Leveling Down

Grand Theft Auto 4 is the best Grand Theft Auto game yet and is an experience all gamers (who are old enough) should enjoy.

I finally got around to completing Grand Theft Auto IV, a year after it was initially released. As a testament to the game, even reviewing it now I have to say that it still holds up very well. My background on the Grand Theft Auto games is that I started with Grand Theft Auto III on the PS2, enjoyed it a lot, and bought both Vice City and San Andreas but did not enjoy either of those two as much as III. The funny thing is, I never finished any of those three games. While my fondness for the games got lower and lower after each iteration, I have to say that Grand Theft Auto IV won me back as a fan of the series, and I will explain why in my review.

Good
- excellent storyline
- a living, breathing, NYC world
- more conveniences than previous GTA games, like taxis

Bad
- poor competitive multiplayer design
- car handling is a bit too floaty
- lack of certain gameplay features & customization in previous GTA titles

Intro
If you’re a gamer, you’ve most likely heard of Grand Theft Auto already, as it’s one of the major and most beloved series in gaming. The series was originally created on the PC back in 1997, and was a top down game with crime-related mission objectives. The game had its own following, but not until the PS2 release of Grand Theft Auto III series explode in popularity. Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: Sand Andreas would eventually get ported to the PC and Xbox, but the trilogy was most well known on the PS2 and most likely sold a lot of PS2 consoles.

When Grand Theft Auto IV was originally announced, it was relatively shocking that Microsoft was able to get Rockstar Games to commit to a joint release for both the PS3 and the 360. This was a big deal, as the reason many people associated Grand Theft Auto as being a Sony product was that the PS2 trilogy was released on the PS2 months in advance before they finally got ported to the Xbox. For it to be available Day 1 on the 360 meant another reason why gamers didn’t need to buy a PS3 right away. On top of that, Microsoft also secured exclusive DLC for Grand Theft Auto IV, such as the recently released The Lost and the Damned expansion pack. Both strikes ensured that the 360 sold more copies of Grand Theft Auto IV than the PS3 did, with the 360 accounting for about double the sales of the PS3 version domestically.

Niko meets a bunch of characters in the game, helping them with various tasks in order to make enough money and go after his true goal.

Storyline and Premise
Grand Theft Auto IV follows the exploits of Niko Bellic, an Eastern European war veteran who runs into some trouble back home and decides to escape to Liberty City due to how well his cousin Roman talks about his life there. When Niko arrives, he discovers that Roman is barely struggling to make ends meet, amassing a lot of debt to shady people and struggling with a gambling addiction. Niko helps out his cousin in whatever ways he can, which introduces him more and more to the seedy underbelly of Liberty City, taking on various theft and assassination missions for bosses and sometimes he is even forced to choose who to kill.

Liberty City is modeled after New York City, taking place in the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and even New Jersey. All of the areas are renamed, but notable landmarks, such as the Empire State building, Times Square, and the Statue of Liberty are present in the game albeit with different “spoof” names. Through the course of the game, Niko begins to do better and gains more safehouses, including one right near Central Park in Manhattan. How he makes the money is not exactly an honest living, however.

For those completely new to the Grand Theft Auto games, Grand Theft Auto IV is a sandbox action/adventure game and the series seems to appreciate a great amount of popularity simply due to its sandbox nature of letting the player progress through the game as fast as he wants with no set linearity. While some missions are predecessors of others in order to complete the main storyline, the player can simply shrug off all the missions altogether if he just wants to have fun stealing cars, shooting people, and dating girlfriends. It is perhaps one of the most realistic games out to date.

It wouldn’t be a GTA game if you weren’t trying to escape from the cops, right?

Gameplay Mechanics
Combat
The main appeal behind the Grand Theft Auto games is violence, and Grand Theft Auto IV is no different. In GTA4, you can find handguns, sub-machine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and explosives like grenades and rocket launchers. All of these items become available to you as you progress through the game, and weapons stores open up to allow you to repurchase guns and ammo when needed. I would have liked for the ability to buy a silenced weapon, as it seems to make sense based on the way the game is played, but perhaps it would have ruined balance.

GTA4 also introduces an entirely new combat system to the game, allowing you to auto-target enemies and make use of cover. Hitting RB near a wall or an object that allows for cover will slide Niko against it, allowing you to aim and poke out to fire when you want to. The auto-targeting works by focusing on any enemy in the direction you’re looking at, but at the same time you can relax the Left Trigger button to free-aim. Auto-targeting works great and makes combat a ton easier than in previous GTA games.

Police
The police are still present in this game, and they will still come after you based on any crimes you pull off that they are aware of. The wanted level still varies from 1 to 6 stars, and the higher the level, the more the authorities throw at you. New to GTA4 is the radar: the higher your wanted level, the larger the search radius of the police. Your goal, when you’re wanted, is to escape that search radius without them noticing so that you can lose them. With a higher Wanted level, the radius is larger and more cops come to help. If they catch you trying to leave the search area, a new search area is created, making it more difficulty to escape.

Driving
With the name of the game being Grand Theft Auto, driving is still one of the core aspects of the game. In Grand Theft Auto IV, Niko has the ability to steal any vehicle he chooses, such as cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats, and helicopters. He has the ability to not only steal a vehicle from a driver by simply throwing them out of the vehicle, but he can now break into any parked vehicle where the door is locked. In Grand Theft Auto IV, Niko can break into the window and hotwire any car he chooses. GTA 4 finally adds GPS to the game, a convenience that Saints Row originally introduced, displaying the ideal “traffic friendly” path to reach a particular location.

In GTA 4, taxis are ever present throughout the city. The cabs introduce a very convenient “warping” system, where you can either sit in the cab and physically be driven to any location on the map you wish, or pay extra to skip the driving sequence and automatically be dropped off there. The taxi is perhaps the single-most convenient addition to the game, getting rid of a lot “wasted time” simply driving from one location to another. It makes it so that in the core storyline alone, it’s possible to be more on foot than actually driving a car.

Cell phone/Internet
Also new to Grand Theft Auto IV is the inclusion of cell phones and the Internet. The Internet is not as big of a deal, as Niko has to generally stop off at Internet cafes where he can check classified listings to meet women, check email, and partake in certain sidequests. The cellphone is a much bigger deal, as it adds a new level of realistic gameplay to the series.

With the cell phone, Niko is now able to call associates or be contacted directly by them, allowing the storyline to progress through phone communication. Not only that, but the phone has a camera, allowing for Niko to take photos and upload them to people, and it also allows Niko to call friends and girlfriends to hang out or to ask for particular services like his cousin’s taxi service to come pick him up at a particular location. You can even dial 911 on the phone to call police to your location if you need their assistance (or car).

Friends/Activities
Niko is able to befriend certain acquaintances, whether it’s purely a platonic friendship or a romantic relationship. Each major character Niko meets in the game has a particular friendship/relationship level with Niko, and in order to keep him close to each one, he has to devote time to them doing activities they enjoy. Hanging out together more often allows for friends to become closer, which means they are are willing to do more favors for him, and girlfriends will allow for more “favors” as well. Activities range from eating, to playing pool, bowling, going to strip clubs, etc. Most of the game activities, like pool, bowling, and darts, are actually playable. Niko simply calls up a friend and asks if they want to go out eating or something, and if they’re interested, they’ll agree to.

It’s almost like The Sims in a way, managing friendships and the like. One time one of my friends said he wasn’t interested in going out to eat with me since that’s all we ever do together. I later called him up and asked him if he wanted to go drinking, and he changed his tune so we headed out and got plastered. Of course, all of this can be avoided altogether if the player wishes.

Sidequests
Sidequests in the game generally revolve around ways to earn more income, but if you’re just completing the main missions in the game, you should have more than enough. Regardless, optional sidequests revolve around playing a cop, hunting down known criminals or simply keeping the peace based on an infinite number of crimes that get reported, or stealing cars, delivering drugs, driving a cab, finding stunt jumps, and killing 200 hidden pigeons throughout the city. I wasn’t the biggest fan of killing the pigeons, but as someone that currently lives in NYC, it does add a certain amount of satisfaction to shoot them in the game.

Multiplayer
The multiplayer in this game was far too ambitious for its own good, and it suffers because of it. There are a total of 15 modes of play available, with up to 16 players supported. The modes range from simple free play where 16 players can just create havoc in the city, to car racing, co-op missions, cops and robbers, deathmatch, team deathmatch, etc.

It all sounds good and fun, and for players that aren’t serious gamers, it can pretty much fit the bill. But Grand Theft Auto IV is not a skill based game, so when it’s turned into an adversarial game it just doesn’t have the depth to maintain interest for serious gamers. First of all, there’s no medkits or healing in adversarial modes, nor is there life regeneration so everything just turns into a big kill fest that plays pretty shallow. In a sense, the multiplayer has so many offerings but they’re not something that would be played in a gaming league. What also makes it more difficult to take the multiplayer seriously is that the host of any game has a ton of options he can choose for the game, resorting in no official settings for any gameplay mode. It’s all up to the host so while you may know a map, if the host wants to start everyone off with rocket launchers or friendly fire, your playstyle will differ on that map from one game to another. In essence, it’s tough to get good and the question you’ll ask yourself is why?

When the initial glee of gunning down other players wears off, you realize that multiplayer isn’t really enough to compete with the other big multiplayer games out there.

Achievement Design
Grand Theft Auto IV isn’t really a game skill based game, unlike the Ninja Gaiden or the Devil May Cry games. There’s only one difficulty setting, pretty much one way through the game (complete all the missions), and no score or grading criteria on how you play it. For a sandbox game of this nature, Achievements will generally reflect more on showing extra gameplay content that the game has to offer, whether it’s street racing, assassinations, renegade copwork, etc. By and large, the Achievements are quite well designed for Grand Theft Auto IV.

Going through just the core story mode alone would account for 15-20 hours, but the Achievements for all of the optional sidequests can add on another 30 hours. I like that there’s a specific 100 point Achievement called “Key to the City”, which unlocks when you have hit 100% game completion, a statistic that is monitored ingame based on all optional sidequests that you do. This really lengthens the game a bit, and while I don’t think any of the optional sidequests come near the quality of the main storyline, they can be entertaining. There’s also a few for multiplayer, and to a degree I’m thankful that only 140 points of the 1000 are devoted to multiplayer (unlike other games, which have almost half of their points allocated for multiplayer related Achievements).

Grand Theft Auto IV’s level of polish and presentation provide for a breathtaking cinematic experience.

Final Thoughts
Considering how much I pushed this game back in my backlog all these months, it’s quite surprising that I’m giving this game a flat out A. Everything in the campaign just screams quality, and I personally appreciate that Rockstar has instead made the game more realistic and less cartoony/comical. Grand Theft Auto IV seems notably easier to me than previous iterations, as I believe I stopped playing other ones due to some difficult mission at some point or another that made me lose the will to continue. Grand Theft Auto IV for the most part has no such issues (except maybe the last mission, but at least there’s a checkpoint) and even helps you complete missions by giving you guidance on where you should go and what you should do. In short, the game is not necessarily about skill as much as it is the experience, and I believe that Rockstar nailed it. You really feel like Niko Bellic, and the game excellently combines as much of the real world as possible into a game without bringing in the mundaneness of our own lives.

By my review criteria, this is the type of game that deserves an A: a compelling and interesting storyline to give you a purpose for your actions, dozens of hours of gameplay so that you’re not done in just once sit down, a sort of polish that can continue to amaze you, and plenty of refinement and innovation over previous games in the genre to make the game really feel like a proper sequel. There is also plenty of humor in the game – I remember laughing out loud when I walked by a Chinese hotdog vender who shouted out, “you mofos think you’re too good for these?!” The single player is a masterpiece, and I’d recommend it to anyone that was old enough to play it. The multiplayer leaves a lot to be desired, and I was struggling with whether or not to dock the game’s score a bit due to the multiplayer but the single player alone stands as an amazing gameplay experience. Whether you get into the multiplayer or not, that’s just something extra but even without multiplayer, I’d still give Grand Theft Auto IV an A.

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