Best GTA to start with
Ah GTA. The stalwart if the British childhood. Ones of those things which you bought because you knew your parents wouldn’t want you to. And then showed to all your friends and laughed at the ones who couldn’t buy it because there parents actually gave a damn about what they were doing.
I feel into the category of the non-GTA owners, so this is infact the first GTA i have ever owned. And what a GTA to start off with.
IV took all the craziness of San Andreas and threw it towards the Saints Row dev team. Instead they pulled out a paint brush and turned everything brown, made the entire go “GRRR” and preceded to make the best city i have ever seen in a game.
Liberty City is the true star of the game. It is the first proper living breathing world i have ever seen in a game. Oblivion’s and Fallout 3’s cities are junk compared to the details in GTA IV. Fire hydrants, newspaper stands, mail boxes even the rubbish in back alleys. Driving through Liberty is surreal. It doesn’t just exist. It breathes. And that's before any people and traffic are added. The citizens of LC act like any real person, each with needs and wants. the AI does occasionally mess up, with civvies running into the road or getting stuck. But the tem at Rockstar did well on the world
Unfortunately, not so well on the rest of the game. The story is passable with all the missions very similar to each other (with some exceptions like the bank robbery mission) and the formula becomes samey at the half way point. The narrative behind it is good, with a varied mix of characters. Some are good fun to be around while others are just irritating bastards. Best of all is Little Jacob, a rasta drugs dealer who becomes one of Niko’s (the main character) best friends. His dialogue is hilarious but he also drags out emotion with his various lines.
Something else that fails is the whole relationship system. Nothing is more annoying than your cousin phoning you up half way through a mission to ask you to go bowling.I don’t give a damn about his feelings, i just want car chases and huge explosions not wasting time bowling. Minigames annoyed me when I played SA and they are not any better here. Same with races. Anytime a dev adds races, i scream and burn down a postal van. That's how pissed off I get.
GTA on pc also gains another annoyance from settings. It requires a ridiculously good PC to look any good and also limits how far you can go. Giles has a midrange PC and is forced to play it in 800x600 when it isn’t burning his graphics card to a cinder.
Now you must be wondering how the hell i can say i really like the game. the answer is simple; Free Mode online with friends. Fuck deathmatch, fuck co op missions. if you want to play GTA properly load up the online, get some friends and make up your own crazy game modes. Hide and Seek, police evasion or just blowing stuff up, free mode is the place to be. I would have bought the game if free mode was the only feature.
So what’s new if you’ve played GTA 4 on Xbox or PS3? Well video editing features make it easy to add cool movies to YouTube. New controls and a new entry for achievements. But my favourite feature is Independence FM. Add your music to the ingame radio and then cruise down to Times Square with U2 blazing out loud and clear. It makes the game so much more fun, to be able to have the music you want as opposed to some of the rubbish already on there.
GTA IV has its faults but its good points far out weight them. Its a crazy experience that try's to be serious but fails around the time the body count moves into triple figures. But MP free mode is the real point of enjoyment that you will go back to again, and again and again.
GTA IV on PC gets 87% and a recommendation
