Grand Theft Auto IV Review

To be honest, I was excited about GTA for the last month or two. Because of all the great games that came out the second half of last year I was unable to buy into the hype until later than most.

I've played the last few iterations of GTA. I dabbled a bit on a friends version of GTA 3, and completed Vice City and San Andreas (story at least) on the PS2. It was a difficult decision for me to decided which version to buy as I prefer the Playstation 3 over the Xbox 360 but with the majority of my friends having an Xbox and this latest iteration of GTA having multi-player I purchased it for the 360.

I remember when I first preordered the game that I was excited that the special edition came with a safety deposit box along with all the goodies. I have been a bit of a sucker as of late for special editions. Now having the game for almost a week, all I've used the lock box for is to hold the other extras that came with the special edition. Now $30 extra for a decent duffel bag, and a lock box is not a bad deal but it also isn't an especially great deal either. I would recommend the standard version of the game over the special edition unless you need a lockable carrying case for extra controllers/games or if you have something of value. It appears to be made of aluminum so its easily transported.
Now onto the actual review. Minor Spoilers, mainly about the opening.

GTA IV begins with the main character's, Niko Bellic, journey to Liberty City in search of the American dream. Niko's cousin Roman has been sending letters to Niko telling him about how Roman is living the American dream full of sleeping with multiple women, huge mansions, and fast cars. Very quickly the player learns that the American dream that Roman is living is anything but. Roman is struggling to get by and lives in a roach infested apartment.

Niko gets introduced to his first friends/business partners through his cousin. The first missions are very simple and give the player the ability to explore some of Liberty City, get used to driving (which I believe is much more realistic and therefore difficult than previous games in the series), and try out the new GPS feature.

The game progresses in a similar way to previous GTA games with exception of having sometimes to wait for a phone call on Niko's cell phone. To progress the story missions must be completed and certain missions are only unlocked after others are completed. There are four instances that I can remember where the player can either chose to kill or spare a person or gets to choose which one from a pair to kill. The final main mission is like this where you can either make a deal with or kill someone from the game who betrayed Niko.

The games size and detail is great but I didn't fully realize this until a mission where I used a helicopter and could see all the buildings above street level. When driving your focus is on the car and avoiding traffic but while flying your obstacles become the massive buildings that you must avoid or fly over. This large cityscape is beautiful and like San Andreas it is hard to get a full view of the size without getting a look down on it from above.

I finished main mission based part of the game in about 30 hours. This would have been longer but if I had failed a mission 3 times I would load the last save and try it again. Normally I wouldn't do this but there is an achievement in the game for beating the main part of the game in less than 30 hours and while I enjoyed the game I thought it would have been a while before I gave all my progress up to complete the game again to get that achievement.

Pros:

• Virtually no loading. Like previous titles, GTA IV used some long bridges to mask loadings of new areas. However in GTA IV if you went from outside a house to inside (ie. raiding a house of drug dealers, etc.) there were no load times and the door could even be shot open from the outside (useful for when trying to see in a room).
• Fully realized character. Niko not only has a past, he talks about it, explains how it made him the person he is, and has his past revisit him. Niko also has a future life consisting of more than killing and racing cars. He has friends that he can do anything from play pool and shoot darts, to going to a strip club and going to a comedy club.
• Fully realized wold. While not as massive as San Andreas, Liberty city is fairly large. The city consists of 3 main islands with a few smaller ones. Each island has it's own districts. Every street has a name. Every business has an address. The gun stores are more realistic hole in the wall type of places on an alley. Cars that are parked on the side of the road are locked and some even have alarms. Plentiful cabs (at least in some locations) where you can hail one and ride in it. These cabs can be used as a quick travel device or you can watch your surroundings go by.
• Fully realized NPC's. Your girl friends in the game are more like real women (they don't enjoy driving fast or going to strip clubs, etc.). You can get on the Internet dating sites to meet women. Your friends/girl friends don't like it when you go too long without doing something with them. Pedestrians get upset about honking horns and even putting one wheel on the side walk. Some drivers resist getting torn from their vehicle when Niko tries to steal it.
• Long, enjoyable game play. In about 6 days time, I played roughly 35 hours. I only put the game down once because I wasn't enjoying it. (Part of that was because I was tired so I was cranky and trying to raid a house but the police had other ideas and killed me before I could finish.) The game also adds multiplayer (I admit I haven't played yet, partially because I don't have Internet at home at the moment), which adds the possibility of 100's more hours of game play.
• Semi-Realistic police response. Now when you have two stars, you don't have to go to a pay-'n-spray to lose your wanted level. You can out run the cops. The more stars you have the larger "search radius" is. Also the more police units give chase. New units also appear that are headed toward where you were seen last, so to escape you must pay attention to where more units are coming from.
• Graphics. While not on par with games like Call of Duty IV or Halo 3, the graphics are amazing. When driving through the Liberty City version of Time Square, I was able to recognize it (I have never been to time square in person, only seen it on TV.) without any one saying where I was.

Cons (most of which are nitpicking):

• Driving. While realistic driving a car or flying a helicopter, it prevents players who haven't played a game with this much driving that's not a racing simulator to fully enjoy the game. While taking a cab is an option, too many missions require driving for it to be this difficult. (ie. A mission requires driving a dump truck sized vehicle. The vehicle requires 3-4 lanes of traffic to turn at slow speeds. Its actually easier to turn using the emergency brake and sliding around corners). While in a sports car and trying to power slide around a corner, if the car does a 180 and the car is now going backwards the gas (right trigger) acts like a brake until stopped. I know this is the more efficient way to stop but I would prefer the tires to start spinning which should happen if I punched the gas.
• Auto saves. The auto-save after each mission is nice, however long missions that have 8 or so parts or are long developing should have mini-saves during them. There's nothing like playing 15 minutes of a mission to have a guy that has to live catch a stray bullet in the head and then having to replay that 15 minute part again.
• Party AI. While friends in the game that shoot at the police, or other enemies to help you out, they show no priority on who to attack and the player does the majority if not all of the killing. There is a mission where you have two friends with assault rifles and have to run around killing a bunch of cops. I don't think they killed a single one. I agree that there should be a challenge for the player but these other life time criminals should be able to fire a weapon fairly accurately. They also shouldn't run in front of me while I'm firing. This happens in most games where the NPC's are scripted to run certain routes (CoD 4 for example) but at least have them know that, "hey, this guy is firing, let me wait till he reloads or at least stops shooting. and then get out of his way as quickly as possible.
• Randomly spawning police. If I'm in a car and drive into a river 3 police boats shouldn't automatically spawn around me. If I get near water I can believe one boat coming and driving along the shoreline just in case and then more coming when I'm in the water, but randomly spawning there when they weren't there a second ago is not right. Land cops will also spawn out of no where but typically you're in a car so its not as big of a deal unless you're almost outside of the "search radius" with a high amount of stars.
• Texture popping. I've read this happens a lot less on the Playstation 3 version (due to a mandatory install) of the game, it is quite noticeable in the xbox 360 version. When driving quickly from one island to another or around a corner at high speed. The building lighting texture or the road texture "pop" in. While this isn't game breaking it is very noticeable as these are large objects. Also, while not texture popping, the road lines not being correct was noticeable. On single direction roads there was still a yellow or a double yellow line down the center of the road. This isn't on every road but can be bothersome when trying to determine if a road is one way or not.
• Police should not random spawn inside of my mini-map radius. If I'm running from the police and have just about escaped a police car should now spawn at the next intersection.

Overall this is a great game with a few minor annoyances. I have not played multiplayer yet but I will update the post when I do. The game's major flaw is it didn't much new the video game table. While not all games are required to do this a game of this caliber should have. I give it a solid 8.5/10 right now but if multiplayer adds much, which it can, the rating may go up.

Update:I've played some of the multiplayer now. The multiplayer, in my opinion, is fairly average. While there are some new modes that have great potential, the matchmaking/party system are not the best.