As always amazing production values, the intrinsic Rockstar wit... and more of the same chase and shoot missions.
You drive back to your cousin's place and decide where to go from there, how to live the American dream and make lots of money essentially (this is a theme that pervades the entire game. Remember "Cash Rules Everything Around Me... Cream get the money, dolla dolla bills y'all").
See, Niko is trying to avoid bloodshed, he's seen enough in his days as illustrated through various phone calls and conversations with friends and enemies throughout the game. You actually get to understand Niko's pain, but aside from being a cold blooded killing drug dealing machine, he happens to stick up for weaker people, and involves himself on the shady side of the law "For the good of the people" of course.
In your times spent in Liberty City, Niko will traverse the 5 boroughs of New York... I mean Liberty City and Alderney City (Jersey City, duh). Along the way you will meet various friends (and potential lovers) who will ask favors of you or to go out eating, drinking, a club, etc. Help them out enough, and they will do you favors in the end.
To be honest, it is fun, and an interesting method to immerse the player in the game world by getting a phone call to go hang out and get a drink (which results in a delightfully dizzying mini game of getting back home... where you can get pulled over by the cops, but strangely enough, not for running red lights in the opposite direction of traffic). However, they have a habit of calling RIGHT BEFORE you get to a mission, or one after another. Also if you decline the offer, your standing with them goes down, or if you call them at an odd hour (again trying to be immersive here), you get chewed out.
Apparently friendship isn't a two way street unless it's scripted. But ultimately this new addition to the gameplay is useless once you hang out with your friends maybe 4 or 5 times. They like you enough that you could decline any offer they make and they still will sell you guns out of their trunk or whatever the case may be.
Other new features to the Liberty City world include multiple restaurants, in game bowling, pool, darts and video games. Also, you can literally watch in game programming on TV. When I first picked up my copy, I watched Roman's 17 inch Radiation King for 45 minutes, particularly enjoying "I'm Rich" (Like "The Fabulous Life of..." on VH1).
Liberty City is presented in such a diverse manner with each borough being reminiscent of their real life New York Counterpart (of course not to scale, and not everything will be reproduced... but hey). Most noticeable are the Statue of Happiness, Middle Park, and The Triangle. Take a wild guess what those 3 are.
Street corners have different vendors, street lights, lamps, boxes, you name it, the city does not repeat. Random citizens have widely varying clothes from business suits to casual attire with every form of clothing and footwear and accessory in between. Heck, you can walk down the street and listen to random cell phone calls, or if you make it like you are going to run into someone, people would drop their coffees to get out of the way. You might even witness a car accident or dozen or robbery on the street.
Clothing shops allow you to customize Niko, and the clothes you wear affect your gameplay. For instance when you try to rob a bank after an "interview", you have to wear a suit and tie. Or if you are picking up "garbage" you need to wear an LCSD outfit (Liberty City Sanitation Department).
Pay and Spray is there as always, and of course, the radio station (my favorite gameplay device since III) is still there, amazing as ever (I love the Beat and Vladivostok FM particularly).
In addition to the music, the voice work is superb as always, although the game has such authentic dialect in some places you'd have no clue what's being said (See Baddman, you'll know what I mean). The voice actors are superb, the music always on point, the advertisements (Pisswasser is a good one to listen for, dare I say better than Knife After Dark) are funny and a refreshing take on today's popular culture and post 9/11 society.
Each car is modeled painstakingly after a real world car, although not bearing any brand names so as to not infringe on copyrights. The driving in the game is slightly harder, as surface conditions drastically affect your handling, in addition to the car's performance themselves (every single car handles differently). I at first was frustrated by this, but that was due to my own negligence and lack of skill. One problem that cannot be made up with skill is the annoying tendency of a enemy car in a chase to be able to take 90 degree turns at top speed while you go flying into a wall (and get ejected using a beautifully programmed physics engine I must say). That is one of the biggest problems I have with the game, and it is something you will be experiencing a lot of, as the overall game's structures mostly depend on either "Chasing" "Shooting" or "Chasing Followed By Shooting".
(Mind you, Rockstar did change the shooting mechanics, giving the game a more Gears of War shoot from cover feel, a problem that is solved as promised, so the shooting is actually done well, and more strategically)
A lot of trial and error and random cars pulling out in front of you can make your missions much shorter.
And sadly, when I said most of the game's structure is the "meat and potatoes" as Sam Houser of Rockstar puts it, it's not a lie. There were 3 missions I played that were not either mindless shooting or chasing.
One was a kidnapping mission where you had to drive with a girl in your front seat, but she would periodically grab the wheel and you had to get her under control and not go flying off the edge of the road and crash. I found it strangely fun, and not aggravating. This was one of the better orchestrated missions in the game. Similarly, a mission where you jump on top of a speeding van (after shooting it out) requires to to slowly inch forward, but then hold on tight while taking the corner.
Sadly, very few of these deviations are ever put into the core gameplay, and if something isn't done to the overall mission structure, I feel that this game series will be nothing more than a high quality sandbox version of Tomb Raider or Sonic.
Additionally, even as I mentioned the dynamic population, amazing physics engine, the diverse landmarks, and more, the game suffers from a few technical issues that seem to be absent from the Xbox 360 version. First of all, there is no anti aliasing. It's not extremely obvious, but there is definitely some jagged lines in the graphics. Second, I don't know what the technical term is, but some of the filters leave a weird swiss cheese type effect in things, and textures can clip through shadows, or even at times, shadows don't render.
Speaking of rendering, I assure you that the PS3 version of this game still has pop up issues contrary to what anyone says, more specifically at high speed car driving, but not always.
Aside from the few nagging problems of technical graphical glitches and the rigid adherence to the shoot n' chase mentality for the most part, Grand Theft Auto 4 offers up some of the best production values and memorable characters you will see this generation.
Gameplay 8 out of 10
Graphics 9 out of 10
Sound 10 out of 10
Value 10 out of 10
Tilt 9 out of 10
Total Score = 9.0
Pros :
+ Amazing Production Value, highly immersive
+ Incredible Sound (voice and music and effects)
+ Great Graphics with diverse locations and objects
+ A cast of likable characters, albeit in a gritty mature setting.
+ The combat got a reworking to be more strategic
Cons :
- A lot of the same technical problems that have been plaguing the series since its inception still exist.
- Not enough variety in the core mission gameplay, and the few deviations from it don't last very long.
- Why can't I take a 90 degree turn at the same speed my enemy is? Especially if he is in a Ford POS and I'm in a Ferarri?