Improvement over San Andreas but still lacks some features, and the number of important characters makes lots of clutter

User Rating: 8.5 | Grand Theft Auto IV X360
Grand Theft Auto IV brings the famous sandbox, car stealing, gun wielding back to Liberty City in this next generation game. Liberty City itself is based off New York City. You are Niko Belic, a mysterious immigrant that has just arrived at the docks of Liberty City with visions of an amazing world that your cousin has been lying to you in letters.

Basically the game has experienced improvements in graphics, physics, story plot, and character involvement. Cars drive more realistically, individuals walk and fall over in realistc motions, rain acts realistically when it lands on streets, and characters don't appear as cartoony as they did in previous Grand Theft Auto games, and fire and explosions look beautiful.

There is also mulitplayer which does a satisfactory job with deathmatch and other interesting modes. Unfortunately, certain aspects in the game are a letdown. Although most of the graphics look great, trees look extremely ugly.

My personal letdown was the number of buildings that could be entered. I was looking forward to being able to enter buildings on every block, unfortunately you can only enter certain hospitals, safe houses, stores, and restaurants. It doesn't feel like a sandbox experience if you can't enter a house or create a firefight within an apartment building.

Another negative is the lack of co-op play online, which today is becoming a staple in pretty much every game out there. The plot keeps interesting throughout the entire game, but the seemingly constant introductions of new characters makes the plot extremely confusing. A character gives you a job to do, but you can't remember who he is or where he comes from, so you are stuck doing a mission utterly confused why your helping this person who you thought was your enemy a few hours ago.

Overall you should but GTA for the single player experience, which is thrilling, suspenseful, and often quite a tear jerker. Multiplayer provides additional fun for a while, but loses it's excitement after a while, but the positives outweigh the negatives.