GTA:IV is a third person sandbox action adventure video game from developers Rockstar North, the studio primarily responsible for the majority of previous GTA games including GTA:3, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas.Walking down the street, you bump into a couple of thugs who raise their fists and start throwing punches at you. You flee quickly, making them think they have the upper hand, before vaulting a low wall and taking cover against its crumbling brickwork before pulling a handgun and taking a pot-shot at the closest thugs leg. He stumbles sideways into the street and is hit by a passing taxi, smashing into the window before sliding down the bonnet into a limp, lifeless pile on the floor. The owner gets out of his blood smeared vehicle and flees, clearly not wishing to take responsibility for the incident. The second thug staggers to a halt, spins on his heels and is away. A passing police car sees all of this and a couple of boys in blue hop out to deal with the disturbance, guns drawn, their chubby frames tottering towards your hiding place. Leaping out and dodging their shots you get to the abandoned taxi and head off, being chased by the police halfway across the island before a brave last stand on the beach involving you, twenty police officers, a helicopter and a rocket propelled grenade.
Welcome to Liberty City.
Anyone who has played an earlier GTA game should be entirely familiar with incidents of the kind above, but in GTA:IV the interaction with the vehicles and people of the world has been taken to a whole new level. The amazing Euphoria animation engine from Natural Motion is on full display here with people stumbling and reacting to gunshots, car collisions, punches or gentle pushes with amazing procedurally generated realism. The graphics of the game are very impressive and the damage modelling on vehicles is extremely convincing with scrapes, dents and missing doors all being displayed with precision.
The game play is an impressive improvement and evolution of what was seen in the PS2 GTA games. Your character seems to have much more weight and presence in the world and Niko reacts to your input in an impressively realistic way. Gunplay has been improved with an automatic lock on being cleverly combined with a free-aim system which controls a little like Real Time World’s Crackdown. This allows for pumping bullets into people with wild abandon or precision shots of individual body parts to stagger or instantly kill enemies.
The driving has also been tightened up with cars being far more realistic to control than those of the games predecessors, which felt a little like cereal boxes on wheels. If Niko drives into a solid object at high speeds he will actually fly through the windscreen in entertaining Euphoria animation mode. Niko can also fire out of the window of the car while driving in 360 degrees, meaning that you no longer have to be right along-side a car you wish to take down.The pure mass of things to do is stunning. Niko can participate in story missions, go out and get drunk with friends (complete with drunken staggering about afterwards and the controversial yet hilarious ability to drink-drive), play pool, go bowling, hunt criminals, complete stunt jumps, hunt pigeons and do a number of other awesome things. Or you can just explore the city.
And what a city it is. Liberty City is the most interesting, fully featured, exciting world Rockstar has ever created. The city is bustling with life and people genuinely seem real. If it begins to rain people will bring up umbrellas or shield their heads with a book. Doomsday preachers stand on street corners and predict damnation upon the planet and people visit hotdog stands for their daily fast food fixes.
You can’t forget the radio, either, which is full of brilliant music and chuckle-worthy adverts. This is where the true Rockstar humour really shines through. While many of the games cutscenes are riddled with jokes and insights, many of which are hilarious, the radio is where the comedy is to be found. Chat show host Lazlow returns to Liberty City along with a whole cast of brilliant voice actors who have all done a wonderful job at making the city feel like a real place through the wonders of its radio.
The really impressive thing about this game is the pure level of attention to detail. A great example of that is when Niko is about to receive a text and the radio starts making the funny blipping sound that it does in real life. It had me reaching for my own phone to check for a text message.
GTA:IV is as expansive as it is immersive and improves on previous iterations in all ways. There are still tons of things that I haven’t talked about including the entire multiplayer component, but suffice to say it is very entertaining but set out in a slightly awkward way. Some fans say that it became too serious and ceased to feel like a GTA game. I disagree. I think the series has matured with technology and that if you want ridiculousness and men in chicken suits, you should go and play Saints Row 2.
This game gets a full marks from me, and I think anyone who hasn’t played it should pick it up straight away. Despite its very few flaws, chief among them being the implication of multiplayer, it is still near perfect and I love it. I know you will too.
10/10
Price : Free Download
Date : 07-02-2012
OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7
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