Rock_On's Full Review: Grand Theft Auto IV for Xbox 360
Where do you go to release your inner criminal? How do you unleash so many instances of pent up road rage? Or even, how to experience a prostitute without the nasty altercations? Rockstar Games has the answer with the Grand Theft Auto series. If they hadn't already done so, they've further cemented their free-roaming legacy in the next generation with Grand Theft Auto IV. The only real playtime I've had with the GTA series was Vice City on the Playstation 2, but I never really got "into" the series until GTAIV (characters even make references to Vice City that I found interesting).
In general, GTAIV is massive. One of the biggest additions is a deeper, more involved storyline with a likeable bad boy lead character that players can actually give a damn about. As if GTA's gameplay isn't addictive enough, the attention to an involving story is a huge benefit for the series. GTAIV starts off with Niko Bellic coming into port in Liberty City. A former soldier of an unknown European Army, it's his first time in America. He's been in touch with his cousin Roman who has talked of cash, cars, money, women, parties - the typical "American Dream." When Niko gets off the ship he's met by Roman who seems to have hit up multiple happy hours before coming to pick you up. Roman asks you to drive, and soon enough you learn that Roman's "American Dream" is hookers, a run down apartment, and a rag tag taxi service. After a couple intro missions, you learn that Roman is in debt with several loan sharks, and thus Niko's path as a criminal begins. After these first couple of missions, you're also given a cell phone that is integral to the game. Characters will call you to hang out, referred players will call and set up a meet, you receive various text messages, and later in the game you are able to receive an upgrade. The integration of the cell phone into GTA is very well welcomed and modernizes the series.
Liberty City is just massive. You start out in one part of the city and as you complete story missions you'll eventually open up two more islands, which many missions take advantage of spanning across all three islands. Missions start out low-scale and short doing things for Roman. Later in the game, word of Niko's work gets out and missions become available through the grapevine of connections. While most missions are meet someone here, drive there, and take out this person over there, the intertwining paths of the story keep the same ole missions fresh and desireable to complete. New to the GTA series is the option of killing or letting certain people go as well as making other moral decisions which can greatly affect the outcome of events later in the game.
Virtually every car or bike that you come across in Rockstar's living breathing Liberty City, based roughly off of New York City, can be stolen to drive around in. Rockstar tried to link as much realism as they could with multiple little gameplay tricks, one of them being that to steal a car Niko will smash the window to break in and instead of just driving off like magic, has to hot wire the car to steal it. There are tons of vehicles and a few different types of bikes that can be stolen for your rampaging pleasure. Cars range from old ghetto sleds resembling real life buicks, to mid-size sedans, to old muscle cars and new sports cars. Vehicle controls feel much more... Controllable. Killing corners at high speeds will still most likely send you spinning out of control through some telephone poles, but driving through Liberty City is much easier this time around. The emergency break (A button) and normal brake (left trigger) will, or should, become your best friend in GTAIV.
Courtesy of GTA's free-roaming gameplay, when a certain story line mission begins to frustrate you, take a break and cause some mayhem in the city. Shoot up some cops and try for an elusive six star wanted rating, and get out alive. When you do have a wanted rating, just escape the police radius on the player map and stay out of police sight and you lose your wanted level. There is a lot to do in the game when you just don't feel like progressing the story, like winning street races, completing assassin missions, completing stolen car orders, and even keeping friendships with supporting characters and acquiring girlfriends. One of my biggest gripes with this friendship system is the timing of phone calls to go do the variety of activities with people. Friendship characters have two percentages - like and respect. I'm not entirely sure how the respect percentage works, but the likeness percentage goes up as you hang out places like strip clubs and pool halls. The real trick is keeping those percentages up as almost everytime someone called me I was already in the middle of a mission or already received a phone call with instructions on a destination. Even though you can progress through the story at your own leisure, I felt like I was being rushed to complete missions to please them as new gameplay options open when their likeness percentage is high enough.
Though the series title is Grand Theft Auto, most missions and weapon action take place on foot- if you can see what you're doing. Controlling Niko feels like the original control scheme from the original Resident Evil, which is blocky and ultimately frustrating after being killed repeatedly while on a mission. You can cause mayhem with a limited selection of weapons like a pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and my personal weapon of choice for 90% of kills, the sub-machine gun. Hold the right trigger to fire your selected weapon, though shooting in free form is akin to giving a blind man a gun and telling him to shoot a target. Hold the left trigger to auto-aim, which will lock on to the closest target. This feature works well early on in the game when their are maybe two or three guys in a gunfight, but as enemies multiply, the more difficult it gets to target who you want to. With the slow camera controls, this often ends in a death. Probably fully aware but short on budget to work on the controls, Rockstar added the ability to cover by pressing RB. The closest object big enough to duck behind becomes your shield, and from there you can pick off enemies either blindly or with the auto-aim. If you happen to get caught up in fist to foot combat, youre better off running away than watching your unresponsive and sluggish punches and kicks do little to no damage as you're being wailed on. Note to Rockstar: please do something about the ghastly controls in the next GTA.
Another first for the series is the addition of multiplayer which is activated through your cell phone. Imagine pedestrians in single player, except they're real players from around the world and they aren't friendly. There is a good amount of game modes to choose from like traditional deathmatch and team deathmatch, as well as multiple objective game variants. You can even join street races. My problem with the multiplayer is that I was often booted from the server before I found a game, or when I hosted one myself it took too long for enough players to join causing players who had joined to leave. It's a nice addition, but neither makes or breaks the game as a whole. Personally, a GTA massive multiplayer role-playing game would fare well. Hopefully Rockstar puts a little more focus on multiplayer and it's connection issues in the next GTA.
As often as I've mentioned it already I can't reiterate enough how massive Liberty City is. It really feels like a living, breathing, fully functional city with traffic and pedestrians that seem to have a life of their own even when you're not interacting with them. The draw distance is remarkable. Drive over a bridge connecting the next island and watch as the building skyline appears. The best thing about it is if you can see it, you can reach that part of the city. There are numerous cut-scenes in the game that play out like a mafia movie which look really good, except that character models look like they were stolen mannequins out of a retail store with some clothes. Save for fake-ish character models and some funky cut-scene animations, Rockstar brought GTA into the next generation with flying colors.
Grand Theft Auto is known for it's selection of radio stations with selected artists' beats blaring out of them, which continues in this installment with a good handful of well-known artists. These stations even have their own Liberty City radio personalities with a ton of funny dialogue that are guaranteed to make you laugh out loud as if you're listening to your own local radio DJ. GTA has a lot going on, so the hustle and bustle of city life like pedestrians in conversation with each other and traffic driving by with horns and radios blaring is brought to life with awesome realism. While people will send you text messages, GTA focuses heavily on audio. The voice acting is surprisingly cinematic, though Rockstar went over board on the character Jacob's Jamaican accent which you can't even understand anything but a few words here and there.
Overall Rockstar did a fantastic job creating a new kind of GTA for this generation, making it hard for them to top and damn near impossible for any other developer to out do what's been done in Grand Theft Auto IV. It does a lot of things right and should very well be the perfect GTA, but the clumsy combat controls are a big deal that falls short of playabilty. On the other hand, GTAIV is a dark, twisted, and incredibly solid addition to the Xbox 360 library (and PS3).
div class="mainContainer Computers Electronics Cameras DVDs Music Games Books Toys in titles descriptions Company Info |Checkout Info |Shipping Info |...More at eBay
GTA IV: Special Edition features a customised metal safe deposit box that will contain the following: A specially packaged version of the Grand Theft ...More at Buy.com
Considered a fresh start for the GTA series; focusing more on realism and storytelling than in previous titles Rockstar has worked to make GTA IV foll...More at Amazon Marketplace
Follow Niko Bellic as he finds a way to survive on the tough streets of Liberty City / Next-gen graphics / ESRB Rated M - MatureMore at J&R Music and Computer World
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.