Fans of Rockstar’s original “GTA Trilogy” (III, Vice City, San Andreas) are still reeling from the disappointment of The Definitive Edition. While recently it’s seen some long awaited labors of love, for some it’s just the bare minimum of what should have been there to begin with. For others, it simply just isn’t enough. That’s where Revolution Team comes in, a small group of 4 individuals based in Russia. They took it upon themselves to bring their vision of how Vice City would feel when reaching the next generation of consoles. Unfortunately, it isn’t as smooth of a launch as you’d expect, since Take Two Interactive decided to shut down Revolution Team’s entire YouTube channel when the trailer launched. This didn’t stop Revolution Team from releasing the mod two days after the takedown. Now that the mod has been fully released, let’s look closely at GTA Vice City: Next-Gen.

Vice City: Next-Gen is a free standalone mod that converts the entirety of Vice City into GTA IV’s RAGE engine, and this is for PC only. Essentially, you have Vice City’s aesthetics, story, and missions, but with GTA IV’s mechanics. Revolution Team has ported every main story mission (scripted from scratch), every cutscene, city service missions (such as Ambulance, Vigilante), stunt jumps, hidden packages, and more. Per the aforementioned Take-Two shutdown, Revolution Team has designed Vice City Next-Gen to run on its own without a prior installation of GTA IV required. The long and short of it is, anyone can download the mod if they so please with no price of admission. More on this later.

I am in the camp that thoroughly enjoys how GTA IV plays. It’s much more grounded as everything has a lot of weight behind it. Now Tommy could trip on a dead body if it’s in the way.  I’ve also grown to love GTA IV’s more realistic approach to driving. When I was a kid, it was fun to shoot supercars down the street and watch them explode. As an adult, I have insurance to worry about. That’s one of the things that amazed me playing VC Next-Gen as when I look at Vice City’s original vehicle selection, I know how every single one of them sounds and handles. It is not a 1:1 recreation of those vehicles as they’re all much slower now and take longer to turn. However, I argue this is a good thing as it makes navigating Vice City feel fresh for the first time since 2002. The Definitive Edition are essentially the original games (original codes and all) with a fresh coat of paint. This means that the Definitive Edition of Vice City feels exactly the same as its PS2 counterpart, whereas Next-Gen changes how Vice City feels despite GTA IV’s mechanics being familiar.

I have not been able to tackle every mission in the game, but those I have played are faithful recreations. Now, with the missions having to be made from scratch this does lead into some issues. For example, in Jury Fury, it feels as if the cars require way too much damage to trigger the cutscene. In Demolition Man, the helicopter is a lot more difficult to manage as GTA IV’s flight mechanics were never designed for tight spaces. However, I’m willing to look past any issues because recreating every mission from nothing is an impressive feat. Even the little things they added or could have changed but didn’t. There are misaligned subtitles during the mission Back Alley Brawl when Vance talks about the gun store and they didn’t change it. They’ve left all the hidden packages and secret weapons such as the shotgun at the top of the garage near Ken’s office. It’s the little things like this that just show how much love and care was put into making this as authentic of a Vice City experience as possible.

Downloading the mod isn’t difficult per se, the process itself is very straightforward. As previously mentioned, you do not need to own a copy of GTA IV in order to play the mod. However, the best way to provide the mod was for Revolution Team to host it themselves through a torrent. In other words, this requires players to download a torrent client to get the files directly from Revolution Team. Since this is direct file sharing this is done with the user’s direct IP address being exposed so if this is something you are curious about getting for yourself, for your safety use a VPN to disguise your IP address just in case. I’ve scanned the files myself and the files themselves appear to be safe. You never know who’s out there, and the last thing you want to do is call your bank because of a GTA mod. I’ve been playing the mod for a few days now, and I can report nothing malicious happening as a result of the download.

UPDATE: There are repacks going around to mitigate the need for torrenting, while I cannot share any here, I can assure you it is very easy to find.

When the files are acquired, it is as simple as running the setup, choosing an install location, and letting it install. On my desktop, I managed to play the game with no troubleshooting whatsoever. However, if you have never installed GTA IV on your system before there are dependencies it requires just to even open. My laptop struggled to get the game working so if you installed the mod and it doesn’t work, I’ve got some suggestions for you here that worked for me.

If you open the game and receive the error “Securom Error Code 2000”, the initial setup folder you downloaded features these two files in a folder called “Redist”. These are Windows dependencies, just run them both once. The game will not open without this.

If you try to play the game through the launcher and it gives you some error message about how the application won’t work with the error code “Oxc0000142”, launch “vcNElaunch” as an administrator. 

Lastly, if you get into the game menu but the loading screen is infinite, add these lines to the “commandline.txt” file in the game’s installed location (aka not the folder with the setup in it).

-norestrictions

-nomemrestrict

-novblank

-noprecache

-nomemrestrict

-frameLimit 60

Even so, the mod just isn’t perfect. There are random crashes that occur, I’d want to say frequently but that’s a stretch. Sometimes it crashes after 30 minutes of gameplay, sometimes it crashes right after a cutscene, it’s a toss up as all mods are. I’ve even had the entire world cease to exist at one point.

Needless to say, Vice City Next-Gen is one of the most astounding projects I’ve ever seen. It’s brought a sense of wonder and excitement to Vice City that I haven’t felt since I was a kid and wasn’t supposed to play it. Take-Two Interactive eradicated Revolution Team’s channel which was home to hundreds of hours of development footage, and it was all erased without a second thought. All these guys wanted to do was provide a fresh take on a beloved classic. There’s nothing worse than giving something your all and losing it because someone else didn’t want you to have it. That’s why Revolution Team decided to just give anyone access with the motto of: “Do as you see fit.” Revolution Team may end up being legally forced to pull the plug on hosting the files, but since they’re out in the wild the damage is already done.

So, what do you think? Think you’ll take it back to the ‘80s?