Warning: May contain a few spoilers, but I'll try to keep them vague.)
It's been a month or so since I finished Grand Theft Auto IV, so it's about time I wrote down some overall thoughts about the game. Biggest question, first. Does it deserve the hype? Does it deserve those perfect tens? It's easy to be cynical, yet there are times when GTAIV dazzles and amazes, when the world immerses you completely and your actions inside of it enthrall. Rockstar North have built a complimentary world that at times towers above its rivals.
Then again, it's easy to be lost in the hype, and there are times when the game fails to live up to expectations and you can see the flaws and you feel a little shameful for rating it so highly.
It's largely dependent on how you play it. I went through it twice consecutively, something I hardly ever do with games. Two reasons for that: one for the Achievement to complete the game in under thirty hours, and two, rather less ashamedly, to make different story choices than those I'd made. I was interested in going back and trying again, changing my mind over who I would kill or not kill as the game demands at certain points. As you quickly discover, however, there's no ultimate result to making those decisions in the game and no pointers on how you should play it. It's just a gut feeling. Saving someone doesn't necessarily mean any consequences beyond a bonus cut-scene or two later down the line. It's also marred by the fact that the effect is diluted by the surrounding missions where Niko Bellic has no qualms in killing dozens of people to fulfill a goal. You feel like the game's trying to placate you as was Ralph Fiennes' Nazi character in Schindler's List, implored by Oskar Schindler that forgiveness can be just as powerful as execution; an ultimately futile gesture in a sadistic world.
The two most significant assassination choices give you access to a little more power or events but they're never necessarily the 'right' answer. Nor are they of consequence story-wise. No sooner have you executed your decision than it takes any significance to the main story away. It means nothing to you as a person. All the way up to the ending, nothing of how you've acted informs the ultimate decision and nothing can foreshadow what happens either way. Playing through twice and you can see that it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Emotionally, that's the intent, but as a whole it doesn't rely on the player's investment in morality, more's the pity.
Incidentally, there's something I like with how the game doesn't end after the credits roll. It literally picks up right where you stood and took your final revenge. Your phone rings and friends console you with kind words before leaving you alone to contemplate your now directionless life in a quiet park. Before you decide to steal a forklift and ride it into the river, but that's beside the point.
Anyway, I wanted to talk about I played the game, and playing once for fun, twice for speed, it's easy to see how the game falls apart a little under duress. Rockstar North clearly had a vision of how the player should progress. If you do all it wants - go on dates, follow the suggestions of your contacts as and when they come - the game world works. It feels like living a day to day existence as much as a GTA could in the midst of its many limitations. Ignore all that however, and the cracks really show. Besides the one or two mission-critical events, the social events don't have to be touched at all, again making no consequence to the plot and without those the game begins to feel empty as you grind away on missions.
It's a shame where dates are concerned, actually, because while the minigame activities are almost all terrible, simplistic or repetitious, the actual act is worth going through to hear what the characters say. Every few times you meet up, a dialogue will spring up discussing their thoughts and feelings, fleshing out the characters a bit more. That's what made it worth while, not wasting time on an easy game of darts when I could be somewhere else.
Taking all that away, all the diversions and side quests and fooling around, the second play through wasn't as interesting as the first. GTAIV only works as a coherent whole. It's not hard to see that a lot of its constituent parts are underdeveloped or uninteresting, yet they're set in a world that just begs to be explored and exploited. Sadly, it's not always rewarding. There are some glimpses: one of my favourite goals off the beaten path was finding vehicles by consulting pictures and location clues sent to you on your phone. I found that a far better treasure hunt than the lengthy search for pigeons. You feel like you're doing your own work rather than allowing for the handholding that the game insists on too much. A lot more of that could have gone a long way towards setting the game on the pedestal it doesn't quite deserve.
I've said quite a lot, so I'll save other comments for around the time of the downloadable content. I should mention the combat briefly, though. A much needed improvement, but still prone to sticking you against cover when you don't want it to. It felt brilliantly tactical on the first play through. A shame it lost some of it charm when you realise that most battles can be won by cutting straight through the middle with an automatic weapon and auto targeting.
Grand Theft Auto IV's world is a stunning visual and aesthetic achievement, though at times perhaps too awesome to accommodate the interactivity you'd truly desire. The GTA series comes with a lot of baggage and the 'fourth' game has to bear this weight on top of its own innovations. It can only really improve and iterate it seems. So while we get all the best parts of a much respected series, it also comes with some of the more archaic, needless bits (only saving at safehouses, no replaying completed missions, etc.). The improvements are all well and good, but the series is already becoming too set in its ways. Perhaps next time we need a true shake-up of the foundations as well. I don't think that'll happen, though. Do you?
