Since our latest demo of GTA IV, Rockstar has announced that the game will be released worldwide for PS3 and Xbox 360 on April 29.

It's been a full five months since our last real look at Grand Theft Auto IV, and all we've seen since then is a single trailer, the box art and a trickle of occasional details. That trickle turned into a spurt last week, however, when we met up with Rockstar to see what they've been up to - which, incidentally, appears to have been making the game a whole lot crazier than it was the last time we saw it.

Our previous peeks at GTA IV made it seem relatively subdued and even somber compared to earlier games in the series, but this latest glimpse blew all that out of the water. Literally. With explosive boat physics.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Our time with the game was broken into three missions, which showed off a bunch of GTA IV's cool new features and gave us an excellent look at the Liberty City boroughs of Broker (a stand-in for Brooklyn), Bohan (the Bronx) Algonquin (Manhattan) and Alderney (New Jersey). The first mission we saw, "Search and Delete," tasks Niko with whacking an informant for Brucie, the shirtless skinhead douchebag glimpsed briefly in the last trailer. Brucie runs a garage in Broker, and as the mission begins, Niko strides in and introduces himself to one of Brucie's unresponsive employees - who's working underneath a car - with a sharp kick to the ribs.

The irked mechanic calls out Brucie himself, who turns out to be an even bigger douche than was hinted at in the video - and worse, he's the overbearingly friendly kind. Over the course of their encounter, Brucie aggressively fawns over Niko and how "cold" he is - mainly because of Niko's unblinking acceptance of the job and repeated insistence that he just wants to get paid - but things start to go south when he fakes a flurry of punches at Niko's face.

"That's pretty good," Niko says, grinning dangerously. "Can I see that again?" Brucie nervously complies, at which point Niko grabs him in a perfect, painful-looking wrist lock. Unfazed, Brucie raves appreciatively about Niko's mastery of "Red Army shit" before laying out the details: Niko needs to kill Lyle Rivas, an informant, before the guy can testify against Brucie's unnamed friends. First, though, Niko's got to steal a police car.

Three GamesRadar editors on two continents saw the GTA IV demo - PlayStation Editor Mikel Reparaz and Xbox Editor Charlie Barratt in the US, and Associate Editor Matt Cundy in the UK. In the interest of getting everyone's unique viewpoint, we've rounded up all three to offer color commentary on each stage of the demo:
Matt Cundy: I thought the cutscene showed that in terms of character, it's definitely still GTA.
Mikel Reparaz: Yeah, the humor's still there. Brucie seems like a pretty entertaining character, one of those guys who's relentlessly irritating but still fun to watch.
Charlie Barratt: Niko's definitely got a sense of humor, even if it seems a little snide, sarcastic and mean.
MC: Niko's definitely a badass, the way he kicks the guy under the car and then near enough breaks Brucie's arm. Cool. Larger than life is how they described him in the demo, and that seems pretty accurate.
MR: Yeah, and so does "obsessed with money."
CB: For a man desperate for money, he's very confident and smug when dealing with people… you can already picture him biting and clawing his way to the top. He treats Brucie almost like a silly child.