I just noticed that Trevor gets meter for shooting animals...even dogs! That is vile, wrong, and somehow worse than the hundreds of virtual humans massacred in a typical session. Luckily, it's a video game.
I don't get the excess of review space devoted to complaints about playing murderous sociopaths - I think Rockstar fired a shot back across Volition's bow here. The Saints Row series lets you play a good bad guy, GTAV forces you to play at least one genuinely bad one (I haven't gotten to Franklin or Michael's inevitable moral event horizon moments yet, although the 'waterboarding' sequence has been thoroughly spoiled for me). Of course, it's still pretty Snidely about it most of the time - what with shooting down satellite dishes, literal dog-kicking and wacky phone bombs - but sometimes you're made to be objectively evil instead of anti-heroic. The unpleasant reflection on similar actions with slightly different context in other titles makes the game (if nothing else) more interesting, and definitely doesn't make it objectively worse. It's no more repugnant than playing an Evil-aligned character for keeps in D&D (and I have to admit, this console generation was the one where graphics officially surpassed my imagination).
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