There is a mean, spiteful part of me that lives way down deep in the frostbitten northwest of my ass that didn't want to write this review. I was planning on roping you in with the promise of a GTA IV review, only to torture you with a five page treatise on global warming and its effects on crop rotations in Southern counties in Midwestern US states instead. The sad thing is, I know there are some people who would have read the whole thing, eagerly awaiting the point at which I would finally cut the crap and get to the review, only to have their hearts broken when the final period was struck and there was nothing left to read but ads and the various footnotes that make up every website (and that you never scroll far enough to notice - did you know that every website gives out a million dollars a day when you click on the right footer? Of course you don't, you've never looked).

   I soon came to my senses, however, and decided I should indeed write a review. Partially because it's my job, but mostly because I understand the awesome power of the Internet, and know full well that if I tried to bullshit enough people, an angry mob would figure out my address, come to my home, and kill me in my sleep. Seeing as how I tend to enjoy life more than I loathe it, actually doing the review seemed like the more reasonable option.

   Some of you likely sense by now that I'm stalling, and you would be correct. When all you've heard is the cacophony of voices screaming in ear-shattering unison that GTA IV is an earth-moving, life-changing experience, and that anyone who thinks differently is a charlatan whore (I'm almost sure I saw that exact phrasing in a review somewhere), it makes the following words hard to write:

   GTA IV is a good game, possibly a great game, but it breaks no new ground, doesn't deviate much from the standard formula, and still exhibits enough flaws to hold the series back. In short, it is nowhere near the transcendental experience it has been hyped to be.

   Now please try not to get blood on the carpet when you show up at my house...

Eastern Europeans Sure Are Crazy...

   Before we get into the specifics of the game, let's talk a little about the plot. Surprise! This version of GTA actually has one! That's right, gone are silent protagonists with questionable motivations, and in steps Niko Bellic, a smart-mouthed Eastern European immigrant with questionable motivations. Niko comes to America at the behest of his cousin Roman, a charmer who tells Niko that he has made it big in the land of opportunity and now lives in a mansion, drives fast cars, and has so many women on his hands he never knows where he left his penis.

   Of course once Niko arrives he learns that his cousin has been lying, and that his life in Liberty City (the game's allegory for New York) isn't much better than what the cousins left back home. Soon, Roman introduces Niko to some shady characters who ask him to do illegal things. Before long, those shady characters introduce you to even shadier characters who ask you to do even more illegal things. Of course, this eventually leads to a web of lies and double-crossings, and before long it's you against the world, just like any good GTA game should be.

Who You Gonna Call?

He Must Really Hate That Dumpster...

   One of the other major changes in GTA IV is that the combat system has been revamped, both for better and for worse. The series has finally, FINALLY, plagiarized itself a cover system, and Niko can press up against walls, columns, free-standing sluts, and anything else in the environment to shield him from bullets. This new system will save you from many an untimely death, and kudos go to Rockstar for adding this much-needed wrinkle. Getting in and out of cover can be weird, however, as Niko will usually stand right up and calmly walk around as you try to move him from point to point, with bullets ripping into his meaty parts all the while. It's not perfect, but it'll do.

   In addition to adding cover, the aiming system has been slightly tweaked as well, allowing you both lock-on and free aim modes. Depressing the Left Trigger will lock you onto a nearby foe, while only pulling it halfway will allow you to aim over Niko's shoulder and fire wherever your little heart desires.

   It's good that you have the free aim, because the lock-on is just as inane and brainless as in the previous games. Locking onto an enemy puts your cursor in the exact center of his body, which is utterly useless whenever a bad guy is hiding behind cover. Trying to shoot using this feature will likely lead you to pump all manner of lead into whatever he is hiding behind, without ever taking away a single notch of his health bar. Then, as you are reloading, he'll spray your position with bullets in a similarly ridiculous fashion, and you'll both continue trading ineffective shots much like the infantry soldiers in every GI Joe cartoon ever made (did anyone ever actually get hit with a laser in those things?)

   The real kicker comes when you're lining up a perfect head shot with free aim, and then the slightest twitch of your finger causes you to lock onto the dumpster your enemy is hiding behind instead. In fights where seconds count, little glitches like these can cost you a lot of extra damage and wasted time as you restart the whole ritual. Furthermore, the lock-on mode isn't real intelligent about switching targets, and will sometimes select a far-away or harmless foe over someone who is standing right next to you decorating your face with a festive array of shotgun pellets. So while the whole gunplay mechanic has been improved, it's still very sloppy at times.

Hey Look, I Hit Another Tree. Sorry, Rainforest.

   Even though the combat controls are sloppy, they pale in comparison to the mess that driving turns into, especially in the game's early stages. Since you start the game in one of the poorer burgs of Liberty City, most of the cars you have access to are junkers and hoopties that really have little right to be on the road in the first place. This translates into what Rockstar bills as "realistic" driving controls, which is developer speak for "handles like a piece of shit." Those used to making tight handbrake turns and whipping quickly around corners will soon realize that trying to drive like you did before is a recipe for throwing yourself through the windshield. Oh sure, the super-deluxe sports cars you can find in the ultra-swank neighborhoods unlocked later in the game stand up to some fancy driving, but these beauties are hard to come by and, of course, are easily totaled. No, instead you'll spend most of your time trying to evade the police in four-door sedans that weren't meant to outrun a slug or outmaneuver a sloth, let alone shake an entire police force that's on your tail for trying to hijack an airliner (what? I wanted to go to Vegas!) The game also throws in motorcycles, boats and helicopters for the sake of variety, but the bikes and boats are almost a waste of time, and choppers are nearly impossible to come by for all but a few story missions.

   Further complicating things is the fact that the game camera sits rather low when you drive, making it hard to see traffic, and it has a nasty habit of hanging back when you maneuver, making it incredibly hard to see around a turn or figuring out a way to recover after a crash. While you can pretty easily manipulate things on an average drive, when you try to evade the police or precision-drive over a grandmother while calling up someone on your cell phone, you are in for a lot of painful crashes.

   The final issue with driving is the whole "drive and shoot" mechanic. The control system governing this whole endeavor is entirely too convoluted, and the whole experience is often too much for your eyes, brain, and fingers to process all at once. It seems like the whole clusterfuck could have been avoided if these chase and shoot missions would have allowed you to have someone in the passenger seat taking the shots, but trying to do it all yourself just causes a lot of cheap deaths and failed missions.

Something About Variety and Spices...

   One area where GTA really kicks it up a notch is when it comes to the number and variety of missions. This is a long game, and there is actually an Achievement in the Xbox 360 version for anyone who manages to complete all the story missions in under 30 hours. Jobs you take on range from the fairly standard "go to this location, kill that guy" to the more exotic "take this car with the dead body in it and drive it into the ocean." Through it all things stay very fresh, and the game does a great job of keeping you from falling into the cycle of the boring and predictable "steal car, kill guy, drive back, repeat".

   Another nice touch is that when you fail a mission (and trust me, it's gonna happen a lot), you can simply tap a few buttons on your phone and be magically transported right back to the beginning of the whole fracas. This really saves on the frustration of having to get out of the hospital (or police station), find another car, drive back to the waypoint, and then kick the whole thing off again. The one curious decision that the dev team made was that when you do fail a mission, you lose all the bullets and body armor that were expended over the course of your shortcoming, and so you are left in a weaker state than the last time. Good thing they at least let you keep both your testicles. Often, some of the more complex missions are borderline impossible without a full complement of body armor and a rather robust supply of ammo, so players are best served by simply reloading a saved game rather than jumping right back in to retry a mission. Thus, the seemingly convenient restart system is rendered somewhat moot.

   As a futher foul-up to this system, there are still no in-mission checkpoints that allow you to pick back up from a certain point when you can't quite nail the objective. There were times when I felt physically ill as I had slogged through a 30 minute mission, only to be gunned down at the last second by a straggling baddy or particularly rambunctious police officer, thus forcing me to do the whole thing over again. Nearly all of the missions easily lend themselves to checkpoints, so their omission is just an infuriating example of the developers choosing to take the easy way out rather than cutting players some slack on the more difficult moments.

Felonies are More Fun when You Commit Them with Friends

   A brand new feature for next-gen GTA is the inclusion of a number of online multiplayer modes, each of them with their own unique flavor and fun. If you and your buddies are just feeling mischievous, then go ahead and jump into Free Mode, where the whole city is your oyster and you can do whatever you want. If your friends are anything like mine, this usually involves jacking up your wanted level as high as you can and seeing how long you can survive the police onslaught. Get a bunch of friends together and let the fun begin! Aside from this sandbox mode, the game also features more unique fare like GTA Race, where you must get from one checkpoint to another using whatever vehicles, guns and routes you wish; as well as Cops and Crooks, where one team acts as a mob group trying to get the boss to safety, while the other fills the role of police and tries to take the mob team down. There are a ton of modes to choose from and I honestly can't think of a single omission in the whole bunch.

You're Very Pretty - In an Ugly Sort of Way

   Graphically, GTA is a very nice game, with its splendor only hampered by occasional pop-up or texture load-in. There are a few graphical glitches here and there, but with such a massive, load-free world small things like that are all but inevitable. Other than that, however, characters are nicely rendered, and the movements of their faces and lips are nearly perfectly synched to the dialogue. Of course, this is important seeing as how this is a story-driven game and the characters are going to be doing a lot of talking. The only thing I found odd was that Niko was constantly sporting a smug half-smile during cutscenes, as though he thought everyone else's problems were little more than jokes, and that deep down he knew that all this was meaningless. Perhaps that's what the developers were going for all along, in which case they nailed it, but for me it just seemed a little odd and out of place.

   The voice-acting cast also does a great job, and the only person who I have any reservations about is the Jamaican rasta character Little Jacob. It's not that I think he performed poorly, it's just that I don't believe I ever understood an entire sentence that came from his mouth. He may have been the most philosophical and thought-provoking entity in the whole adventure, if only I had some clue of a damn word he was saying.

After All That Bitching You Need to Buy This Game Anyway

   I've pointed out many flaws in this review, and in a way I think I'm simply reacting to the heaps of praise that have been showered onto a game which, while still being better than most of the other crap out there, doesn't deserve the "Game of the Century" crown that seems to already be resting upon its head. Rockstar tried a lot of new things with this title, and while they all work on a level, most of them also manage to fall flat in some way. However, the formula that's made all the other GTA games a success is still in full effect here, and it manages to build on those titles and improve on them in nearly every respect. While nothing particularly stands out, nothing (beyond perhaps the driving mechanics) really lags behind either.

   So go ahead and pick this game up, as you'll likely have a lot of fun. The improved story in the single-player, coupled with even more freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it(just don't get sucked into watching TV and surfing the Internet instead of going on missions, just like real life!), make this the ultimate experiment in do-it-yourself gaming. Furthermore, the inclusion of multiplayer lets you go online and wreak havoc with friends, which I think we could all use a little more of. Just remember this admonishment, GTA IV does nothing new, and it is not, I repeat, IS NOT, a great innovative leap forward in gaming.

   It's still a helluva lot of fun though...

       ... Brad