GTA IV is here and is it worth the hype? (An honest review)
I'll start with the story. You're Niko Bellic, an illegal immigrant from somewhere with a bitter past. Hoping to escape his past, he comes over to America, Liberty City, to stay with is cousin, Roman. In the past Roman promised that he had all sorts of the "American Dream," with fancy cars, beautiful women, and a great mansion. Turns out all of that was a lie. A low-profit taxi company, hookers and a run down apartment was the order of the day for Niko. Now things go sour, don't they always, and Niko and Roman are forced down a spiral of lies, corruption and murder into oblivion. It may sound plain, but what unfolds is a web of mystery and conflict.
Now the meat of any, and most importantly this, GTA. Gone are the days of horrible targeting systems, uber-disappointing friendly and enemy A.I., and cruddy graphics that can make what goes into the toilet a work of beauty. Now, with next generation systems, Rock* can finally make the GTA game they always wanted, and mostly in part to the new Natural Motion Euphoria Engine coupled along with the RAGE (Rock* Advanced Graphics Engine), everything plays a vital role this time around. The Euphoria Engine can make the most minor of details some of the biggest surprises in the game! This includes Niko flying out of the car through the windshield and flopping around the concrete, pedestrians looking around in and on their vehicle, drinking coffee, talking on cellphones, sweeping the ground, smoking cigarettes, and so on. The list is nearly endless. Oh, and explosions look like explosions to a very striking detail! Now the aiming and targeting has gotten an overhaul...pulling halfway down on the left trigger lets you free-aim, to make all those difficult and tricky shots; fulling pressing down on the left trigger lets you lock-on. another nice feature is while locking-on to a target, you can use the right analog stick to pinpoint a certain part of their body, while flicking the right analog stick legs you switch to another target. Add the ability to have a cover mechanic that would make Gears of War blush, and you have the recipe to cause a lot of damage during firefights. To add to the next-generation feel, you even have a fully functional cell phone, complete with customizable ringtones and wallpapers. For craps and giggles, the phone even has a vibrate (yes the controller does vibrate) and silent option. However, the silent option suspends the main story mode until it is turned back on to either silent or ring. But there is even more, believe it or not, that that is impossible to write in a single review.
Also for the first time in GTA history, we have online multiplayer. Featuring 15 game modes, this is enough alone to keep you entertained for weeks on end. You have Cops 'N Robbers, a bank heist, GTA race, and many more. Even better is that Rock* hit the the bullseye for the multiplayer on the first attempt. Rock*, you guys really are masters of your trade.
The sound is another highlight for GTA IV, as with every other entry in the series. Now, Rock* has more advanced technology to filter sounds for every occasion imaginable. Upon starting the game, and stepping out of my apartment for the first time, I heard a cop car go down the adjacent road, a hot dog vender advertising his food, a man yelling at what was presumably his girlfriend/wife, a train passing overhead and a car horn honking all at one time! Now that is ambient surroundings at it's finest. Guns now sound like guns instead of party-poppers and every car has it's own distinct engine sound. Even the voice acting is superb, as always.
The missions are your standard watch cutscene, go here find this or kill that, report, and rinse and repeat. But variety is the name of the game, and is put to good use here. One mission has you clinging to the back and top of a moving truck to stop the driver, another has you stealing a police car to pull over suspicious vans to search for stolen merchandise. Since you have new gunplay mechanics, you are also engaged in more firefights this time around, and they are fun and a blast to play. Parden the pun. And the missions keep getting more wild, varied, and most of all, fun! To help ease the frustration, all you have to do to replay a mission is accept the text message the mission giver sends you. Nice, very nice indeed.
The graphics are what bring this package home. The city itself is very detailed and worth spending countless hours of your life over. Pedestrians look different, and I haven't seen the same character model twice out of my whole 10 1/2 hours of playing. Even the facial and body movement is fluent and realistic, and ALL THE CHARACTERS NOW HAVE FINGERS INSTEAD OF CLAWS!!! WOW! However, I wish the same could be said of the vehicles. There are tons of vehicles in the game, and more get added every time you unlock part of the city. I can't wait to see how many there are by the end of the game!
However not everything is wine and gold. No game is perfect and this is a shining example. The infamous pop in is still here, although much less frequent. Far backgrounds have a faint grainly look to them, but you can still see what is going on. Although I only experienced it twice, interior details like to disappear for a moment, or on one occasion forever, locking up the game and forcing you to load the last save. The lock-on when in firefights can spaz out when enemies are in close proximity of you; something free-aim can fix rather quickly. Those are the only problems I found out of my time with the game, and none of them are really hurtful because of the overall scope and detail of the game.
NOTE TO READERS: I have played BOTH the PS3 and the XBOX 360 versions, and both look nearly identical. However, the PS3 did have slightly sharper visuals and draw distances, I heard on a few occasions in the cutscenes the volume for the speech go down then back up. I also heard slight popping sounds in the LCHC radio channel. The volume only went down on two cutscenes at the beginning of the game, one of them being the fist time talking to Vlad and the other being the first time meeting Michelle. But that only lasted maybe 5 seconds. The DECIDING POINT BETWEEN THE two is the PS3 for SLIGHTLY BETTER VISUALS or the XBOX360 FOR ACHIEVEMENT POINTS!
All in all, GTA fan or not, there definitely is something here for everybody, considering you are old enough to play it because it really is for the mature only. With a campaign lasting 35-45 hours, a great storyline to keep you engaged and will actually care for, beefed up gameplay, and realistic environments and physics help make this GTA one for the history books.