Additionally, burnouts also left marks on the ground in the original, which doesn’t seem to be the case in the remaster. While the black smoke created by burnouts in the remaster is more pronounced than the white smoke in the original, it looks less realistic. Tire burnout effects are also disappointing to witness in the remaster. The remaster seems to have switched to scripted and static animations though, and parts of vehicles suddenly just teleport upon being damaged, and often not even in the right place. Damaging vehicles with punches and melee weapons in the original game was quite satisfying, because you would see individual parts of the vehicle falling off. This is yet another area where the San Andreas remaster is worse off than the original. Even here though, while in the original they would shatter and send shards of glass flying outward, in the remaster, when a windshield is destroyed, the glass simply disappears into thin air.
For starters, just like the original, the windows themselves don’t react to bullets at all, only the windshield does. Surprisingly, shooting at car windows is actually worse in the remaster than it was in the original. The same is true in the remaster as well.
Things are essentially unchanged- underwater grenade explosions in the original game were basically the same as any other grenade explosions with the same fire effects and no effect on the water whatsoever. Sadly, throwing a grenade into a water body yields much less satisfying results. The ripples are still a static animation, but the end result is still better. The effect in the remaster is much more pronounced, with the bubbled also being accompanied by ripple effects in the water. Shooting weapons into a water body in the original game saw slight bubbles being created in the water upon impact. This is one of the areas where the San Andreas remaster showcases improvements over the original. Take Claude, for example- the GTA 3 protagonist has a brief cameo appearance in the game, and in the remaster, his facial model is completely messed up, looking smushed and unnaturally plasticky in all the wrong ways. Some character models, for instance, look significantly worse in the new releases.
While the new art style used in the GTA remasters is, for the most part, pretty well-implemented, it isn’t a universal success. Things are marginally better in San Andreas than in, say, the GTA 3 remaster, but they’re still really, really bad. The rain effects here look like a filter rather than actual rain, with a constant sheet of droplets constantly obstructing vision. When it rains in those games, especially during night time, visibility is reduced almost entirely. This is one of the most widely known issues with the new GTA remasters. Players have been ripping into its deficiencies since it launched, and we ran some tests on it ourselves to see how it stacks up against the original game when it comes to some of the smaller details. San Andreas – The Definitive Edition is, like the other two games it’s packaged with, a disappointing remaster. In an ideal world, the remaster for a game as universally beloved as GTA: San Andreas should have been a true labour of love- but as it turns out, we don’t live in an ideal world.