Grand Theft Auto IV
By Alex Kierkegaard / January 7, 2010
Note that this review does not take into account the game's multiplayer component. When Alex gets around to trying it out he'll be sure to update the review, and if necessary also the rating, accordingly.
I gave up on the GTA series roughly half-way through Vice City, and hardly even touched the next three episodes. I did, however, keep an eye on IV throughout its development, just as I did with Halo 3, and Metal Slug 7, and Street Fighter IV, and DMC 3 and 4, and as I am still doing with Deus Ex 3 [ > ], and Doom 4 [ > ], and Command & Conquer 4 [ > ], and with whatever other upcoming sequels to formerly awesome series that have either been nerfed, or sold out, or otherwise disgraced and profanated their legendary heritage -- just because, you know, you never know.
I usually approach these kinds of sequels with unlimited enthusiasm despite everything, and always hope, and to a degree even expect, nothing less than a stunning return to form -- but not so with GTAIV. What bothered me right away about this game, from the very first trailer, was the protagonist: an ugly East European thug with a disgusting accent. I just could not see myself spending 20+ hours controlling him. I am physically unable to play videogames as an ugly character (and this includes fighting games, something which puts me at an immediate disadvantage, since half the character roster in the typical fighting game is usually beyond repulsive). It's not just the fact that I am good-looking and would therefore have trouble identifying with an ugly character -- even if I were ugly I'd want to control handsome characters (or at least I think I would -- do ugly people identify better with ugly characters? -- a question for the artfags.) For isn't all this supposed to be, to a great extent at least, about escapism? One would think that people would want to escape to something better and better-looking, not to something worse and uglier.
However that may be, and contrary to all expectations, I actually warmed up to Niko almost immediately. He has been written as such a cool and level-headed guy, but at the same time icy calm and ruthless when he has to be, that I ended up identifying with him just fine. I even came to love the accent (courtesy of extremely consistent, top-notch voice acting), and as for his ugliness: he grew on me like all ugly people with whom one ends up getting friendly. Past a certain point you simply no longer notice. In Niko's case, once he's dressed in a $2,000-dollar business suit and driving a convertible with an assault rifle in one hand, one could even call him... well, if not exactly good-looking, then at least totally badass, which almost amounts to the same thing.
But yes, the game. By far my biggest complaint is that the structure is exactly the same they've been using since III, and which, as I mentioned, I've been sick of since Vice City (all the while games like Dead Rising and Crackdown have taken it to totally awesome new directions, and this even without the budget and brand recognition that GTA sequels command...) My hope, and reasonable expectation, that a new numeral would be reserved for a new structure, went sadly unfulfilled. And things get worse, since the difficulty has taken a massive hit. However boring I may have found Vice City and San Andreas, at least they were reasonably challenging games -- but this one's for fucking children. III and Vice City featured missions I had to replay two dozen times or more, only occasionally passing a mission on the first try, whereas in the first few hours of this there were barely two or three missions I had to replay at all. And even then hardly more than a couple of times. There are missions several hours in that are on the level of III's first mission, and everyone in the forum is telling me that the rest of the game is on a similar level (I only played to about 15% before giving up -- and yes, on this site we give up on games that are too easy -- not the other way around). This is the first GTA that made me look for a difficulty setting option -- only to realize that they don't have one. It's just a big fucking joke. It made me feel like going back and finishing Vice City and San Andreas -- that's how bad it is. Like how Mission: Impossible 2 made me feel as if the first movie, which I had originally detested, was some kind of a masterpiece. And it doesn't help that the missions are mostly extremely straightforward -- or I guess it does help, because otherwise I would have given up sooner. If there's one thing worse than short easy missions it's gotta be LONG easy ones.
One should try to grasp why it is vitally important in a game of this type that the missions be relatively lengthy, involved and hard all at the same time -- as many of them were in earlier games. Straightforward missions (drive this guy there; go there and shoot some guys, etc.) make the game feel like Crazy Taxi or a shoot 'em up: enjoyable perhaps, if they are tough and well-designed (and if the engine is well-designed for them -- which this isn't -- in which case you are better off actually playing Crazy Taxi or a shoot 'em up), but poor in terms of potential for awesome, random unscripted shit to go down -- which is the whole point of the free-roaming genre. Toughness is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that the player fails and repeats most missions several times -- for only this creates a feeling of accomplishment once a mision has finally been overcome, and moreover -- and just as importantly for this type of game -- only this forces the player to explore and experiment with various wildly different approaches to each mission. And the tougher the better, because the player will only attempt the most imaginative approaches if he absolutely needs to, if he already has a healthy number of failures under his belt, if it has been made clear to him that the straight-up approach is either extremely difficult or will perhaps not work at all -- otherwise alternative approaches will not even occur to him even if they exist, and all the cool areas and functions you've worked so hard to work into your virtual playground will simply go to waste. Of course there's always the chance the player will get discouraged and give up, but that is where the carrots come in: make the story tight (i.e. free of filler) and consistently awesome, spread the weapon/vehicle/etc. upgrades equally throughout the length of the game and make them count, keep new areas in reserve and make them so distinct that they feel like old-fashioned new stages -- and trust me: the player will keep trying. At least the enthusiastic, imaginative player -- the rest can fuck off already and go watch some movie or a JRPG.
All this is what made me keep trying despite a dozen or more failures per mission in III, and the lack of all this is why I gave up on IV even though I practically never failed.
A shame, really, since plot- and engine-wise they've put a lot of effort into the game, and it's mostly paid off. Niko's murder and corruption spree in modern-day New York is certainly far more engaging than the clumsy apings of 80's and black culture seen in the previous two major installments, and the new version of the RAGE engine (last seen in Rockstar's table tennis game), despite carrying over many failings as usual, and even introducing a few new ones, is still overall a huge upgrade, with so many additions and improvements I had to take down notes while playing so as not to forget any of them. Above all in the visuals and camera-work: a wonderful haze effect softens distant objects and makes them appear more indistinct, lending the environments an additional sense of realism (though this ultimately ends up working against the game, as I will soon be explaining), and a truly awesome wide-angle effect when you pull the camera in towards you or back away from you. The new cab and subway rides are also very cinematic, and the drunkeness effect is good enough to make you feel genuinely sick. Though this new environment is overall a rather grey, drab urban sprawl, as I imagine the real New York must be, all of the above conspires to set up some stunning moments if you get the city at the right combination of angle, weather and time of day. This happens only rarely, but then again the same is doubtless true of the real New York.
Hats off to Rockstar also for what is certainly overall the most sophisticated combat system ever in a 3D action game. Unarmed fighting now offers several punch/kick combos as well as dodges and disarms (think Dead to Rights), the latter two being appropriately difficult to execute, whilst armed combat now incorporates a very useful cover system. Best of all though is the manual targetting system added to drive-bys which has been very cleverly implemented, as it forces your brain to struggle to retain control of the car via the left thumbstick while lightly tapping the right stick to keep your shots on target -- easy if the target is stationary, but delightfully tricky if it's a fleeing sports car. And to cap it all off, rag-doll physics rendered on the fly courtesy of the Euphoria engine.
Still, all of these individually great elements rarely ever come together, partly due to inherent implementation deficiencies (targetting is as wonky as ever, and even more so when using the cover system), and partly due to the lack of missions that take advantage of them (unarmed combat for instance is as always under-utilized, rendering all the improvements to it superfluous). There is even a throw item move which seems to be required only in the tutorial mission that explains how it works.
And that is not the worst of it. The worst is that the driving model has been made generally slower and more sluggish, purportedly in order to make it more realistic, but actually simply making it... slower and more sluggish. Even your character responds sluggishly -- everything seems to have way too much inertia, and you often feel as if you are watching things unfold in slow motion, or as if there is perhaps too much lag between your inputs and Niko's reactions. Factor in serious framerate drops at high speeds (at least in the console versions), and the result is that the car chases, the game's signature aspect, often become frustrating and overall a great deal less enjoyable. I also did not like the new mechanic for losing your wanted status, whereby as long as you escape a circular search area clearly marked on your map, whose size depends on your wanted level, you are in the clear. This makes the game feel more "videogamey", that is to say artificial, and does away with the sense of uncertainty associated with the (hidden) time-based police chase scenes in previous games, where you were never quite sure exactly when you would lose a star. The new system might initially seem like an improvement, but you eventually realize that its ultimate consequence is to diminish the level of suspense.
Then: the save system. Not only is there auto-saving after every mission without having to drive back home, but it is now also possible to place yourself automatically at the exact starting point of a mission after a failure, without having to either reload or drive all the way to it from the hospital or police station from which you have just been discharged. This, again, seems at first an improvement -- until you realize that in the long run all it does is diminish the feeling of suspense even further. Because in previous games there was still the little matter of making it back home in one piece after every mission, and I can recall several gut-wrenching occasions when, having just completed a mission after a dozen failed attempts, I was killed or captured while trying to limp my way back home -- and therefore forced to replay the mission so as not to mar my statistics with deaths or captures (that's how I play GTAs in order to increase the realism and immersion of the experience -- since I generally hate the idea of playing with immortal avatars). Getting back in one piece used to be a large part of the experience of GTA, all of it now lost since the game saves the moment you've accomplished your objective -- even if you happen to be in the middle of a five-star police chase! Truly ridiculous stuff. And the mission replay option does not actually rewind time -- it fast-forwards it, so deaths and police captures accumulate every time you use it, making it useless for those who want to get through the game with clean stats. Of course you can turn off both options and play the game as usual, but given how boring the missions are I can't imagine anyone doing this. It's as if all the nerfing the game has undergone and all the hand-holding now built into it were designed exactly so as to make the tediousness of the missions bearable.
I said earlier that the structure of the game remains unchanged, and indeed it does, but to compensate for this and justify the new numeral beyond the engine upgrade, Rockstar has thrown in two new features: a handful of missions which *gasp!* actually give you a choice that ostensibly affects the plot (they do, but only in the most superfluous way possible, mostly by changing perhaps a couple of lines of text in the next cutscene), and a cute little social life simulator centered around chauffeuring and boring mini-games (darts, bowling, etc.) which, though not detrimental in itself (because it's entirely optional), really bogs down the experience for those who get caught up in it. Making matters worse, the rewards it offers (special "powers" such as, say, free cab rides, depending on which person you've managed to endear yourself to) are superfluous both in themselves and also considering how easy the game is in the first place. Both ideas are great in principle, then, but have been very poorly executed.
Another thing they messed up is the strong comic feel of previous games. I do not mean the humour -- this is still here and, in some respects at least, as great as ever (just check out the commie radio station and the mock internet and TV channels -- these alone are worth buying the game for. Lazlow is also back but not exactly in top form.) What I mean is the comic book feel of previous games. GTAIII and its, let us say "expansions", used relatively low polygon count character models, even by the standards of the time, because DMA Design, which created III before becoming Rockstar North, sucked at game engines. But they made up for this by making the characters look somewhat like 2D cardboard cutouts, thereby turning this technical deficiency into a charming aesthetic choice. But with the jump to a more powerful engine and higher res/higher polygon count characters they simply abandoned this look and made the characters basically as photorealistic as they could (when viewed from a distance, that is -- up close they look like Star Fox-era disjointed polygon blobs -- courtesy, again, of chronically incompetent engine design). And the same of course goes for the environments, so what we are faced with (though no one besides me seems to have noticed) is a fundamental change in art direction for the series. Couple that with the loss of the wonderful mood-setting loading screens of previous games -- again due to improvements in hardware performance whose effect on the game's art direction were not carefully considered -- and you have a sequel that feels as different from its predecessors as it plays similarly (-- and moreover nerfed for casual retards who suffer from motor neurone disease).
A change in art direction, of course, does not necessarily imply a change for the worse -- but in this case that is how it is. I have no doubt that a GTA with a dark edge and a realistic aesthetic, a truly violent Punisher- and Training Day-styled GTA, with most of the comic aspects removed and Max Payne- or Modern Warfare-style graphics, would have been something amazing -- but this game is nothing like that. The cartoon and comedy vibe that permeates the entire game, from plot to mechanics to ambiance, all the way down to the various HUD elements, clashes violently with the realistic textures and colors. I am not begrudging the increased resolution and polygon count -- far from it -- what I am saying is that these technical improvements should have been employed in the opposite direction -- towards increased stylization, not less. Think JSR, Killer 7, Okami, XIII, etc. That is what a GTA should ultimately look like, for that is the kind of look that fits the series' mood and play-style.
So, from a strict game design perspective, according to my extremely precise, hyper-sensitive evaluation scales, GTAIV is worth exactly 2.0 stars. Once you realize that the missions are not really going to improve and the difficulty is not going to ramp up, no amount of cool plot developments or mechanics improvements are going to keep you playing -- and the plot gets quickly watered down by countless side missions (which are however required to progress, exactly as in Vice City and San Andreas), whilst the improved combat mechanics soon lose their novelty, and once taken for granted even begin to feel oudated compared to other current games you could be playing instead, like any number of modern third-person action games, whether of the free-roaming or linear varieties. -- Still, for the first few hours at least, while you are still under the spell of the massive sensory overload of this new virtual playground, and still discovering all of the engine's various neat new tricks, the game is a blast, and it is with these few hours in mind that I give the game an extra star.