Grand Theft Auto IV (Xbox 360) Review

Summary [7.5 out of 10]

Grand Theft Auto IV is, at it’s core, an average game that is wrapped in an incredibly high-fidelity world. “Heavy” character and vehicle control coupled with poor friendly AI and punishing mission gameplay design leave you with a game that is both beautiful to admire and maddening to the point of wanting to crack the disk in half… for no good reason.

Update #1: This review was written for the original Grand Theft Auto IV release back in April 2008. There were 2 DLC addons released later (The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony) that can be picked up as a standalone game Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City.

In The Lost and the Damned, Rockstar made noticeable changes to the mission structure (more forgiving checkpoints) and friendly AI (smarter, less aggressive) that significantly improved the “Grand Theft Auto” experience, removing almost half of my complaints with the original GTA IV.

The Ballad of Gay Tony was released with further enhancements to the mission structure with extremely friendly and frequent check-points inserted not only before missions, but during them as well.

If GTA IV had shipped with the mission structure, check point styling and AI of Ballad of Gay Tony, it would have been an easy 9 out of 10 score from me; completing removing everything that frustrated me about playing the game.

If you are a GTA IV fan that had the same gripes I did with GTA IV, just be aware that the DLC got better and brought back a lot of fun into playing the Grand Theft Auto storyline.

Introduction

As a long time fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, I probably played the first GTA about a week before GTA 2 came out. Got really into that, had a blast (even though it looked like a glorified monopoly game) going around the town wrecking havoc.

When Grand Theft Auto 3 came out, my brain melted. The idea of a game… that modeled the world… and let me do whatever I wanted in it… my brain just couldn’t compute how awesome that was.

It was a lot like the first time I played Doom, and my brain couldn’t compute the 3D-ness of it when I walked by the window for the first time and saw the outside go by instead of a static texture rendered on a wall.

Unfortunately something I would come to learn about the GTA series is that they spent so much time dazzling you with their sandbox nature and cutting edge gameplay elements, that you never really stop to notice how damn repetitive, frustrating and unnecessary unfun they turned out to be once you started playing them.

Of all my gamer friends, 1 other person has finished Grand Theft Auto IV, no one I know has finished San Andreas (including myself) or Vice City. For each game, every single person cites the same reason: “I got to a ridiculous mission that I just couldn’t pass, so I stopped playing.”

I’ve been waiting to write this review since GTA IV was released and the circle-jerk that reviewers all did around it when it was released. I got the game, was immediately disappointed and decided to make sure I gave it a fair try before I finally reviewed it… so yesterday, like 6 months after it was released, I finally finished GTA IV… and here is my review.

The Great

• The detail of the world is incredible. You won’t notice it if you run through it, but take a taxi somewhere sometime, or just hang out in a park listening to the NPCs; some of the comments are hilarious.
  • The sense of being a particular place is very real. When you are in mid-town, you feel like you are in midtown. When you are walking along the beach, you feel like you are on a beach. Again, the fidelity of the entire world is astounding.
    
• Sound effects and Environmental effects tie directly into the first point, they are all excellent.
• Music and Radio stations are fantastic, funny and chalk full of content… enough that you could spend the entire game and still be hearing new stuff by the end (Same goes for the TV stations).
• Facial animation is incredibly accurate. Unsurprisingly it was done by ImageMetrics, the folks behind some of the most advanced facial mo-cap technology today. You really notice it.
• Voice acting is spot on… just perfect. Nothing else to say, it’s great.
  • I couldn’t understand a damn thing that Lil’ John said.

The Bad

• Repetitive gameplay… it’s the same “Go kill X” or “Go chase Y” that has been identical to every single GTA before this. That same formula is the case through every single mission, you just wait for the NPC to stop talking so you can figure out either who you have to KILL or who you have to CHASE.
• Useless multiplayer. We all wanted co-op… I don’t care who you are, we all wanted co-op. There is no co-op, and in “Free roaming” there is absolutely no objective, so the game gets stupid in like 15mins.
• Over-bearing police. First off police are everywhere, usually in a density of 1-in-20 or 1-in-30 cars, so any time you plan on dicking around, chances are there is a cop watching. Also, police have an insanely low tolerance for anything, so the end result of all this is that you spend an inordinate amount of time running away from a 1-star rating than getting to your marked destination or having fun.
  

The Ugly

• MADDENING mission design. Not the actual missions, but how they are designed, specifically that there are no checkpoints in missions, no matter how long and if you restart a mission you don’t just start over at the beginning of the mission, you start out and have to work your way back over to the mission marker on the map. Even if that means driving across the damn map every time.
  • Saints Row 2 aced this formula by not only starting you over at the point of action when you Restarted a Mission, but they also included checkpoints in the missions incase anything went south.
  • NOTE TO ROCKSTAR: You have forgotten what “fun” is… or maybe you never knew. “Fun” is not screaming with rage as I retry the same mission for the 7th time. There are numerous ways to fix this issue (easier settings, checkpoints, better mission restart location, etc. etc.)
• Never telling us that you cannot destroy cars early in chase missions. Just a heads up to anyone suffering through this game, EVERY SINGLE CHASE MISSION, whether it’s a boat or a car or a helicopter, has a pre-set destination where the car you are chasing will “Wreck” and then you either finish the job or there is a followup cutscene. You cannot destroy the vehicle before this point, but you will burn through 1000s of rounds of ammo trying to, and possibly crash and wreck while trying to aim/drive/shot, only to go online and find out that if you just follow the other vehicle, they will eventually crash and that is what you are suppose to be waiting for. I figured this out about 60% way through the game, and just stopped trying and would just follow whatever vehicle I was suppose to kill… suddenly chase missions were 4x easier. This is so damn frustrating I don’t even know what to say to it… except to give Rockstar my middle finger.
• Stupid friendly AI. For some reason enemy AI is decent, but for the missions you have to do with friends (especially the cocaine-boat mission with that Italian guy near the end), you really regret having them around because they like to run into buildings and not take cover… dying and ending your mission early.
• The actual story of Grand Theft Auto IV is completely confusing. You figure it might be straight forward like “Take over the city and stop XYZ”… but it’s more like this twisting mess of 4 parallel groups you are helping, but also hate, and another group of people you used to know from the other side of the world that want to kill you, but they are friends with 1 of the groups you did work with… and there are two Italian crime families that you help, but they don’t like each other… and then there are undercover FBI agents that tell you want to do… bah. It’s not cool at all, it’s seriously just a confusing mess, I have no idea who half these people were or why I cared. I asked my 1 other friend that finished it, he had the exact same response… he had no idea what the story was about either.

Conclusion [7.5 out of 10]

After all that negative comments, you might ask “How can he give it a 7.5 out of 10?” and honestly, it’s probably for the same reason so many early reviewers gave it a way higher score than it deserved: the insane fidelity this game was made with.

If the game’s graphics, sounds, effects, details, etc. were on par with Saints Row 2, I’d give it a 6.5 out of 10, right down there with Kane & Lynch because the gameplay itself was the same basic, repetitive and annoying gameplay that has stopped us all from ever finishing a GTA game before in our lives, but when you stop to enjoy the living/breathing city, you cannot score it that low… it’s obvious that too many people spent too long making this city live.

Rockstar is inches (minor design decisions) away from a true 9 out of 10 or higher game. Little things like:

• Co-op in multiplayer. Don’t tell me the story wasn’t written for it or you couldn’t handle it in the cutscenes. I specifically looked for this and only saw a handful of cutscenes or missions that would need to be changed up a bit to make sense having another person with you.
• Adding checkpoints to missions
• Diversifying the missions themselves to involve other things, maybe sometimes goofy or fun
• Not making you loose rep with your friends when they call you every fucking 6mins to do something and you don’t want to
• Thinning out the police population or making them more tolerant of aberrant behavior
• Creating events or missions that involve you enjoying the high points of the virtual world a bit more (doing the missions I didn’t see a good 1/3 of the game that I found later and was amazed by)
• More adult themed content to a game this “real” would have been nice. Toning it down to PG-13 was a unavoidable side-effect of the retardation that was Hot Coffee, but still unfortunate.

But most of all… don’t forget that games are suppose to be fun. There is so much in this game that is impressive, and so much in it that is just so stupidly short-sighted, pushing a play style or choice onto the player that is not obvious at all and just ruins their gaming experience (like that “chased vehicles never die, but no one ever tells you” thing).

Overall, I’d say unless you loved… like seriously loved all the GTAs, to skip GTA IV. There is nothing new here, and while the city is impressive, it’s not entertaining enough to be worth the purchase. Unless those addon packs for the Xbox 360 add co-op or something, I don’t see any reason to give this franchise another glance.