The Story
The Grand Theeft Auto games have always been known for their awesome story telling, and GTA 4 will be no exception. In this episode, you play as Niko Bellic, a Russian ex-soldier who came to Liberty City (redesigned New York city) to start a new life, trying to escape his past and meet his cousin, Roman Bellic, who's having the good life. At least, that's what he told him. As soon as you step into Liberty City, you know this won't be relaxing. Soon enough, you find yourself gunning down ennemy thugs, racing through the streets chased by cops, stealing lots of things, well, you know, the usual GTA package.
The story evolves around Niko Bellic trying to find a man who betrayed him and his squad in pakistan (or somewhere like that) killing almost all of his squadmates. But to do so, you will have to do a lot of favors to a lot of people you wish you didn't know. The story telling is engaging and is easily one of the best in the serie. Your'e always impatient to finish your mission so you can find out what will happen in the next cutscene. There are many charming characters that you will really care about a lot in the game and the cutscenes are awesomely tied up by some really good voice acting.
The Graphics
Knowing that the last GTA was suffering from an outdated graphical engine, people were fearing for the soon to come GTA 4. Well, they could not have been more wrong. Grand Theft Auto 4 graphics are outstanding and everything inside the city was made with extreme details. The buildings, garbage cans, weapons, cars, pedestrians, trees, stores all look authentical. When you play the game, you really feel like your're in New York city. Rockstar Games really pushed the graphical engine to its limits with this game, making it just more awesome to free roam around the map in a nice muscle car, just admiring the city or go hitting people with a big ass truck and watch the incredible animations when the pedestrians go hitting your car's bumper. Another great thing about the engine is the car damaging system. It reflects as closely as possible the damages your car will get to a precise spot. Example if you hit a street light pole very slowly with your front bumper, it will bend slightly. If you hit it hard, the front portion of your vehicle will get a lot mor compact, like so.
The Cars
Since this is a GTA game, you will spend most of your time driving or shooting people. Luckily, the driving system is a lot better than previous games and by that I mean a lot more realistic. No more cruising at 120 mph and taking a curve a 90 degrees. If you try to do so, you will find yourself sliding for quite a long distance. Some people find it annoying, making a game a little bit harder, but by doing so, the producers of the game pushed it towards a much more realistic one. The cars feel like cars, not boxes of soap and they tend to react almost like real cars would. The amount of cars in the game is quite astonishing as well, counting more than 110 vehicles without the boats, helicopters and motorcycles. Most of them are based on real life cars, like the escalade, porshe, lamborghini, ranger, subaru wrx, which helps make the game even more fun and realistic.
For myself, I'm a die hard muscle car fan and they put a replica of the old charger and challenger in the game, vehicles that I was driving most of the time. To put it simply, they could easily have made a racing game with the car's physics and animations. The most fun you'll have while playing this game will be when driving around, drifting, running over peds or escaping cops.
The Shooting
Like I said above, driving and shooting are the main arguments in GTA games. While it still is fun to climb on top of a building and start shooting pedestrians with an ak-47, the only thing they added to the game was a cover system (a good one, but still). The auto-lock feature is still there, although I strongly recommend you to deactivate because it makes the game way too easy. The animations of the guns are well done and even better are the ones when you shoot someone. If you shoot someone in the hand, he'll drop his gun. Shoot him in the leg, he'll fall to the ground then hardly go back on his feet. Shoot him in the shoulder, he'll put his other hand on it to stop the bleeding, then start shooting back at you. My only real complain about this game is that there is a serious lack of weapons. Only fifteen weapons : 2 pistols, 2 smgs, 2 assault rifles, 2 shotguns, 2 sniper rifles, 1 rpg, 1 grenade, 1 molotov cocktail and a knife with a baseball bat. Each category that holds 2 weapons, there is one that sucks. For a game based around shooting people, that's a little lame. Not even a chainsaw or a heavy machine gun nor a light machine gun? Come on!
The Missions
One thing Rockstar Games didn't do too well with are the missions. Let me explain. The missions are, for the most part, really good and fun to do but really are lacking in variety. Almost all of them requires you to get in a car, drive somewhere, kill a lot of bad guys and then kill the more important bad guy. This gets old really quick and except for a few like robbing a bank or faking an interview, they do not offer a lot of variety. This problem has kept me from completing the game multiple times, but I finally got myself to do it. However, there are a few sidemissions in the game but most of them are like the main missions: kill everyone. Now the activities are a bit different though. Many main characters you become friends with will have some jobs avaible for you, like driving cabs for Roman's cabs depot, stealing vehicles for steroid Brucie or completing drug deals for your rasta friend, Jacob. These are pretty boring and you'll probably end up doing themonly for the trophies/achievements.
Other things you can do is go bowling with your friends, play darts, get drunk, do some races, buy clothes (not a wide selection) do helicopter tours, watch a comedy show, eat, play some pool, and go to a strip-club. All these activities offer a nice bit of variety, but no real meaning of doing them. Christ you can even watch t-v while your'e playing a video game, I mean what's the point? When you go drink, you don't see yourself drinking but get out drunk (which can get very funny and make the cops arrest you if you're driving), you don't see tits when going to a strip club, bowling and darts controls are awkwards and the shows are not funny. The only reason you'll end up doing these activities is because when hanging out with friends, you boost the percentage of how they like you. For example if you get one your friends to like you to 60%, you get the ability to call for back-up. Sadly, that's the only real useful ability since the others are like get a discount in stores or get a free cab ride.
Now that this has been said, what is there left to do in Liberty City? Sadly, not much. There is nothing you can buy except for a really limited selection of clothes. No houses/savepoints, no businesses, no crew to pimp out, crappy weapon stores, no way to upgrade your car,etc. You'll find yourself without anything to do and with a stunning amount of money pretty quick in GTA 4. The best activity I found so far was the police one, where you have to clear crooks off the street, leading to some intense firefights. No more ambulance or fire truck activities, no more dancing, no more gang wars, no licenses to be earned, no planes to fly, no tank to drive, well, you get the idea. Rockstar made some huge improvements to their games but also ditched some awesome stuff we came to love, likejet packs or bicycles. But they added some new interesting concepts as well, like the ability to actually use your cellphone this time. You can do so to call your friends to hang out, see how they're doing, unlock missions, use cheat codes, take screenshots and access the multiplayer menu.
Also, you can now escape from police instead of having them chase you forever. When cops are on your tail, a small circle lights up around you in the mini-map. If you get out of the circle without being seen by police or snitch pedestrians, you lose them. Seems easy, but the circle on the mini-map gets bigger with every star you get. At 6 stars, if you escape the police, you're a demigod. Cops seem to be a lot smarter in this game and it appears they actually learned to shoot with a gun in this one, so they will surely prove to be a tough challenge. My favorite time-killing activity in this game was to see how long I could survive a six stars wanted level before my car blows up.
The Map
There is not much to say about the actual map in this game. It is extremely well desgined and you truly feel like you're taking a trip to New York while playing it, but there is not enough variety in it. The map contains 3 areas, 2 that you unlock while progressing in the main story and I could not tell the difference between any of them. They all looked like this:
For the exception of wall street and central park, they all looked alike. No more cruising down the desert in a big ass S.U.V or riding down a campaign trail with a motocross, no more visiting casinos or walking into random shops. Going up a mountain with a bicycle? Gone! There aren't even any shops anymore except for the few fast food joints, the clothing stores and the mediocre gun stores. There is basically nothing to do in Liberty City, as big and beautiful as it is. Oh, I forgot, you can kill birds :) When cruising in the city with your car, you will see that pedestrians are just shooting targets or bonus points if you hit them. They talk on the phone, read the newspapers, drink coffee, talk together but never do anything concrete. They won't start fighting with cops, shoot each other, get chasen by cops, steal cars, jump in the traffic or any of that stuff. They all act very realisticly and I know this is the theme of the game, but this is not fun nor entertaining, this is just boring. Every once in a while you'll see someone trying to fix his engine or a police filling up infraction tickets, but that's about it. So to have some fun, go pull off amazing driving stunts or get in trouble with cops, cause they're pretty much the only free roaming activities.
The Multiplayer
Even if I didn't play the multiplayer for too long, it felt like it was really rushed. There are a lot of game modes, like race, team deathmatch, deathmatch, cops'n crooks,where cops must stop the crooks of accomplishing an objective, turf war, like king of the hill, mafia work, where both teams must kill someone from the other team while protecting their own leader, bomb da base, where one team must destroy the ennemy's base while defending it's own one, a few more and finally free roam. Since I only played team deathmatch, turf war, race, deathmatch and free roam, I can't give a full review about the multiplayer but only my thoughts of it. Teamdeathmatch, deathmatch and turf war all had the same problem,they're too chaotic. While some may agree that it's not a bad thing, it took me forever to understand how to pick a gun, what I had to do, where was the objective and when I finally did, I got blown up by an rpg. It seemed that experienced players kept raping me and the only kills I could get were the afk ones (shame). There is no real tactics in the multiplayer since the one law that matters is : I HAVE A BIG GUN YOU DIE!!. No matter if I started shooting the guy from behind with an smg, he still had time to turn around and blow me up with an rpg or an ak-47.
Another bad thing about the multiplayer is the game lobby. It sometimes took me more than 30 minutes to see my game launched. On a title as big as gta 4, there should be a better way to do it. A certain number of players must be ready to launch the game and the games are not joinable when launched. Pretty lame if you ask me.
The things that really shined from the multiplayer are race and free roam, which can both accept up to 16 players. 16 Players race is amazing with the car's physics implemented in the game. In every game mode, you can change settings to your likings, like police or not, car density, weapons found, time limit, etc. This can lead to some amazing gaming moments, like 16 players race with cops chasing everybody while trying to avoid traffic by dropping grenades to your opponents.... Good!
Free roam was a mode loads of gamers have been asking for which is... a free raoming mode. You can do anything you like but with 16 other players. I strongly reccomened you play it with a bunch of friends otherwise it gets boring really fast.
Overall Score
GTA 4 is in no way a bad game. In fact, it even is an excellent one with it's amazing graphics, details, car gameplay and story, but they took the fun out off the game by making it too realistic.You die too quickly and the atmosphere is a lot heavier than previous games. They took away too many elements that made the previous GTA game such a big hit. Other than the missions, there is just not enough things to do to keep you from playing another game. GTA 4 is a superb game, but not an amazing GTA game.
Final Score: 82%
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