GTA IV: Demo debriefing

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What we liked and disliked about GTA IV

Couple this with a significantly improved combat system which has you ducking behind cover and interacting with the environment like never before in a GTA game, and we wouldn't be surprised if most of the fourth game's firefights took place indoors.

Believe it or not, in between projecting joy at the television screen we did collect a few concerns as well.

The code we saw was a few weeks old before we even arrived, so we think it would be unfair to kick up a stink over the small amount of shadow and pop-up glitches in the demo. That said, we're hoping for a lockdown on the framerate as the park scenes ran significantly smoother than the city - but that's not to say the city was chugging badly.

Less of a concern, more of something we're hoping to see, are the routines of pedestrians and the lives they live out. In our demo we didn't really get to see pedestrians get up to much other than walk around, though Rockstar notes that traffic and pedestrian routines were modified for the purpose of the demo.

Taxis as well, we're told, were far more common in our demo than they will be in the final game, and each will have a different cab driver rather than the single bearded fellow we met.

We've had our introduction and now we've picked at the real meat and veg of GTA IV. Next up, hopefully, is proper hands-on time and we're looking forward to seeing how that Gears of War-style cover system handles. And making some really big police car pile-ups, obviously.