Buy, Borrow, or Bury: Grand Theft Auto 4

This review has been a long time coming and I expect it to be a long one.  As a result I'm going to delve straight in instead of giving a whole lot of history like I would with other game reviews.  So, here goes.  In Grand Theft Auto 4 you play Niko Bellic, an immigrant from the Balkans who has been lured to Liberty City (Rockstar Games' take on New York City) by delusions of grandeur from your cousin Roman Bellic.  After being picked up literally fresh off the boat, you quickly realize that all is not as was promised - Roman lives in a rundown apartment, works for an angry boss at a taxi company, and doesn't spend all of his time chilling with beautiful women.  So, you've come to America to start a new life and hunt down some ghosts from your past but you quickly realize you'll have a difficult time adjusting, what with your cousin's run-in with a nasty gambling addiction and all sorts of undesirable people that are typically associated with that type of lifestyle.  And...action!

Grand Theft Auto 4 is the first game in the Grand Theft Auto series since the original top-down version that I've played on a console.  With that said, one of the first things I noticed about GTA4 were the controls.  GTA4 (like all of the GTA games) is based heavily on driving around town, and in fact the first thing you do in Liberty City, after getting off of the ship that brought you there, is drive your drunk cousin home.  The controls for driving are actually pretty good.  Each car has its own feel, and as long as you pretty much disregard the handbrake completely you shouldn't have any problems.  Of course don't plan on jumping right in and being able to navigate the streets without accidentally making your way onto a sidewalk or flipping your car from time to time.  It happens to the best of us.

After the controls the next thing I noticed were the graphics.  There was a lot of buzz about how amazing GTA4 looked and I have to be honest, in the trailers and screenshots there's no doubt the game was beautiful.  Once I got it home though, even though it's a huge step up from previous games, I was kind of unimpressed.  It might be because my TV is kind of lacking but mostly what I noticed was a ton of aliasing (jaggies) on basically everything in the game.  Not only that but the game has a fairly short draw distance.  I don't know, maybe I'm just crazy, but the game to me isn't at "Oh my God!" status as far as visuals go.  Then again, the GTA games have never been about amazing graphics.  Still, I did adjust to the graphics and get used to the aliasing after a while much like the controls, and pretty soon I found myself appreciating the game visually.  Flying over Liberty City in a chopper is actually pretty breathtaking.

Next up is combat - and boy is there a lot of it.  If you've never played a GTA game, basically you get in a lot of gunfights with various scoundrels throughout the game.  Let me pause on that though, and start from the beginning.  When you get off of the boat in the beginning of the game you don't have a single weapon aside from your fists.  There really hasn't been much to hand-to-hand combat in the GTA series up until now, but I have to give Rockstar some props for working in a passable fighting system for GTA4.  Not only can you throw combos, but you can block and counter your foe's attacks as well.  After you've gone a few rounds in fisticuffs you'll acquire a melee weapon (knife) from one of your many victims.  You'll eventually get a handgun, then sub-machine gun, and so on and so forth.  The aiming system for the gunplay in GTA4 is awesome at times and extremely annoying at others.  First off let me say that you can finally take cover behind objects in the environment in this game, which rocks.  Being able to effectively hide yourself and choose when to attack and when to hold back makes the gunfights much easier and much more enjoyable.  Still, when it comes time to actually fire the gun you'll find yourself struggling with the auto-aim feature.  In theory you should be able to look at whichever enemy you want to take down and pull out your gun - once you've gotten that far the target locks onto that enemy and you can start shooting at them.  It works most of the time but I also found myself accidentally targeting the wrong enemy or even a civilian off in the distance at times.  Obviously that's pretty annoying.

There's a whole lot to do in Liberty City which is cool.  I'm going to give a rundown of some of the "side-missions" in the game (I put that in quotes because a lot of the additional gameplay features aren't missions at all) that stick out in my mind.  First off, and this is kind of wandering into the story a bit, Niko has a lot of friends.  Niko also has a cellphone which is used to start missions, keep track of appointments in the organizer, and, of course, call people.  Therefore it makes sense that you can call one of the many folks you meet throughout the game to hang out.  You can partake in a ton of different activities with your friends, including games and sports, going to see a show at at comedy or cabaret club, or just going to grab something to eat at a restaurant.  Based on how often you take a friend out and how the activity goes your friends will gain respect and fondness for you, and many of them will eventually give you a bonus of some kind.  For example, one of the first characters you meet in the story will eventually sell discount guns to you out of his car if he gets to like you enough.  There are also a bunch of women you can hook up with if you so choose, and yes, you can get some hot warm coffee with them after a date.  I have to say this part of the game also ranges from fun to annoying.  There are certain characters in the game (anyone from the McReary family, Little Jacob) who I love to chill with.  There are other people who annoy the crap out of me.  Unfortunately you kind of get guilt-tripped into hanging out with these people because if you turn them down too many times they'll start to dislike you.  It's a very interesting gameplay mechanic.

There are some true side missions too, such as competing in races or boosting cars for one of your friends.  As seems to be the trend, these missions are either really fun or really not.  For example, the first time you get missions to steal cars your radar is marked with the location of the car that you have to steal.  Easy enough, right?  Just go to that spot on the map (the radar gives you "turn-by-turn" directions), steal the car, and you're done.  Later though you're only given a rough estimation of where the car might be as well as a picture message on your phone of what the car looks like.  This is much more difficult because the cars can sort of blend in with the environment so chances are you'll spend a lot of time looking for them (there are 30 you have to steal in all the second time around).    On the other hand there are some really cool missions where you can do vigilante police work by stealing a cop car and using its computer to hunt down criminals.  Those are actually pretty fun.  Remember, the side missions are completely optional but they're a good way to make money in the game.  One of the things that annoys me a lot in some games (the best example I can give is Mass Effect) are side missions that are all exactly the same and are obviously only added to the game to give it more play time.  GTA4 isn't like that.  The side missions switch it up often enough to keep things interesting despite there being a ton of gameplay there.

There's so much gameplay there that I literally spent 3 or 4 days completing just the car boosting missions.  This is where I talk about the story.  The reason that's relevant is because, during the middle of the game, it felt like there was almost a week where I went around doing side missions but didn't mess with a single story-based mission.  As a result I found the story sort of disconnected.  Sure, you can blame that on how I played the game, but I think that the game's story starts out strong and towards the end picks back up but there's a lot of stuff in between that doesn't feel like it has anything to do with Niko's original reason for coming to America (I won't spoil anything).  Suffice it to say that by the very end of the game Niko's main nemesis randomly switches from one person to another who you thought was kind of a side-character.  To spend so much time building up one character and then all of the sudden take all of the emphasis off of that person (as well as the story behind them) and move it to someone else was just a weird way to end the game.  I guess the story is told in chunks.  You get to know a certain person you're working for and then you get through their missions.  Then you go on to the next person, learn their story and get familiar with them.  So on and so forth.  My favorite of the bunch (as I said above) were the McReary missions.  The McRearys are a dysfunctional Irish-American family and I thought each sibling was unique and interesting.  You do missions for almost all of them, and overall I'd say their missions were the most fun.  Again, I don't like spoiling anything so I won't, but some epic stuff goes down.

The story was solid even if it falls apart at certain times.  It's not just the content of the story I don't think, it's how everything is delivered.  Most of the story is given to you in cutscenes before or after missions, and they're so well acted and staged (sounds like a movie, right?) that you really become fond of the characters.  There's also plenty of twists and even user-interaction to keep things interesting.  For example there are several points in the game at which you'll have to make a choice to either do one thing or another, and based on your decision the rest of the game will play out differently.  Should you kill this person, or that person?  Let someone live or take them out?  It's a nice feature and I'm already looking forward to playing through the game again, this time making different decisions to see how the game changes.

With all of that said I do have some remaining issues with the game.  First off, when will Rockstar figure out how to make the cars spawn more randomly?  There's a lot of traffic in the game and it always seems like I'll get in a car and then immediately there will be a thousand of that same car either being driven by citizens or just parked along the roads.  It's so bad that there's one mission in particular where you're given a really sweet car upon completion, but as I was driving back to my safehouse I saw literally 15 of those same cars only a couple of blocks away.  Imagine you hit the lottery and buy a lamborghini, but as you're driving it home you see that everyone else all of the sudden also has a lambo.  What happened?  Did everyone hit the lottery?  What's going on here?  Now imagine you can steal almost any car without much repercussion, and you see someone else driving a lamborghini in a color you like more than the one you're driving.  That happened to me all the time in GTA4.  I'd be like "Sweet, a Banshee!" then I'd go around a corner and see someone driving a green Banshee so I'd jump out of mine and steal it from them (green's my favorite color).  Now, I realize that rendering a bunch of the same car model is more efficient on the hardware but come on, there has to be some way to make the cars show up a bit more randomly!

My next complaint is the inconsistency of the police in GTA4.  There were times when I'd be flying down a road and I'd slam into a pedestrian in a crosswalk killing them right in front of a cop.  The cop does nothing.  Now say I'm driving down the road and I barely even tap their car with mine, all of the sudden I get one star and cops are chasing me down because I nicked the cop car's fender.  That doesn't really make sense to me.  It seems that with GTA4 Rockstar did their best to try to add a touch of realism to the game, but it completely falls part at times.  It's a tough line to tread, making things realistic without it being too realistic to the point that the game isn't fun anymore.

To sum it all up I think GTA4 was a really great game.  Overall it's kind of step back for the series (you're limited to a much smaller world than in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there aren't nearly as many side missions and the variety just isn't there) but a little bit of Grand Theft Auto is better than none at all.  Still, if I had to give GTA4 a rating (I won't, that's not what my reviews here are about) I'd rate it a lot lower than many of the official rating sites out there.  I think that even professionals get caught up in hype and end up scoring a game higher than it really deserves.  With that being said I have to recommend that you Buy Grand Theft Auto 4.  It's a great game and it shouldn't be missed.

I salute you if you some how made it to the end of this post! =)