The moral discomfort of Niko’s situation also influences your decision-making to some degree: take a life, save a life; choose who to side with, and while it was hard to discern the impact of these things on the first playthrough, the game promises repercussions. Once again, thanks to technical advances, particularly graphically, Rockstar is driving more drama and interactive drama into these meaningful matchups, rather than resorting to bosses with huge health bars.
This kind of attention to detail, which exceeds your expectations, is evident throughout, with vast expanses of content in areas that even a thorough investigation might not uncover. The comedy club has been followed before launch and features routines by Ricky Gervais and Katt Williams, but you can also watch TV shows; police behavior reworked to rely on visual identification to maintain control over you, allowing you to sneak if you can out of sight of cars and helicopters, whatever your desired level (no small feat, as the police will lock you up and try all types now); you can’t customize Niko’s physical attributes or upgrade him, but you can change your clothes and buy anything you see in a clothing store, and the women you date will notice if you dress poorly. They also scold.
And the things you do with your friends are activities in themselves. Bowling is all about throwing speed and timed aftertouch; pool is full billiards, albeit with simplistic clues and physics; the drink ends up tripping and is more fun than it should be; and strip clubs are, er, unchristian high definition. If you get tired of other people, you can put your phone to sleep, take a slow taxi and turn on the radio, home to a nice variety of styles and some superstar DJs (Iggy Pop, Juliette Lewis, etc.) with brilliant DJ shows. chat and radio announcements. The hybrid car announcement, the health insurance debates, the Ikea provocation, Dragonbrain. There are also many secrets to discover; watch out for pigeons.
Then, by picking up your mobile phone, you can select multiplayer. Through a lobby system that allows you to team up and check other players’ details, you set up games that apply old rules and skewed derivatives of GTA to the game’s fabulous open world. In a world of lockdowns, with weapon spawn points on the minimap, normal and team deathmatches come down to knowledge of the terrain, which is only gained through persistence, but team-based Cops n’ Crooks, where one team starts out on foot, escorting a VIP to an escape point while cops show up in a squad car and try to chase them down, it’s an instant hit, and others like GTA Race are more than meets the eye. With pistols and rocket launchers, sore losers make it more entertaining for the front of the pack. Then there’s Free Roam, which lets you do whatever you want in Liberty City with up to 15 other people and leaderboards for everyone. (Look for more comprehensive comments on the GTA multiplayer post post.)
However, like previous PS2 games, some of this comes at a cost. We’ve all read about PS3 install time by now (keep an eye out for a special Face-Off feature next week), but framerate takes a hit too, tainted by Rockstar’s shameless ambition, with noticeable pop-in in some places. However, it never stopped me from having fun. The only thing that did that was the occasional stickiness of cover points when trying to maneuver quickly, the continued absence of checkpoints mid-mission (itself just irritating when a mission starts with a long drive, which is rare ) and somewhat clumsy on the ladder -Climbing and jumping objects. And perhaps Niko’s arsenal, which is quite basic, although versatile.
For the rest, GTA IV is the 10/10 you expected. Pretty much everything you do in Liberty City would be good enough to drive its own game, and the best parts would be good enough to outrun the competition, but the reason it works so well is that Rockstar has created a game that does not require patience to play. . This, along with its usual coherence and the best script in the series, is what makes GTA IV the best open world game to date, and why it will take something miraculous to wrest Game of the Year status from it.