Developer - Rockstar North
Publisher - Rockstar Games
Available on - PS3, 360, PC

“We’re broadcasting live from the streets of Liberty City”

Returning to the streets of Liberty City gives a certain vibe. The dank, musty air; the abuse of random pedestrians. Yes, these are my streets. While all the corruption remains with the wavering permittance for violent crime sprees, and the multi-cultural supremacy of crime and thug syndicates, something is new. The city has matured, expanded – not only thanks to an entirely new game engine for the Grand Theft Auto series, but a sophisticated new direction for story, narrative, characters and setting.

Grand Theft Auto IV wastes no time in introducing our latest protagonist fresh off the import boat, Niko Bellic – a Serbian war veteran coming to America to live with his cousin Roman and find “that special someone”. After establishing our first group of anti-heroes, a vendetta and a quick drive, it wasn’t long till I was left to my own devices and begun to explore the new city.

Having memorised theses streets from my GTA 3 days, it was a whole new experience re-visiting the new Liberty City, presented bigger and better than ever thanks to Rockstar’s own RAGE engine. So much to the formula has been overhauled and revised to create a far more technical experience, ultimately refining a much more controllable and substantial GTA package. After all, that’s what Grand Theft Auto games have always been, packages in their own right. The level of content spanning across multiple gameplay styles have always proved the GTA series as dominators in the gaming market around the world.

These technical advances and updated engine elements are of course the first thing you’ll notice when stepping on to the new streets of Liberty City. Character statistics such as strength, weight and sex appeal that were introduced in San Andreas are gone, and thankfully so. Driving now requires some skillful handling, with much more realistic vehicle controls ultimately creating a more difficult experience at first, but this occurs with most gameplay elements in GTA IV. Gun play draws a similar effect, the controls this time allowing so much more control over aim and character movement.

Locking on to a character allows the right analogue stick to be used for positioning your cross hair exactly as desired within the target. So now you can shoot specific legs, head, arms or torso. For some reason the weapon fire button changes to melee when in close range, which is disappointing when you have a shotgun at point blank rage ready to fire, resulting in Niko flailing the butt around and missing. Keeping in mind though, with increased control this means that you’ll always need to concentrate on pulling off more lethal shots but once you get used to the advanced controlling features, it allows far more efficient gunplay when mastered.

A lot of early game is like this for GTA IV. If you’re used to the old games you’ll find some drastic changes to the engine here may throw you off a little at first as yes, cars are now far touchier to control and require some professional maneuvering. Then there’s drastic additions like the ability to be launched out of your front windscreen on a hard enough head-on collision that will really throw you off. Again, get some practice down and ultimately you’ll find an extremely sophisticated driving experience online or off, be it city street traffic dodging or high speed street racing. Realistic driving at first proves cumbersome, but ultimately allows so much more driving finesse once you get it down. Especially now that you can fire a single handed weapon from any direction of the car, even out the back windscreen while looking behind you. Of course there’s no lock on whilst drive-by shooting, it’s a true skill to be perfected – especially online.

Grand Theft Auto IV absolutely nails the technical side of things when it comes to gameplay. Driving through thriving urban landscapes is brilliant, gunfights are fast and furious with so much more control than before allowing multi-target killing sprees to no end. This only applies when one ignores the included cover system, as while cover fire is an ambitious and worthy plight, the mechanics are just terrible with no control over what to specifically crouch or lean behind usually resulting in a dyslexic death. Seemingly inspired by Gears Of War, the cover system in Grand Theft Auto IV is useful when effective but incredibly rarely so, often only proving useful when enemies (just like every other game) crouch, exposing that one leg you can fire at over and over until they die.

So while cover sucks, it’s easy enough to just not use it and still pop off enemies at alarming increased rates over past GTA games. Be assured one-hit head shots are still possible and are of course the most desired target in gun fights, despite a lack of any significant model reaction from these shots death reactions are quite realistic now with the incorporated Euphoria physics engine. Live rendered physics do wonders for GTA, allowing not only model interactions to look and act realistically but opening new windows for the simpler game touches. For example, simply rolling over a pedestrian with enough pressure from a vehicle will prove fatal, over the old days of receiving a “pedestrian falling over” animation of which they’d get up and walk away from.

The new engine doesn’t just expand on gameplay mechanics, Liberty City is now bigger and more packed with content than ever before. Liberty City has a huge graphical overhaul since it’s last realisation, and while everything certainly has those next-gen looks about them there’s a certain brown to everything. Especially noticeable when moving from indoors to outside, it’s like a sudden smog fog to the face. Liberty City is clearly a gritty town, right down to your lungs.

The city has a lot of attention to detail from humorous store names to the billboards. There’s even times such as on a convoy mission, I noticed the passenger up front consuming something, to then toss the wrapper carelessly onto the road. It’s not much, but enough of these little events add so much to the experience of re-creating a living, breathing city. Then again there’s also those times you’ll commit heinous crimes and wonder why you’re not getting your Serbian ass beat by the police or all the people around you who are watching an old lady being brutally stabbed. You can even car-jack taxi’s passenger status, kicking out a passenger to then tell the taxi driver where to take you.

There’s a plethora of alternate stores and locations to get lost in around Liberty City. As you progress through the story the more people you’ll meet, making friends and enemies – going on dates to bars and strip clubs, or even take a lady bowling so you can pretend to be interested in whatever she has to say in the obvious hopes of just getting some action.

GTA IV has a very stylised approach to it’s narrative and pacing. While the game is still full of drugs and violence, many ulterior motives and themes are continually approached especially around cleaning up the streets, with characters like Manny set out to help the ‘hood and get drugs off the streets. There’s a lot of strong views and examples of the decay of urban society, the quality of life, the hunt for the American dream and the power of money. The story also explores the gratification of revenge and the justice in vengeance while exemplifying the negative effects of drug use. There’s a lot in there, and a lot of characters to portray it all. Ultimately the story leaves a lot to reflect on especially as the players decisions come into effect quite often.

As the story develops, many sinister characters and motives arise in Niko’s quest to find his special someone padding the story out nicely through some exciting and some repetitive missions. The continually exuberant and manneristic denizens of Liberty City are always entertaining throughout, whether it be in an objective oriented mission or a simple game of pool with your Rastafarian friend. The entire adventure is literally packed with dialogue, even failing a mission always results in an alternate session of dialogue on your next attempt assuring GTA IV a constantly rewarding experience.

The amount of alternative content to that of the main story even confuses at times as all sorts of phone calls and work requests will pop up. Early on Niko is provided a cell phone that can be used at any point in the game to call up a friend, date, or even organise cash reward missions just for that extra money or something to do.

The main missions are a mixture mostly of stuff we’ve seen before. The frequent escort missions and “drive here, drive there” requests are still abundant and ultimately can get a bit repetitive and frustrating, but with so much always going on in the thriving metropolis it is of little concern. Repetitive missions are often broken up by events of grandeur, such as my favourite bank heist mission which is most certainly big and eventful. There’s a big difficulty curve too, with no way to know what will involve driving someone to one location, or what will involve a 20 cop car pile-up. You can be assured though that if one mission were to become a chore, there is at most times at least one other thing to do, perhaps leading off onto a whole new branch of storyline.

While a lot of these missions are quite repetitive when compared to past GTA games, like most other mechanics these have also been improved. Most notably the inclusion of multiple story paths dependent on player decision. Some very significant decisions are forced for the player to make, opening even more paths of re-playability and enforcing a continually evolving plot.

Even if you find yourself stuck repeating missions, the changing dialogue will always entertain and of course radio stations are again plentiful and numerous. Eighteen stations to be exact, of course seeing the return of the lovable Lazlow and his own talk show station, again the real life Lazlow worked on most of the radio station content outside of his own show in both writing and recording. Aside from the talk shows, there’s a variety of genre-based stations to siphon through hundreds of songs.

Often news reports will emerge of activities recently undergone by Niko. The news and updates are often quite amusing, making a mockery of modern popular news culture with references to the gaming industry and the violence in gaming issue. One big gripe I have with these news reports is that they are great, but like a lot of unique dialogue in GTA IV it is too easily interrupted or missed to never be heard again. Talking on the phone can be interrupted by so much as a bump of a car, and if you’re on a mission and a news report comes on, your associate won’t shut the fuck up for a second and you can’t hear a word of it.

Police interactions are now easily assessed, when in trouble with the police Niko will develop a star rating as usual, rising up to 5 stars as his crime spree expands but police habits have changed. Now the radar will specify the FOV (Field Of View) for each patrol unit allowing you to easily slip out of their view, or speed off into the distance. Once out each FOV for a period of time, the star rating will simply vanish leaving Niko to start up another crime spree. This effectively removes a large portion of the challenge of police chases as they are now all too easy to escape. What this adds though, are multiple and continual isolated police chases and being able to slip in and out of 4 star chases creates some enthralling action sequences.

When not trafficking another shipment of drugs, or destroying someone else’s, there’s absolute eons of content throughout GTA IV to enjoy before, during and after completing the main game. Go online at the Tw@ internet cafe to check your (fake) e-mail, read some spam, check out Your Mexican Doctor or browse the car markets; or you could just take someone to the multiple locations throughout the city such as strip clubs, pool halls, bowling alleys and more.

The best-spent time of all is by far multiplayer. Rockstar have included a huge 15 different online game modes, from the standard death match to objective based missions both co-operative and competitive. There’s all sorts of online rankings and leaderboards, supported by the now-thriving Rockstar Social Club matching up players and tracking statistics all over the world. Allowing up to 16 players and the entire city to roam free, it sure is a hoot carjacking and pillaging the city with your friends around the world through so many game modes.

Grand Theft Auto IV is nothing short of a milestone achievement for Rockstar and gaming in general. It’s the definitive GTA package with more content than you’ll know what to do with. An expansive and involving storyline, Liberty City alone is a bustling community online and off that Rockstar can be proud of. The driving mechanics are adaptive, as well as the evolved shooting style making GTA accessible for all who are able to handle it’s mature content. Absorbing single player content alternating from story progress and a huge online multiplayer community makes GTA IV a mandatory purchase for any PS3 or 360 owner and a solid contender for not only game of the year but the best game ever.

Grand Theft Auto IV

98%

The Good -

* Liberty City re-created faithfully and full of life.
* Involving story with lots of characters and personality.
* Excellent multiplayer and side-content to entertain for hours.

The Bad –

* Atrocious cover system.
* Unique dialogue too easy to interrupt.
* Not exactly family friendly.