Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA IV) (Xbox 360)

...been a fan of the Grand Theft Auto Series since the first 3D version came out (Grand Theft Auto 3) on PlayStation 2, I remember buying it and spending a good week or two playing it none stop as I was simply addicted and I’ve never experienced such an interactive and open world game that could knock Mario World 64 out of my top favourite. I have prided myself in become a somewhat expert on all the PlayStation 2 versions of the game, I’ve completed ...
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===What is Grand Theft Auto About?===

Grand Theft Auto or GTA as it is commonly referred too is an open world sandbox style game, which basically means you’ve got an open city to run around in and do whatever is available to you. GTA take this idea and set up a crime based game, where you are a character who typically has a criminal past and gives you control of him. The game drops you in which you progress by doing missions ... more

I have been a fan of the Grand Theft Auto Series since the first 3D version came out (Grand Theft Auto 3) on PlayStation 2, I remember buying it and spending a good week or two playing it none stop as I was simply addicted and I’ve never experienced such an interactive and open world game that could knock Mario World 64 out of my top favourite. I have prided myself in become a somewhat expert on all the PlayStation 2 versions of the game, I’ve completed them all multiple times and have been dreadfully close to completing them 100%. My heart did a flip off joy when I heard they were releasing a game on the Seventh Generation Consoles, but then my heart did a dreadful landing when I realised I wouldn’t have the funds to purchase a console in time for its realise, so from that day on, it has been a somewhat side goal of mine to get the game and complete it, which I have recently achieved and now will do a somewhat epic review of it.

This review is based around the Xbox360 version of the game, some features or functions may vary slightly, however the games vary very little from my knowledge and therefore this review can apply for both versions.

I will also be comparing the game to the previous version, mainly the feature and functions, so please do excuse the occasional reference if you haven’t had much or no experience with the previous titles.

What is Grand Theft Auto About?

Grand Theft Auto or GTA as it is commonly referred too is an open world sandbox style game, which basically means you’ve got an open city to run around in and do whatever is available to you. GTA take this idea and set up a crime based game, where you are a character who typically has a criminal past and gives you control of him. The game drops you in which you progress by doing missions for people you meet, typically starts of doing missions for a friend or colleague and expands into you meeting a number of wacky and interesting characters, with a fantastic storyline. The game is famous for allowing you to do whatever is available to you, steal cars, beat people up, shot people, and get into trouble with police among other things when you are not in a mission. Due to the all the features and functions and great open world variety, the game has adopted a large audience of all ages (although games are of an 18 certificate).

Grand Theft Auto IV Storyline

Grand Theft Auto IV or 4, starts off with a cut scene showing Niko Bellic on a container ship making his way into Liberty City, which is based and strongly resembles New York City, he is met by his cousin Roman who has written him emails back Niko’s home country, (which although is never named, it quite likely Russian or another Russian speaking country) saying that he has made a fantastic life in Liberty City with a big house, fast cars and lots of women, which is all a lie as Niko finds out as Roman owns a small time Taxi company has is far from rich and has a gambling problem. Niko is left to do what he does best to his dismay and begins working for a variety of criminals throughout the game, but following a common goal of finding a person who betrayed him (During a mission in the game).

Graphical Improvement

The first thing which hits you when you begin playing GTA IV, is the massive graphical improvement, where as the previous games which were on the 6th Gen consoles (Xbox and Ps2), they provided excellent gameplay, however they were possibly the worst looking games on the system, as everything looked painted and the famous fin like hands are no more in GTA IV. The superior graphic capabilities of the PS3 and Xbox 360 make the game much more realistic and exciting and not only does it look fantastic compared to the previous games, but also gives you much better enemy and person AI (Artificial Intelligence), better car damage, more realistic civilians and how they act (all discussed below). GTA IV also takes a new route of allowing you to pick the outcome of some situations, which does effect the storyline slightly in the middle of the game and much more dramatically towards the end, I don’t want to spoil it, but in some sense, you’ll want to replay the game to find out what could or would have happened. Basically the game coming out on a more superior and advanced console has unlocked much better gameplay and possibilities which makes the gaming experience that little bit more enjoyable.

Gameplay

Basic Character Functions (Niko Bellic)

Niko Bellic is the character you play throughout the game, you play in 3rd person as you do in all GTA games and have the same functions as the other GTA games, walk, run, sprint, jump and crouch, which are slightly advanced in this game as you can know climb slightly better, giving you the function running jumps and grab and also shimming across a ledge.

A new addition to the game is the cover system, when you’re in a gun fight, you can access cover behind a car or a wall, and Niko can also shot blankly from behind the cover without aiming, but doesn’t real render effective unless it’s the rocket launcher, but it is useful when you’re fighting against numerous enemies.

Niko can also swimming in this game; however is far more ‘confident’ in the water as the character in GTA San Andreas was. Niko can swim, swim fast and sprint, which is all you really want as you don’t spend much time in the water.

Key New Features in GTA IV

Mobile (Cell) Phone

The biggest addition to the gameplay has to be the Mobile Phone, through this you can call different people you’ve met in the game, although typically get a answer machine, but it is also used to call up Roman to get a taxi ride for free (and get a hilarious mouth full or abuse about how you are ripping off Roman from the Driver). You can also call the police and ambulance services, but this is mainly to steal their car if you can’t find one otherwise. It is also the way you enter cheats into the game.

Taxi

You can now take a Taxi from one location to the other. You can wave a taxi from the road and get in, from there you can pick a location like a Gun shop, Safehouse or Mission destination, if you want to get somewhere more specific you can set a Waypoint on your Start Menu map and it will appear on the Taxi computer. This is very helpful in mission and to get around as the city is very large and there are 3 islands.

No Loading for Indoor Locations

This really surprised me since it’s such an interactive city, entering an indoor location didn’t require any loading, you just walk through the door in real time. This is quite useful as loading was a bit of a hassle in the other games (now that you think about it).

From Vehicle Shooting

Until now, the only way to shoot something from a vehicle was to have a submachine gun (Uzi or MP5 style weapon) and do a drive by style shooting; only way to shoot forward was to get onto a motorbike. Now you have total freedom in which direction you want to shoot, basically you smash the side window when driving and aim the crosshair to the target. You can even throw grenades out of the window to blow up the car behind you.

Police Computer

When you enter a police car and you park it or stand still, you have the option to access the Police Computer, which gives you the option of Search for Target; this allows you to either put in a name or upload a picture from your phone to find out if they committed an offence, I’ve only used it in Missions, and can’t really find any other purpose unless you want to try random names or take pictures or random people.
It also give you Most Wanted and Crimes in Progress, this is the equivalent of the Vigilante Missions in the previous games, basically gives you a target and you take them out.
GPS
One of the most useful features in the whole game, the GPS. When doing a mission the little map outlines the way to go, which in a massive city this Liberty City is highly useful. Some cars even have a voice inside telling you which way to go. You can also set up a Waypoint to be GPS’ed to that specific location.

Vehicles

Cars

The graphical quality improvement of the cars was the first thing I noticed when starting the game, they are much more detailed and look similar to cars in a racing game rather than a sandbox game as they look beautiful (only word that fits). With this detail, the cars also have a much better damage ‘score’ to the vehicles, it depends on the impact and where you hit the car to where the damage is visible (seems obvious, but this was done very poorly in the previous games), and the cars now show bullet holes and bullet shots in the windows with excellent accuracy. Basically the vehicles are outstanding aesthetically and the damage is inflected accurately. An interesting feature is the cars can now show dirt, and you can tell if a car has been on a dirt track or not, also when you hit a person, depending where you hit them, there is going to be blood on the bonnet or hit location, which is pretty cool. The cars can be washed at a Car Wash which has been added in this game, but except for one mission, there is really no practical need.

Driving the cars are a whole different story, with the cars becoming aesthetically realistic, the driving has taken the same turn, the cars have become more realistic to drive and therefore much harder. Basically there is no more crazy driving if you want to get anywhere fast, you have to break in sufficient time, and turn slowly, the power turns or drifts require much more skill to control and can’t be done in any car, which is very annoying at the beginning especially when you’re use to the previous control, but you get use to it and learn to control the cars much better or like me take the Taxi everywhere.

There is larger selection of cars, including of course the classics like Patriot, Sentinel and Infernus as well as some that were introduced in GTA San Andreas like the Comet, Huntley and Buffalo, but in addition there are good few extra cars which are totally new to the game and each brings its own charm like the others do. Motorbikes are also included, again including some new ones like the Zombie and Hellfury, which actually look similar to a Freeway which resembles a Harley Davidson style bike.

The cars have also had a massive make over, they are almost unrecognisable from the previous versions because of detail and quality, and some just look totally different. The designers had to remake each vehicle for the new game, so they redesigned the whole vehicle in some cases.

Boats

I don’t spend my time on boats as much as I do in cars, because there are few missions that involved boats and I typically travel by Taxi (discussed below), but there isn’t anything all that impressive with the boats, there is a new addition called the Tug, but otherwise, they are just plain boats.

I do however find the boats much more annoying to drive. If you see do a sharp turn, the boat will typically turn over and this renders the mission failed or leaves you to swim back to the shore.

Aircraft

Unfortunately there are no Airplanes in GTA IV, but thinking about it the 3 islands don’t present a need for an Airplane unlike the widely spread out world of San Andreas. There are however helicopters, although a small variety of them. I’ve only seen the Police Helicopter and the Tour Marvick.
The controls are pretty easy and simple, however I find them quite odd on the Xbox 360, specifically the rotation part, but I won’t get into that as it’s something to get use too rather than moan about.

Weapons

There is a fair selection of weapons in GTA IV, to sum it up, there are 2 off everything. The game offers the following – Pistol, Combat Pistol, Pump Shotgun, Combat Shotgun, Micro-SMG, SMG, Assault Rifle, Carbine Rifle, Sniper Rifle, Combat Sniper Rifile, RPG, Moltov and Grenade as well as the hand weapons like the Bat and Knife.

You see a sort of pattern occur, there is the average you get at the beginning of the game and it betters to the same gun essentially but better accuracy and damage. But I’ve got to say, the weapon sounds are much more realistic and match to the ones made in FPS games like Call of Duty.

Achievement and Trophies

Personally I own and have only played the Xbox 360 version, so I am only aware of the Xbox 360 achievements, but I don’t think they vary between the PlayStation 3 Trophies. There are about 165 achievements, about half are in game based, so you have to blow up 10 cars in 10 seconds or get 3 strikes in Bowling, among some more challenging ones like find and kill 200 flying rats (pigeons), which is near impossible in the vast size of Liberty City to do without some kind of a guide.
Other achievements include completing the main story in less than 30 hours, which typically requires a second or third play through and the other are online gaming based, and are very difficult to say the least like coming first multiple times in death matches with your team, which is near impossible unless you have some very talented gamer friends.

So essentially the game gives you around 1500 achievement points (not sure what that transfers in trophies) but for about half of those points will require hard luck and good skill and patience to get.

Online Multiplier

The multiplayer was something I was somewhat excited about on the Xbox360. It can be accessed during the game via your mobile phone and you pick what game you would like to go into which ranges from Racing to Deathmatch, Team and Single, which is the only 2 I have been in and have enjoyed it quite a lot, although Deathmatch sometimes becomes slightly repetitive when the Host sets the point limit to high. The other games tend to take a long time to get into and you always end up short of people, although the game allows 16 people in one match (32 on the PC version), it never maxes out, which is a shame as the maps are by far large enough to host such matches.

The online play provides about half the achievements for Xbox360 and are quite difficult to gain. Also from my experience it gets boring reasonably quick, unless the match is maxed out with 16 players who are reasonably skilled in playing the game.

Downsides of GTA IV

Although I would like to say that the game is perfect, there are some annoying downsides, a few major and significant ones I will cover below –

Enemy Targeting

This has to be the single most complained about feature of the game on most websites discussing GTA IV and among my friends. Just like in previous GTA games, you can lock onto your enemies, which is highly useful. But GTA IV has messed up the targeting quite badly, when choosing to lock onto the target, the function jumps to the nearest target, which as you can imagine is annoying if you’re fighting in a street where instead of the shooter, you target a civilian. This wouldn’t be as big of a problem if you could quickly move to a different target like in previous games, however the lock on is almost glued to that target and unless the other target is 10 feet away, your only choice is to try again to lock on or free aim. Highly impractical and very annoying.

Hit By Cars

With the added realism of the open world environment, the traffic is more ‘real’ for instance if you run out in front of a car, it will hit you or if you attempt to stop are car to hopefully car jack it, they will most likely hit you. The problem is, when you are running or don’t see a car, you get hit and lose a large portion of your life, but there is a possibility that the car will continue to drive on and basically kill you, which is highly annoying in missions.

Police Wanted Level

The police wanted level has changed slightly, although you still have the 6 star wanted level, the way to escape it has become easier slightly, you basically have a ‘Wanted’ area on the map and if you stay out of it for a few seconds you lose the wanted level, and this becomes increasingly larger as you get more stars. However I found that if you just avoid the police on foot at a 1 star level, you eventually get a 2 star, which becomes a bigger challenge to escape from and is slightly unfair.

No Tanks

I’ve noticed that once you hit 6 stars, you would have the army come after you as it has in the previous games and therefore you can access a tank if your crafty enough to get to one and not get killed. But unfortunately, no such luck here, and with the large vibrant Liberty City a tank would have been a great source of enjoyment.

Longevity

Like in good old Grand Theft Auto fashion, this game takes a good few days to complete, in fact it took me about a week and this was on and off play during my Christmas holidays, and it was only the main story, there are also some side missions like the car thefts for Stevie and completing the Most Wanted, as well as attempting to get all the achievements and trophies. Only having completed 68% of the game at this moment in time, I can predict that to get to 100% it’ll take me another week or 2 following guides and tips on the internet. Basically this game is very long and vibrant, which makes it fantastic as it is not only very addictive but long enough for you to satisfy the addiction.

Conclusion

To conclude this review of epic proportions, Rockstar has developed another outstanding masterpiece of a game, it has everything you expect of the GTA franchise and that little bit more. The new look for the new generation of consoles makes the game look outstanding to say the least and the AI and character movement makes it so much more realistic than ever before.
If you haven’t played this game yet, I strongly recommend it, even if you weren’t a fan of the previous games, the look and feel of this particular GTA may just change your mind.

This is another thing the Brits can be proud to have brought the world. (Rockstar North is a British based Game Development studio)
 

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