Do any of the later GTAs match up to SAs greatness?

[QualityChimp]

I liked San Andreas, but some bits didn't work for me.

I disliked the hood theme.
The exercise and eating thing was ultimately pointless.
A lot of the minigames, like that quarry section, felt like hard work.
The territory defense thing was a chore, having to run back from whatever you were doing to shoot some people.
Police AI was skewed so if there was a shootout, they'd ignore all the violence, but as soon as you fired a single shot, you were a wanted man.

Finally, it felt like it wanted to be two games. One was this serious gangsta drama about one unlucky punk drawn into a life of crime and stuck between the G-Units and the Po Po, the other was this wacky adventure where you're jetpacking into Area 51 to find aliens.

I feel Sleeping Dogs worked better as you had some option of which type of lifestyle you wanted to pursue and Saint's Row was out-and-out bonkers from the start.

As for the GTA games, I never completed V as there were too many distractions, but I completed IV and still think V is the better game. Just a technical marvel, a bountiful sandbox and a fun game to boot.

Also consider Red Dead Redemption, if you've not played it, as that was an amazing experience.

[Digfox]

Yep, RDR was outstanding. Although I got far and put more hours into it than GTAV, I never did complete it. Shame there never was a remaster or PC version for it.

I am worried RDR2 will be ruined by microtransactions. I have this horrible feeling Rockstar enviously look at lootboxes and want to implement them along with ramming microtransactions into the single player game. Hope that's wrong because an uncompromised single player is better than nothing (ala GTAV).

But as you say RDR is also up there and worth playing. In some ways I preferred it to the main GTA games.