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Rating:  -
All, ALL of the older GTA were better. It is a fun game to play, with better graphics than before. It just isn't as fun as Vice City, SA, or any of the old GTAs. The game goes by a lot faster, the story line okay at best, and the best vehicles suck!!! There are also a lot of bugs with the new graphics.
Rating:  -
In Short:
1. You can play online in every way you want to with up to 16 poeple.
2. The controls are the best yet with only the close combat of inside a building being frustrating.
3. The story for this one is the best yet. It's easy to connect with the main character and his struggle.
4. What are you waiting for? I guarantee that you'll spend at least 100 hours on this game. That's between beating it and messing around for fun.
In Long:
I'd have to say, after playing every single incarnation of GTA there is mind you, this is the best yet. This game stand in a stark contrast to Vice City. Where as Vice City was all about getting and having everything, literally, this game is about having and starting from nothing. It's about all in all being a good person at heart, but just having bad luck and meeting the wrong people. That's the story line in a nut shell.
The game play is truly refined. Some people complain about the controls, but quite honestly the controls are the best I've seen for GTA. Walking and Running serve their purposes and get you to your vehicle, but the one place you'll be cursing the controls is in the extremely tight spaces of apartment complexes. In these places you'll be wishing you could juse use FPS controls whenever you wanted to. That's the one thing I wish they could have added.
The driving takes some getting use to as it's utterly changed. It's for the better though as it's gone from being "cartoony" in that it responded nothing like a real vehicle to MUCH more like the real world. Once you get use to it, you'll love it. Vehicles respond pretty much how you would expect them to in every way. Muscle cars have power for the straight aways and aren't that great at turning, the rule of decelerating into a turn and accelerating out of it and the fact that if you speed on a motor cycle your going to die after rolling for a mile or two are all true.
Weapon switching is much better this time around. Where as in a couple of the incarnations you had three tiers of weapons, this game has only two and there is a very clear upper and lower tier. The weapons work beautifully and so does the aiming system. Not only is aiming a breeze, but you can lock on to which ever target you're pointing at by fully pressing down the aim button. You can then adjust the lock by moving the "tethered" reticule. So once you know exactly how far up to push in order to aim directly for the head, you're pretty much golden.
The game can be beaten with thirty hours if you JUST do the storyline. Of course nobody will wanna do that their first time through. It's a really great game with a TON of other stuff to do as optional side missions. This missions have ABSOLUTELY no bearing on the storyline! Then there is the online. That thing that everybody has been craving. You can now go online in Free Mode and just play with up to sixteen people in the huge city. Have fun! :D
Rating: -
Having just beaten the single-player portion of GTA IV, I am having a hard time sorting out my feelings for the game. On one hand, it's a blast to play, and you can easily lose 30-60 hours of your life to the streets of liberty city. On the other hand, there really isn't anything here that you haven't seen before.
PROS: Terrific graphics, awesome "sandbox" (I'm starting to hate that term) gameplay, the most realistic city ever rendered. Tons of game content, great voice acting and production values, tons of cool music to listen to, and the deepest and most mature GTA game yet.
CONS: Underneath the next-gen looks... it's the same game. The control, which had supposedly been revamped, still stinks. You spend tons of time battling the camera (especially in close-quarters combat and when driving). The new aiming system works pretty well, though it's not foolproof. The biggest problem I had, however, was the canned, cliched and repetitive mission formats. Virtually all of the missions follow one of three structures: 1)Nikko must kill someone. Drive to where they are, shoot them. 2)Nikko must chase someone, THEN kill them. Get in your car, get really frustrated at the unrealistic physics, kill the target. 3)Nikko must recover drugs/guns/etc from bad guy. The chase scenes are particularly annoying, as run-of-the-mill cars will suddenly outrun your high-end sports car. The new car physics model is a case of overcompensation- in trying to make it less arcady, the developers have made it unrealistically floaty.
The interpersonal relationships is another gimmick (much like altering your body type in San Andreas) which gets old really quick. There are no properties to buy, meaning you can expect to do a lot of driving between safehouses the game gives you. There are no checkpoints, meaning that many longer missions will have you throwing the controller at the wall when you fail and have to repeat them from the very beginning (though Roman's taxi service does help a bit).
Conclusion: I still had a lot of fun with this GTA, but it also became readily apparent how the core gameplay has NOT evolved since GTA III. Rockstar adds little tweaks, which is great, but the missions feel like deja vu. Why is it so hard to make a character control scheme that doesn't have the character feel like he's on rails?
Rating:  -
I have to admit that I can only play this game for a little while at a time. There is only so much mayhem to cause before I get bored and go back to some other 360 title. It will probably take me forever to finish it. So far, I have enjoyed the robust story. The gameplay is pretty intuitive also. However, Rockstar, as always, hits a few negative spots with me. First, missions that are way too complicated or simplistic mixed in at the same "level". Second, the opening/loading cutscene...hey Rockstar, I don't want to have to see this stupid hooker sucking on her lollypop every time I play the game...I should be able to skip this. Third, being able to interact with everything is cool...I can steal any car, but can't get into any building or break any window...just odd. On the same note, why is it that the hood can fly off my car, but if I clip an OPEN car door in traffic, it wrecks the WHOLE car? Shouldn't the door just get snapped off? All the same, a worthy addition to the franchise. Problem is, GTA isn't my favorite series. Only 3 stars.
Rating: -
The Grand Theft Auto series has always been a mixed bag for me. I really enjoyed GTA3, and played it nonstop until I finished it. I then moved to Vice City and couldn't have been more disappointed by a sequel; I only played it for a couple of days before I moved on to other games. Then GTA San Andreas came out and I again was hooked again. My only issues with GTA: San Andreas was that it was entirely too long, I spent A LOT of time playing it, but it just seemed like the amount of missions were endless. After a while I got an XBOX 360, so eventually I stopped playing the XBOX altogether, leaving San Andreas unfinished. Fast forward a few years and now we are at one of the most anticipated games for quite a while. GTA IV. While the game is not really that bad, not nearly as bad as Vice City, it still is not as good as San Andreas or even GTA 3.
Without boring you with the storyline behind the game, I will just say that in this edition of the series, you are Niko Bellic a Russian immigrant now living in Liberty City (New York City).
Game play is very similar to previous installments, so if you are familiar with the other games in the series, then you will be able to pick this one up right away. In addition to what you already know about the game there are some additions.
You have a Cell Phone, in which you can actually call your in game buddies and girlfriends to go on dates and/or to the bowling, strip clubs, etc. They will also call you if you ignore them for too long.
Instead of being able to just walk up to a parked car open the door and drive away, this time around you actually have to break the window first, then hot wire it before you are able to drive away. This stuff is done automatically by the game, but it takes time, and with the very high police presence in this game, you really have to pick the cars you want to take to avoid an annoying police chase.
Another addition is that you can actually watch TV while you're in your safe house. There are about 4 or 5 different channels, and there are actually different shows that you watch, it starts to repeat after a while, but it is still a cool addition if you really just want to waste time without having to do something all the time.
Finally, you can also go to an internet café and surf the internet, receive emails (including SPAM) and read hilarious news stories.
The graphics in the game are ok, but it seems like one is looking through a brownish film. The graphics are comparatively much better than San Andreas, but not as good as I have seen in other games. I can easily look past this however, considering the fact that there are always a lot of things going on the screen at one time.
My biggest complaint about the game are the absurdly poor controls and slow character movement. Game play to me is what makes a game and sadly GTA IV's controls are not very good. As another reviewer already stated, one of the most annoying type of mission are missions in which you have to kill 23,478 guys by yourself. Just the simple task of killing one person is more difficult than it really has to be. First of all the buttons are very difficult to use during intense fire fights. By the time you get the cover button to work properly, you would have already lost 25% of your energy, and by the time you are able to move to another place, another 10 - 15% of your energy is gone. All of this and you haven't even begun shooting yet! If you are lucky enough to have enough energy left to put up a good fire fight, you then have to worry about your bullets not even hitting the guy you are shooting at. I have been in situations where I was literally two feet away from a guy, and my gun shots did NOTHING to him. Yet he turns around and kills me with 3 shots. After I died I was given the option to start the mission over, but then I had to go through the tedious process of driving there first. I seem to remember San Andreas allowing you to skip the driving part if you have already done it, but I don't see any kind of option like this in GTAIV.
Another annoying type of mission are the car chase missions. There are three levels when it comes to car handling cars in GTA IV: bad, worse, and terrible. NONE of the cars handle great and a simple left or right turns sends your car sliding and spinning out of control giving the guy you are chasing ample time to get away. You can always turn slower but then the enemy will still get away because you are not moving fast enough. In addition to this, I have noticed some car chase missions are completely scripted in which the same type of road hazards occur every single time. For example I had to chase down and kill this guy and while I was chasing him he causes a truck to spill pipes all over the road, then later on causing a taxi to spin out of control heading straight towards me. I failed the mission the first time, so when I tried again, the EXACT same things happened again!
The game controls alone are enough to make me not want to play the game anymore or at least not as much as I played GTA3, or San Andreas, but then I run into the problem of the new features of the game become more annoying than enjoyable. A prime example is your cell phone. If you are like me and just spent an hour or so beating a couple of missions, all you want to do is save the game, but while you are going to your safe house to save, you get a call from one of your many friends asking to do something. You can always ignore them or say no, but then that hurts your friendship rating. So either you lose your friendship rating or reluctantly do something, spending more time playing the game. You can always turn stealth mode on, to stop people from calling, you but it seems to turn off by itself and you have to set it back to stealth mode again every time you load a game.
I haven't played this game in about a month. There are a good number of other games that I have that are more enjoyable than GTAIV and I probably won't ever beat it if it turns out to be very long. I give it 3 stars overall and 3 stars for fun. It's not as bad as Vice City, it just SHOULD have been much better, considering all the hype surrounding it.
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