed lowrider, all that was missing was the white wall tire line. I was seriously beginning to think I was gas-lighting myself until I checked old PS2 footage and, no, the tires are fine there and just how I remembered them. So like... huh??

When I got on the BMX, I was displeased to find that pressing and holding W made you automatically go into full on pedaling. So I tried checking if there was an option to turn it off and there doesn't seem to be, but I did find an option for "Modern Drivebys." I do not know what this does. In fact, it wasn't even the first option that made no sense. When I first was setting up my game I saw an option in Audio that simply read, "Autotune," and it was an on/off switch. It was also on by default. Like?

When I got out of the settings, I proceeded to do circles in front of CJ's house only to randomly fall off my bike, go up in the air, and gently come back on the objective marker. Just, lol.

Remember when I complimented the lighting earlier? Yeah, well, I don't know if it's like this anywhere else but inside CJ's house is full bright with ZERO baked in lighting. The characters have no shadow, not even SSAO shadows on their bodies. This makes the iconic intro scene that spawned meme completely uuuuuuuuugly.

During the BMX chase I noticed the higher quality bike model really likes to partially clip into the ground a lot.

After that mission I went exploring for a gun to test out the "Modern Drivebys" setting (Spoiler Alert: I never ended up doing that) and I crashed into a pole, which CJ proceeded to go into the fall animation, to immediately frame skipping to him standing, just for him to do the fall animation again and then stand up normally. Again, lol.

THE UGLY
The camera on cars, specifically on mouse, is a joke and you Rockstar needs to fix this. Maybe I'm a little weird, and I probably am, but I really got used to the 100% free cam in GTA IV. I practically drive manually aiming my camera during turns in any GTA style action game. In this game however? I'm about to date myself, but does anyone remember consolitis? This game has consolitis and mobilitis. You cannot free camera while driving. If the mouse stops receiving input for 1.5 seconds the camera immediately tries to reset behind the car again. So, at least for me, I'm either playing tug of war with the camera or I have to wiggle the mouse around during turns to keep the camera were I'm looking at. And the even grosser part? The sensitivities between horizontal look and vertical look are different. And I don't mean ones slightly slower than the other. The horizontal camera is quick and snappy, but the vertical aim is needlessly really slow and heavy, like Sisyphus rolling the rock up a hill. And I play games at a crazy high DPI. Its much better on a controller, it was like that in the original too, but on controller I guess it kinda made sense? On mouse, hell no. And, if I'm honest, I don't think this was on the original PC version. The foundation of the Definitive Edition is the mobile versions of the games, after all.

I ended my little trial of the game before moving onto RDR1 by accidentally getting a 2-star wanted level. I drove my stolen car into CJ's garage, and bolted out of there only to see an old friend. CJ was able to basically shove a car like it was nothing just by running into it. I saved my game and went back outside to see if I could replicate it on Big Smoke's car and oh boy did I ever. This is 20 year old bad code still present in a definitive edition that has been out for 3 years. That is embarrassing. For those unfamiliar - in the original PC version release if you run the game at anything higher than 60 FPS some of the physics do not play nicely with that. For example, they let you push cars around like they're toys with just your body and make bike collisions very wonky, which is when I realized why I had those two weird bike incidents earlier. Of course, capping the game to 60 fixed it. Why bother even including higher frame rate options and uncapped as an option if you're not even gonna bother fixing the physics, Rockstar? Get it together.

NITPICKS I CAN'T EXACTLY CONFIRM ATM NOR DO I CARE TO
I don't know if it's just me, but Carl seems to have way too much energy and goes way too fast on the BMX. Maybe it's tied to the high frame rate issue, I dunno. It just didn't feel right.

I also feel like blood pools take longer to form than they did in the original when I was running over pedestrians?

Lastly, maybe it's just me having this on a 1440P monitor, but the pop-in is super noticeable even with the ground haze. I'm doubtful because I played the launch version of this PoS on a 1080P monitor and didn't notice.

OVERALL
Listen, there's a lot of good fixes from what I've seen, especially for the other games, but I'm not going to pat Rockstar on the ass for animation fixes and pretty lighting. I'm not really a negative person when it comes to games. I'm not going to overreact at stupid stuff and deem the game unplayable trash or anything, and I will 100% commend them for continuing to work on the game. I hope there are more updates to come. However, there is something that REALLY bothers me about this product. This game was first sold to PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo customers worldwide first 3 years ago. This big patch a lot of people have been waiting for, for some reason, gets released on the 2023 Mobile port... which, if I'm remembering correctly, came exclusively to the NETFLIX VERSION OF THE MOBILE VERSION FIRST IN MARCH 2024? I find the fact customers who bought your product 3 years ago had to wait an additional 8 months for this update f**king ridiculous if I'm honest with y'all. I really hope Rockstar/T2 doesn't do something like that again because locking updates, especially to your BROKEN GAME, exclusively through limited collabs or partnerships for a game streaming service truly is one of the scummiest things I think I've ever seen a game publisher do.