Review
Sea of Thieves
An unmatched co-operative sailing sim wrapped in a PvP world that not everyone wanted.
No. 7 in The Noteworthy 50 · Open World
Grand Theft Auto Online
Thirteen years of accumulated heists, supercars and grinding, sitting in the shadow of a sequel that changes everything.
GTA Online is the most successful piece of live-service design of the last decade and one of the most cynical, and both things are true at the same time. Rockstar built a world of unmatched craft, filled it with genuinely brilliant co-operative content, and then bolted on an economy calibrated by actuaries.
The good is very good. The Doomsday and Cayo Perico heists are among the best co-op missions in the medium — multi-stage, properly rehearsed, with real preparation and a payoff that lands. The city has thirteen years of accumulated detail and still, remarkably, no serious competitor as a shared open world. Driving a car in Los Santos feels better than driving one almost anywhere else.
The grind is the product
Every new content drop arrives with a vehicle or a property priced high enough that acquiring it through play is a project measured in weeks. That is not a balance failure; it is the design. The distance between what the game pays and what the game charges is precisely the space where Shark Cards live. Players have solved it with efficiency routes and repeatable heist strategies, and Rockstar has repeatedly patched those routes.
Public lobbies
On PC, free-roam is close to unusable. Modded lobbies, money-drop scams, players teleporting you into the sea — the enforcement has never been adequate. The practical solution is an invite-only or friends-only session, which is what almost every veteran actually does, and which quietly removes most of the reason the world is populated at all.
The sequel question
Everything about this entry now sits under the shadow of GTA VI and its own online component. Rockstar has kept supporting the old game, but anyone starting fresh in 2026 is buying into a thirteen-year-old economy shortly before the successor arrives. If you have friends already playing and a Rockstar-shaped hole, it remains a great time. As a new investment of hundreds of hours, the timing is questionable.
What works
- Los Santos remains the best-realised open world in multiplayer games
- The heist missions are genuinely superb co-operative set pieces
- An enormous back catalogue of content, all included, no expansion passes
- Driving and shooting still feel distinctly, expensively Rockstar
What doesn't
- The economy is tuned around Shark Card sales and it is blatant
- Public lobbies on PC are a hostile mess of modders and griefers
- New-player onboarding into thirteen years of systems is bewildering
- Load times and menu design remain famously bad
The Catch — what it will cost you
Shark Cards are the point. Vehicle and property prices have inflated for a decade in a way that has no relationship to how much money missions pay, and the gap is the sales pitch. It is entirely playable without spending — the grind is just calibrated to be tedious enough that a $20 card looks reasonable at 11pm.
Who it's for: A crew of three or four who want heists, chaos and a city that still has no real rival.
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