Grand Theft Auto 4 Review
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
It’s been the most awaited game for the whole year, delayed consecutively month after month, but finally it was released to the eager public and sold nearly 6 million units and $500 million in sales; the Guinness Book of World Records acknowledges it as the fastest selling entertainment release in history.
Grand Theft Auto 4 has once again stunned the gaming world with newer innovations since Jesus, and adds so much more to what the Grand Theft Auto franchise is. If Rockstar gripped what naming games with numbers was, they may have called this GTA 6 excluding the PSP games (Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories), but apparently the last two games (Vice City and San Andreas) don’t count, so we carry on away in Liberty City, previously seen 7 years ago in GTA 3; the first ever GTA game to be in 3D.
You take the role of Niko Bellik, a fresh off the boat Russian who is a stone cold couch potato, a desperate online dater and a highly trained killer all in one…sounds like a fun guy? You meet cousin Roman, who shows you the highs and mainly lows of the carbon copy of New York, Liberty City.
As usual with any Grand Theft Auto game, the voice acting and characters are amazing, and would rival any movie or TV show for overall standard. Making loveable connections with a character that could blow your brains out with a 12 gauge shot gun is a rare beauty. But aside from the normal things that made GTA prolific in the first place, we have Liberty City, a thriving metropolis of sex, drugs and crime.
This time Liberty City’s changed a bit, and had a facelift. Now with hours of piped programmed cable television, 21 radio stations with over a staggering 300 different tracks to groove to, the fake internet with crazy blogs, random websites, and even spam emails, and star attractions at some of the many clubs in Liberty City like the Split Sides comedy club; featuring Ricky Gervais of all people.
Liberty City is a rich and vibrant place that just happens. It’s a living world where everyone is doing their own thing, may it be: begging, chatting to obnoxious people on the phone, busking or waiting for the train, Liberty City has it’s own array of different characters, and not to mention that over 1000 people tried for motion capture, so you’ll never be short of different faces to look at.
The new 5 star attraction now for Grand Theft Auto is the newer edition of multiplayer. With ranked and player matches, players battle it out in races, high octane battles and random forms of death match. But that’s not all, also included in the form of missions for example are Bomb da’ Base II. A fun little multiplayer mode, where a team of 4-6 players each help each other steal a high security truck, fly to a giant cargo ship in a helicopter then shoot everything in sight and then blow it to smithereens. It’s an unbelievable amount of fun, and adds a sheer amount of re-playability to the game. (Not that with the open world it didn’t add to it anyway), and with the prospect of episodic content for the XBOX 360, Grand Theft Auto 4 should still be in peoples for a lot, lot longer.
Another game mode for multiplayer is Freemode, which basically says what it does on the tin, and gives you the whole city to play with and do with as you please. In settings you can customize the area where you spawn, what weapons you can use, the type of weather, police or no police, the amount of traffic and pedestrian density. The idea of Free Mode is for people to experiment with Liberty city as they want and to make up game types.
While testing out multiplayer with some friends over XBOX Live we decided to drive down to Times Square in the game, steal a bus, get as many people with SMG weapons and cause global terror on the population. A change with the citizen AI is that now, if you fire a weapon, almost everyone with run for the hills. So if you can imagine the sight if you were walking towards the “Fun Bus” as I called it. The whole city were running for their lives.
Missions in the game have taken a new toll of fantastic, they still have the feel and writing of GTA, but have a new essence of quality about them. Cut scenes feel more watchable now, before with games like San Andreas I felt like I didn’t want to know anything about the story it was bang, bang less dialogue, but now I feel a strange magnetic pull towards watching and absorbing everything from the game universe.
One thing that I can lower the score for this game slightly is that maybe Rockstar thought that GTA was getting a little too out of control, and gone for the used coffee filter bridge of grey realism, that more and more developers and making games towards. I really wanted to have zanier toys, crazy empire state building base jumps and random police chase the train I got in.
Moving onto the fact that, even though GTA is a amazing game, some things just don’t feel correct, eg: You take your girlfriend out with you, but she doesn’t mind the fact that you just run over those pedestrians or that you’re driving at 100mph along the sidewalk.
I feel Niko more as a person who just wants to step away from his past with the Red Star alliance, and start fresh with is indulgence in the American Dream, furthermore the things he ends up agreeing to do make me feel like he’s being out of character, and at the start of the game, I would try to drive correctly and not kill anybody I shouldn’t. But the more and more Niko would willingly do crazy things, the more I wouldn’t care about his character so much.
My further thoughts of Grand Theft Auto are always positive, and some of the annoyances like frame rate and graphical glitches from the previous games have been fixed. Always good things for the future of the Grand Theft Auto series, giving the final rating of % 95
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