Grand Theft Auto IV Review

Reviews

SCORE: 4/5

From the get-go, Grand Theft Auto IV promises to be something quite special.  Niko Bellic arrives in Liberty City aboard a boat that carried him across the Atlantic, away from a horrifically scarred past and towards the hope of starting over.  The supporting opening cinema is slick and brilliant, and captures the mood of an immigrant’s story chasing after the American Dream. 

Nothing is as it seems in GTA IV, and things are quickly turned around in the opposite direction.  Niko was promised the good life by his cousin Roman, but Roman is hardly the successful entrepreneur: he runs an upstart cabbie business out of his dive garage and apartment.  It’s not long before Niko gets involved in the various criminal underworld elements of Liberty City in order to make a living.

The GTA series has always featured over-the-top characters and a story-line that runs into total ridiculousness, and this game is not so different in some respects.  You’ll grow to love the spot on perfectly voice acted characters Niko runs into and gets involved with, and the dialogue is incredibly sharp, mature, witty and engaging. 

But what’s different about GTA IV’s approach is its tendency to actually make you feel something, and take directions that turn the whole idea of GTA’s wanton violence on its head completely.  There are many elements strewn throughout the game that force you to make a choice regarding the fate of certain individuals, and those choices will have real consequences. 

Moreover, there are elements to GTA IV’s story that are utterly brilliant.  Turn of events that shock you were telecasted through dialogue of other characters but only afterwards do you become privy, and it hits you all at once.  You also begin to care about the characters you become involved with, in no small part due to the fact that you can engage with them in many different ways.

Developing and maintaining friendships in GTA IV is a central aspect of gameplay.  Once you’ve met these bizarre characters, they can be contacted via cell phone to engage in any sort of activity.  You can play pool, shoot darts, go see a comedy act, even get drunk, and that’s just for starters.  Each character has their own preferences and the activity you pick will gain their trust and likeness for you further. 

Once you’ve gained enough of an acquaintance’s fondness, they become friends and offer gameplay related benefits.  Brucie will allow you to enter into races with a just a call.  Jacob will offer guns and ammo on the cheap with a call.  In fact, much of your interaction with your friends is through texting and calls through Niko’s cell, and they may call on you at any time.  Turn them down, and you risk losing their friendship. 

The system is very dynamic and allows for both the aforementioned gameplay elements interwoven with story development.  Some of the most telling and moving dialogue within the game occurs just as you’re driving from place to place with a friend on the way to an activity, and most is entirely optional.  There is so much in this alone to sink your teeth into, and Niko may just be the deepest character ever envisioned for a videogame.

Niko was a former soldier in an unspecified war, somewhere in the Balkans or, more broadly, Eastern Europe.  The horrific tragedies he witnessed and partook in are revealed in his own recollections.  When he reminisces on the nature of a God that would allow children to be lined up against the wall of their school house and have their hands cut off and throats slit, all the while grieving the loss of his innocence, it’s hard not to sympathise.

While a tragic character, Niko’s background puts into context all of the action he partakes in.  He’s good at one thing: Killing.  So it’s no surprise he ends up working as a hired assassin or thug for the scum of Liberty City.  As the story missions unfold, Niko will be required to do everything from delivering small packages of drugs to assassinations to taking on a bank heist. 

For all the missions there are to complete (and there are a lot), it’s remarkable that none ever get very dull or boring.  Despite the fact that you’re basically driving, running, and shooting at people, the manner in which they create the mission structures is expertly done and keeps things fresh.  Often times you’ll be doing several things in any one mission as it progresses.

The missions also happen to serve a very proper purpose:  Taking you all over the fantastically realised Liberty City.  As you chase down characters either on foot or by wheels, the developers purposefully lead you to places you never would have thought of, and reveal a tremendous amount of complexity to the city.  One mission even has you chasing a biker through the subway tunnels of Liberty City, at which point you’ll realize that Liberty City has a fully constructed subway system running all throughout it. 

It helps that Liberty City is a site to behold.  As with all GTA games, you’re placed in an open world that tries its best to breathe life into itself and become another character altogether.  There are talk radio stations with blowhard pundits from the right and left, an internet where you can check your email and even engage in an online dating service, activities like pool, drinking, cabaret shows and darts, and clothes stores to outfit Niko in appropriate apparel.  Some incredibly funny laugh-out-loud moments come from experiencing these many elements: watch an episode of Republican Space Rangers, and you’ll agree completely. 

Liberty City also looks fantastic.  Although the game lacks the kind of high fidelity of other major releases, it does come with a painterly look to it that approximates the look of the art that’s always accompanied the games.  It is absolutely beautiful at times, especially so when it expresses weather patterns convincingly.  The weather effects create more “moods” for Liberty City than any particular character has altogether. 

The sheer variety in a smallish amount of space is equally as stunning.  Everything is soaked in miniscule details.  And just when you think you’ve seen everything, you’re introduced to some new place that looks entirely different from everything else.  Then the game takes you to the water with boats and gorgeous realism and into the sky with helicopters and huge vistas.  This game may not have the fidelity of other major releases, but it’s a small wonder that a creation of such magnitude works as well as it does, let alone works at all. 

But for all that GTA IV does brilliantly, it is hurt by clunky combat mechanics that still need a good measure of fine tuning.    The shooting action features a welcome over-the-shoulder perspective and cover mechanic akin to Gears of War.  They make the action manageable in a way that wasn’t possible before.  That said, the cover mechanic is wonky and you’ll find yourself struggling with proper cover positions, randomly bouncing from one cover point to the other, and simply not experiencing a fluid transition between cover and shooting. 

The lock on system is also a convenient addition to combat but equally flawed.  For starters, for a game that is at pains to remove HUD elements in an effort to immerse you, locking onto a character results in a large reticule appearing over the character thus drawing you out of the experience.  Furthermore, it does not feel natural: Hand to hand combat is frustratingly unresponsive and will quickly end-up a least favourite element of gameplay. 

Shooting whilst locked on is a better option.  However, you’ll frequently find yourself locking onto an unintended target despite directly facing the character you wish to dispatch.  The developers cleverly added a free aim option by only pulling in on the trigger half way, but during tense situations you’ll spastically pull in too far and end up locking onto whatever target the game deems fit anyhow. 

Regardless, the game looks great during combat, the action visceral, and especially so when it comes to pyrotechnics.  One sequence in an abandoned warehouse is particularly great, as is an escape from a bank heist.  Watching pillars of concrete explode into dust and cop cars erupt in fireballs is beautifully thrilling.   But these sequences work in spite of the combat mechanics, not because of them. 

A final critique of GTA IV can be levelled against its sometimes plodding nature.  Despite the remarkable amount of things to do, even after the main story has ended, there are too many moments that the game feels like you’re grinding to get to the end, that all this driving and touristy gaping is a chore.  The main story will take you a good long while to finish, but a noticeable portion of that time is taken up in monotony. 

With an additional online mode that takes place in the fully open Liberty City, there’s a tremendous amount of fun to be had offering up even greater longevity.  There’s a ridiculous amount of multiplayer modes available that have been covered to death already.  Suffice to say that there’s tremendous fun and replayability on offer.  With all there is to do in Liberty City, GTA IV feels less like an action game and more like an epic RPG.

As an open world simulation, Grand Theft Auto IV is some kind of a revelation.  As a narrative device, it is practically perfect.  Judged on its gameplay merits alone, it stumbles, taking the sheen off of an otherwise engrossing experience.  Genius like the dialogue and story can be credited to Dan Houser and Rupert Humphries, who have created in GTA IV what must have been a labour of love, and what is ultimately one of the most convincing and scathing critiques of American culture.  This is hardly the last we’ve seen of Niko Bellic, and we’re all the better for it, but there’s clearly room for improvement.   

For more on Grand Theft Auto IV, check out the Play Journals. 

peachey @ May 20, 2008