There's already been a lot of blog entries and forum posts devoted to what makes Grand Theft Auto IV such a special game, but as our pick for Game of the Year, we obviously feel that a lot of it certainly bears repeating.

There are really two big things to Grand Theft Auto IV: the gameplay and the setting. On the gameplay side, things were refined and tuned for a somewhat more realistic experience than you've seen in past GTA games. Gunplay became a bit easier to manage thanks to better control and a legitimate cover system. Driving became a bit more realistic and, as a result, a little tougher to manage. But for players who weren't up to the challenge, abundant taxis let you get around Liberty City with ease. The mission design was grounded in a gritty reality that kept things from spinning too far out of the realm of believability. Overall, it certainly played very well.

But actually playing GTA IV is really only half of the puzzle. The world built by Rockstar, and the characters that inhabit it, are unlike anything we've seen in a game so far. Watching Niko Bellic come to America and quickly discover its seamy underbelly became immediately engrossing and made the story and the missions far more powerful than they've been in the past. The colorful characters he'd encounter along the way, all of them flawed in their own way, only add to the overall experience. These characters, and your interactions with them, made Liberty City feel like a real place, and made your actions in it feel like they carried some actual moral weight.

Most games are built around in-game action, and the story sort of exists merely to tie the action together. GTA IV has that action, but it also continually drives home a common theme of deciding between loyalty and wealth. Between staying true to yourself or cashing in for a quick slice of what many perceived to be "the American dream." Watching Niko live out the choices we made for him and going on to see the ripple effect that those choices caused is something that few games can accomplish at all. And Grand Theft Auto IV made all that look easy.

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