So once you reach your destination there’s a good possibility that there will be some fighting. This starts off with a few punches and kicks, and soon graduates to firefights with pistols, shotguns, SMGs, Molotovs, and eventually sniper rifles and assault rifles. With a mouse you hold down a button to aim, and it all works fairly well.

The problems arise when you try to take cover. By default, hitting ‘Q’ enables you to hug walls, cars or other solid cover. This works most of the time, except on the odd occasions when you seem unable to lean round particular corners, or when faced with a door, which will always swing shut in your face, and stop you from shooting the bads. This does get frustrating, especially when effective enemy-slaughter is so essential to the completion of most of the missions. This is the one part of the game that feels under-developed, and it will irritate on occasion. It’s not too hard if you remember to stock up on body armour and bullets, but some fights take you by surprise.

You’ll certainly experience a degree of fatigue in trying to get through all these missions. They’re almost all bound up with driving to somewhere, shooting someone, perhaps chasing them through the city first, and starting again if you mess up. You can’t decide not repeat them if you fail, since most drive the overall plot. Worse, there’s no quicksave: just an option to repeat the whole thing – housekeeping errands and driving missions too. It’s another area where frustration can start to set in. Fortunately, these missions are all bookended by GTA IV’s wonderful cast of characters, who ensure that this is one of the few games in existence where we’re not clamoring to get past the cutscenes.

Perhaps what’s most entertaining about all the recent Grand Theft Auto games, and this one is no exception, is how the missions and the sandbox world end up colliding. For example: a shootout in a warehouse attracts the attention of cops, and the escape means killing police, stealing a car, then heading into the city to lose them. We were soon involved in a gun battle with six cop cars, and quickly had no tires. We bailed out, with our accomplice in tow, and stole a truck. We headed onto the freeway, still firing wildly out of the windows. Sadly, our escape was not to be and a headlong crash sent us flying through the windshield, out of the overpass, and headfirst onto a beach 30 feet below... time to restart. The second time around we take off on foot, leading to a running battle with cops across rooftops and parkland. Ludicrous, escalating carnage is this videogame series’ trademark, and it doesn’t pale in GTA IV.

Crucially, this incarnation has discarded many of the roleplaying elements of San Andreas, such as fitness, and simply focuses on the matter of there being loads of things to do, aside from the vehicular carnage and inevitable homicide of the missions. This means that it’s the city itself that is the star of the game. As we’ve said, it’s based on New York. Each of the four game regions is based on a different borough. You start out in a Brooklyn analogue, and travel into equivalents of Queens, The Bronx and Manhattan. Each region has numerous attractions, some of them based on the real world. Coney Island and the Statue of Liberty are there, for example, and Rockstar’s version of the Empire State Building looms over the skyline.

It’s the richness of the city that satisfies. It’s a massive place, teeming with life. This is largely an illusion of course, but that barely matters. It’s as close to the ‘living city’ ideal that these games have been aiming for as we’re likely to get. Dozens of random interactions take place with your every trek down a street, and the options for getting into trouble are near infinite. We got into a fight on the way to the subway, and ended up being chased by helicopters – it’s that kind of town. It’s also dripping with sideline amusements: the dialogue of the burger-diner waitress, the weird performance art shows at the clubs, even some standup by Ricky Gervais.

While you discover some of this while doing the core missions, it’s the peripheral distractions of both going out with Roman and meeting your girlfriends that really make your virtual life so worth living. Although incredibly simplistic, they’re oddly touching. Getting drunk with Roman or pursuing your ladyfriends offer little practical benefit, but is nevertheless a welcome aside, and a healthy dose of human color in the game. Going bowling or to a show – these are entertainments in their own right, and the way in which GTA IV presents them as casual offshoots of the main game is enthralling.

We do have some grumbles to close with. The first is the additional fluff that sits in between you and the game. You need to log into Rockstar Social Club to go online – fair enough we suppose – but then you need to log into Games for Windows Live too. It’s a bizarre hindrance, and totally unnecessary. It’s exactly the opposite of the kind of streamlining we expect of games today. We also experienced some major framerate wobbles. It was nothing fatal, and the game looks incredible on an 8800 and a Dual Core processor, but the lag was nevertheless in evidence. Otherwise this seems like a deft conversion: GTA IV is astonishingly beautiful, and playable on gamepads or mouse and keyboard alike.

Finally, the multiplayer component has been expanded for PC and integrated video uploading comes as standard too – replays of great moments can be easily saved and edited.

Dec 2, 2008