3. Missions
I touched upon this earlier, but it really needs its own section. San Andreas has the highest number of missions in any GTA game, and the outstanding variety of these missions really is quite an achievement. Now for those of you familiar with the GTA mission format, you will know that the basic template is; turn up to a job, drive somewhere, complete a task (mainly shooting a range of people) and drive back, collect reward, Bobs your uncle. San Andreas decided to mix this up; burning marijuana, flying planes, diving out of a plane into another plane with no parachute, performing a casino heist and even taking a trip to Liberty City are just a few of the tasks that made San Andreas missions so great, and with a half hour long final mission providing the icing on the cake, and left you with a real sense of reward for your hours of endeavour to complete the storyline.