Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)

Dimitri Rascalov: You know, if there is one thing that I have learned, it is that we must obey the rules of the game. We can pick the game, Niko Bellic. But we cannot change the rules.

As a person living in Eastern Europe, this game is close to me like no other. Niko is not just the main character of this story - he is a real person. The feelings I get from him are such that I could right now go out into the streets of a not-so-good neighborhood and meet someone just like him - with principles, a heavy past, and a very harsh future.

But surely it's not just because of the main character that this game can be the best? Of course not. I don't want to talk now about the technical revolution created by Rockstar. I just want to say that Liberty City is not just little boxes, it's real arteries. This city is the main protagonist in all three stories from the Complete edition.

Liberty City is a city of contrasts. You drive through the Russian neighborhood and in a few minutes you're in a club in the center of LC, where there is no honor or dignity. If clubs get on your nerves, you can drive around the tourist spots, see how Latinos sell drugs in their neighborhoods and how bikers are rushing through their district. This city is life itself, this city is the embodiment of capitalism and how strongly the system breaks everyone, whether it's glamour or crime, here everyone is sinful.

I loved Grand Theft Auto IV. I never fully finished any other games in the series, but in terms of story and gameplay, I finished this one with great joy and satisfaction. It got a great story, good mechanics and a ton of stuff to do.

The story revolves around Niko, a immigrant from Serbia who came to the States for the American Dream. This dream however turns into a nightmare and the reason why is not worth to spoil and is something that one needs to experience for themselves.

Like all GTA games, you can free roam a huge city with stores, places of interest, food chains and a whole lot more. You can go wherever you want, whenever you want. The map is filled with hidden easter eggs and time specific events, and the map and its content alone, can keep you occupied for hours.

You progress through the story, keep in contact with a lot of different main and optional characters, each providing you with missions and challenges. You try to keep your relationship with them on a healthy level by meeting with them, play some darts, drink a beer, taking your girlfriend out for diner and it almost feels like a real life simulator sometimes. Relationships can go bad and sometimes, people do not want to talk to you anymore, so keeping an eye on their happiness is surely recommended.You earn cash, spend it on new fancy cars, clothing and weaponry and overall, become a feared mobster that takes care of business.

Grand Theft Auto IV looks amazing. Even today, the “outdated” graphics were no problem to look at and the framerate is still smooth as ever. The cars, character models and environments look still fine and I think GTA IV really aged well.

Grand Theft Auto IV allows you, just like Vice City and San Andreas, to import your own music tracks in the game. You get in your car, put on the radio and your own music is blasting through the game. It enhances your experience sooo much by just being able to do this.

Controlling Niko, cars and aiming your weapons all feel responsive and accurate, with the exception of the helicopters and some of the mini games like bowling and playing pool.

This is a game that can suck you in, letting you play for hours. You explore, roam, complete stuff, unlock stuff, buy stuff, and overall, just always keep you busy. If you want to play darts for three hours, go ahead. If you just want to become a millionaire, complete as many side missions first, it is your call.

The achievements in this game keep it even more interesting and gives you even more purpose to play. Going to the airport, get the cops on your tail and try to spin your car 180 degrees in a ramp was just so much fun.

The only problem I had with Grand Theft Auto IV are the horrendous helicopter controls. I am not sure it is on purpose, but flying a helicopter in this game is just as hard as doing it in real life. Especially in the end of the game, where you need to act fast and fly a Black Hawk helicopter after a terrible chase scene, it was pure torture.

But nevertheless, I loved every second of this game, its story and its content. It will keep you occupied for hours, and I would surely recommend it to everyone.

A historia é praticamente o único ponto forte, mas o próprio jogo não sabe o que fazer com ela.

O jogo faz um bom uso da critica do tão desejado "Sonho Americano" ao mesmo tempo que nos mostra um tema de vingança explorado porcamente pela empresa. O Niko uma hora se encontra no maior modo sério e do nada começa um "Ultimate Grind" fazendo dinheiro no jogo do tigrinho.

O combate corpo-a-corpo é sim muito interessante, mas sinceramente não existe um que realmente vá ficar alterando entre arma e soco pra passar um missão em uma área apinhada de inimigos.

Se brinca bastante com a questão das missões ir ao ponto A, matar alguém e ir ao ponto B para terminar ela, mas GTA IV leva isso ao extremo. Matar é a única coisa que você faz 5 horas seguidas dentro desse jogo até ele te dar uma missão de dirigir do ponto A ao B novamente.

Ainda acompanhado de bugs e má otimização, a Rockstar deixou GTA IV idêntico a como foi portado para PC.

Grand Theft Auto IV é nem de longe um jogo ruim, mas tem péssimas decisões feitas pelos desenvolvedores, um mapa minimamente interessante, personagens meia boca, e historia desnecessariamente longa.

I've been a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series since the first game came out, and Grand Theft Auto IV is definitely the best one yet. The game is simply amazing in every way.

The graphics are simply stunning. The city of Liberty City is brought to life in incredible detail. The characters are also well-animated and look realistic.

The gameplay is incredibly fun and addictive. The missions are challenging and rewarding. The open-world gameplay allows you to explore the city however you want.

The story is one of the best I've ever seen in a video game. It's complex, emotional, and thought-provoking. The characters are well-developed and relatable.

Overall, Grand Theft Auto IV is a masterpiece. It's the best game I've ever played, and it's a must-play for any fan of action-adventure games.

This game is just boring. Story, voice acting, graphics, world building, and whatever else you wanna cite in support of this game don't matter when the actual gameplay is a slog. The missions feel like chores, and without checkpoints can become migraine-inducing, and driving (what you're doing 90% of the time) is atrocious, so much worse than any other 3D GTA it's unbelievable.

Watching a supercut of all the cutscenes in this game will give you 99% of what people like about it. Playing it is a waste of time.

Fair warning that there’s nothing even approaching an original thought in this review; this game has been retrospected to death in the years since its release and I am about to beat some long-dead horses.

I never finished this when it came out—I got about half way through and then just drifted off it. Not due to the game being bad, but it was just a time of my life where I wasn’t playing games as much. Coming back to it nearly 15 years later has been interesting.

What works

Even by 2022 standards this is still an impressively realised city. While it lacks the large, exploration-encouraging open areas of the San Andreas-es that both preceded and followed it, there is a density to the world that does not feel outdated today.

I found myself far less interested in going off the beaten path to drive around purely for fun (largely because there isn’t much “off the beaten path” to speak of), but I regularly marvelled at the amount of work this must have taken to build.

It can also look fantastic; sure that “painterly” LOD effect turns the entire middle distance onwards into a smeary mess, but when you’re driving across a bridge at night in the rain, skyscrapers lit up in the distance and headlights reflecting off the road, it’s really something to behold. I distinctly remember finding that view across the river breathtaking in 2008, and it’s still impressive today.

The story is solid (at least for the front half, more on that below), and Niko Bellic is an interesting character with a lot more self-awareness than previous GTA protagonists have had. Motion capture and character performance in general was also a massive step up from previous entries in a way that appears far more than a single generational leap. The controls and shooting fare the same, this being the first GTA game to control like what we would now consider a modern third-person game.

What doesn’t work

(Sorry horses).

While this game can look fantastic, it usually doesn’t. Why did they make it so grey!? The colour filters are so egregious in this game that skin tones frequently look like low-budget zombie makeup. When it rains, the game effectively goes greyscale. This by itself betrays the year this game was released, right at the peak of “everything must be grey and brown because grey and brown is realistic”. I hear they did address this in The Ballad of Gay Tony, which I haven’t yet played but do intend to (assuming it works on the Series X back compat.).

I will never understand what on earth they were thinking with the social missions. “Cousin, want to go bowling?” is the overarching meme of this game, so I won’t dwell on this too long, but I find it very strange that no-one at Rockstar stopped to consider that it isn’t any fun. Random interruptions to do dull mini-games, offering nothing worth having if you agree, but characters get pissy at you and send you passive aggressive texts if you say no? Rockstar plz.

The controls are hugely improved over the PS2-era entries, but it’s not all good. The Euphoria engine makes for very realistic looking character movement, with the caveat that actually playing the game on foot feels like you’re on a satellite delay. Niko lurches around like he’s filled with ballast water and the most frequent cause of death (at least for me) was getting stuck in cover or against a wall while an NPC shoots me directly in the face.

As for driving: it gets a lot of hate in this one, but I think it’s okay. The “lower bound” of performance for the shittier cars is far too low, in a way that makes certain vehicles actively miserable to drive, but you get used to the model and it can be quite satisfying. Bikes can get in the sea though—I avoided them completely apart from when the game forced me onto one.

While the story starts off interesting, I found it became quite dull and muddled by the end. I was just doing hit jobs for four different mafia dudes, which in a gangster flick might be a thrilling tale of complex webs of betrayal, but here they’re all sort of generic and indistinguishable. Earlier setups like the United Liberty Paper promise intrigue but don’t really pay off with anything interesting.

I think the decision to have two endings did a disservice to the story, because both of them feel a bit tacked on. Also, because I largely ignored the social missions, I had almost no attachment to Kate and so her murder at the wedding just came off as hilariously tonally inept.

This last point doesn’t really fit anywhere else, but it’s something I regularly found so baffling throughout the game that I need to mention it. Rockstar went to the effort of recording multiple takes of a huge number of non-cutscene conversations in the game, so that if you fail the mission and need to replay it you aren’t listening to the same conversations over and over. Why didn’t they just add checkpoints? The only time I was ever frustrated by failing a mission in this game is knowing that I would need to repeat five minutes of driving to where anything interesting happens. Instead of recording multiple pieces of dialogue, why not just...not make me repeat the boring driving part?

Conclusion

This game got me thinking a lot about what I want from GTA 6. I did complete V, but haven’t played it since about 2014, so my memory of the ways it improved on IV is hazy. However, I think for 6 to succeed it desperately needs more variety in missions. From what I remember, V made some good progress on this with its longer, multi-part heist missions. 6 will need more like that, because I don’t think a long string of “drive to place, shoot some guys” broken up by the occasional “chase a guy and kill him” or “chase a guy but you can’t kill him until he gets to a place with more dudes” is going to cut it for future entries.

Also fun lil’ one: this game was pre-financial crisis, and one of the parody radio ads for awful products offers a credit card with a 27% interest rate 🥲

After finishing GTA: IV, I learned that:

1. Pavements are surfaced with graphite, not bitumen
2. Money is completely unnecessary
3. Cell phones are annoying
4. Friends are bothersome
5. Dating sucks
6. Rats can fly and
7. Guns are easy to handle

I partly unlearned the English language.

But, since I heard 'Heaven and Hell' by Black Sabbath on one of the radio stations, all is forgiven.

Now, should I start working on the three papers I am supposed to write or play another game? Of course, it’s time to start playing ‘Bastion’.

Actual Score: 2.5/5

The Good

• The Liberty City map is huge and must have taken a lot of time to build. On the other hand, missions send you from one side to another again and again, so the size gets annoying quickly. There is also no reason to explore Liberty City, except for some body armor and health there aren't any cool upgrades hidden.
• A new feature in GTA IV is the GPS. Its a useful tool to navigate the map more efficiently. Too bad that it makes you look into the lower left hand corner, instead of learning the layout of the city.
• There is a cover system implemented that can be useful in firefights, but since its controls are so cluncky I preferred to stay in over-the-shoulder mode and imagined that it was an FPS.

The Bad

• For a game where you are driving around 80% of the time, it's too bad that its controls and car handling are the worst. Cars accelerate like lawnmowers, start drifting at walking speeds and they all feel like trucks. Only sportscars are somewhat decent but even they are severely underwhelming and not that fast. It also doesn't help that sportscars are so rare. To add to that, the traffic in Liberty City is mentally challenged and out to get you. It feels like traffic tries to crash you intentionally when driving at higher speed.
• GTA IV sadly is a long game, because it is the most boring one I have played until now. The city is huge but so gray and uninteresting. The 3 minute (!) video intros before every mission are boring and uninteresting. The missions are uninspired and repetitive. The weather is 80% fog and 20% rain. The main characters never draw you into the story and frankly, I couldn't care less about Niko Bellic... Also you can say goodbye to the cool gameplay features of San Andreas & co: tuning and tweaking cars, buying mansions, RC car missions, RPG aspects, lots of stuff hidden around town, area control, Police/Medic/Firefighter missions...
• GTA IV for PC is a buggy console port. Even today, 9 year later, the game runs painstakingly slow on high end hardware. There are a lot of flashing textures, jitter in movies, buggy animations and finally also a game breaking bug in that horrible final mission! Joy!

I'm happy that I completed this game, but I didn't enjoy the ride at all.