- Not what I expected.The Grand Theft Auto series has always been a mixed bag for me. I really enjoyed GTA3, and played it nonstop until I finished it. I then moved to Vice City and couldn't have been more disappointed by a sequel; I only played it for a couple of days before I moved on to other games. Then GTA San Andreas came out and I again was hooked again. My only issues with GTA: San Andreas was that it was entirely too long, I spent A LOT of time playing it, but it just seemed like the amount of missions were endless. After a while I got an XBOX 360, so eventually I stopped playing the XBOX altogether, leaving San Andreas unfinished. Fast forward a few years and now we are at one of the most anticipated games for quite a while. GTA IV. While the game is not really that bad, not nearly as bad as Vice City, it still is not as good as San Andreas or even GTA 3.
Without boring you with the storyline behind the game, I will just say that in this edition of the series, you are Niko Bellic a Russian immigrant now living in Liberty City (New York City).
Game play is very similar to previous installments, so if you are familiar with the other games in the series, then you will be able to pick this one up right away. In addition to what you already know about the game there are some additions.
You have a Cell Phone, in which you can actually call your in game buddies and girlfriends to go on dates and/or to the bowling, strip clubs, etc. They will also call you if you ignore them for too long.
Instead of being able to just walk up to a parked car open the door and drive away, this time around you actually have to break the window first, then hot wire it before you are able to drive away. This stuff is done automatically by the game, but it takes time, and with the very high police presence in this game, you really have to pick the cars you want to take to avoid an annoying police chase.
Another addition is that you can actually watch TV while you're in your safe house. There are about 4 or 5 different channels, and there are actually different shows that you watch, it starts to repeat after a while, but it is still a cool addition if you really just want to waste time without having to do something all the time.
Finally, you can also go to an internet café and surf the internet, receive emails (including SPAM) and read hilarious news stories.
The graphics in the game are ok, but it seems like one is looking through a brownish film. The graphics are comparatively much better than San Andreas, but not as good as I have seen in other games. I can easily look past this however, considering the fact that there are always a lot of things going on the screen at one time.
My biggest complaint about the game are the absurdly poor controls and slow character movement. Game play to me is what makes a game and sadly GTA IV's controls are not very good. As another reviewer already stated, one of the most annoying type of mission are missions in which you have to kill 23,478 guys by yourself. Just the simple task of killing one person is more difficult than it really has to be. First of all the buttons are very difficult to use during intense fire fights. By the time you get the cover button to work properly, you would have already lost 25% of your energy, and by the time you are able to move to another place, another 10 - 15% of your energy is gone. All of this and you haven't even begun shooting yet! If you are lucky enough to have enough energy left to put up a good fire fight, you then have to worry about your bullets not even hitting the guy you are shooting at. I have been in situations where I was literally two feet away from a guy, and my gun shots did NOTHING to him. Yet he turns around and kills me with 3 shots. After I died I was given the option to start the mission over, but then I had to go through the tedious process of driving there first. I seem to remember San Andreas allowing you to skip the driving part if you have already done it, but I don't see any kind of option like this in GTAIV.
Another annoying type of mission are the car chase missions. There are three levels when it comes to car handling cars in GTA IV: bad, worse, and terrible. NONE of the cars handle great and a simple left or right turns sends your car sliding and spinning out of control giving the guy you are chasing ample time to get away. You can always turn slower but then the enemy will still get away because you are not moving fast enough. In addition to this, I have noticed some car chase missions are completely scripted in which the same type of road hazards occur every single time. For example I had to chase down and kill this guy and while I was chasing him he causes a truck to spill pipes all over the road, then later on causing a taxi to spin out of control heading straight towards me. I failed the mission the first time, so when I tried again, the EXACT same things happened again!
The game controls alone are enough to make me not want to play the game anymore or at least not as much as I played GTA3, or San Andreas, but then I run into the problem of the new features of the game become more annoying than enjoyable. A prime example is your cell phone. If you are like me and just spent an hour or so beating a couple of missions, all you want to do is save the game, but while you are going to your safe house to save, you get a call from one of your many friends asking to do something. You can always ignore them or say no, but then that hurts your friendship rating. So either you lose your friendship rating or reluctantly do something, spending more time playing the game. You can always turn stealth mode on, to stop people from calling, you but it seems to turn off by itself and you have to set it back to stealth mode again every time you load a game.
I haven't played this game in about a month. There are a good number of other games that I have that are more enjoyable than GTAIV and I probably won't ever beat it if it turns out to be very long. I give it 3 stars overall and 3 stars for fun. It's not as bad as Vice City, it just SHOULD have been much better, considering all the hype surrounding it.
- 
- 
- 