Grand Theft Animals Review

Open world games have remained popular for decades. Creating a playground for players to engage in a wide variety of activities as they so choose is certainly an appealing concept. However, the games that have delivered such a premise have varied wildly in quality. Grand Theft Auto undoubtedly remains at the top of the pile, and with the quiet cancellation of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas VR, the opportunity to fill the gap has been laid bare. Unfortunately, according to 131XR’s review, Grand Theft Animals is not the game to do it.

What is Grand Theft Animals?

Grand Theft Animals, as you probably could’ve guessed, is a tongue-in-cheek take on the phenomenally popular Grand Theft Auto built for VR. Except, not really. In play, it actually has very little in common with Rockstar’s genre-defining series. Instead, it’s closer to Gorilla Tag.

You’ll be bounding around a small, largely empty city. You can fight with people and police, drive cars and… that’s about it. Grand Theft Animals is not a story lead open world experience set in a criminal underworld. It’s a social sandbox in VR, and little else.

Having launched on Meta Quest last month, hopes were high that Grand Theft Animals could live up to the expectation that a pretty interesting marketing campaign had built. However, as you’ll see in 131XR’s review below, that’s simply not the case.

The key element of an open world game is not, in fact, the world itself. It’s the activities in which you can engage in within that world. Sadly, according to 131XR, Grand Theft Animals simply doesn’t deliver on this front.

Instead, what we have here is a social sandbox. It’s a genre that is incredibly popular in VR, but even with that there are far better titles which offer greater engagement. The recently released Bull Hit, for instance. While not perfect, it’s certainly more feature filled than Grand Theft Animals currently is.

You can learn more about these issues in 131XR‘s Grand Theft Animals review below.

What Comes Next?

Since launch, the developers at Squido Studio have been keen to address the fact that there is more content coming. And frankly, there needs to be. The empty city that has been created is simply not enough to maintain interest. Even playing with friends will see you run out of fun activities within minutes, not hours.

That being said, Grand Theft Animals is already building a strong community. So perhaps we’re wrong? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!