Grand Theft Auto IV: Kikizo Preview 3

Our third GTA IV preview spectacular reveals exclusive new details for the first time anywhere, and takes a much broader look around Liberty City in a fantastic build of the game that's nearing completion.

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Playboy X has made friends with a wealthy Arab guy who's bought a development site that we're en route to now. The mafia have heard about the plans and are objecting; they've infiltrated the trade union, and they've called a strike of all the construction workers and are basically disrupting the progress of the development. So the Arab has spoken to Playboy X to go and find who the ringleaders of the strike are and take them out. If only Niko could also go visit whichever faction is preventing all the best TV shows from production right now, he'd be doing everyone a favour. "That cat and me is gonna be tight as two cellmates on a lockdown after this!", enthuses Playboy.

Niko questions the operation:

Niko: I don't know how good your plan is though, Playboy. If I get rid of the guys on the site, will there be more? If it's a union thing doesn't that make it bigger than a few guys with guns?

Playboy has a strategy though. He's left this car around the corner from the development site, where we're going to get some useful hardware.

Playboy X: You best take them out with your rifle before you hit the rest of them. I'm going to get in position where I can see all the shit going down. If you can take out the main cats, the rest of them shouldn't be a problem. When you in there, I'll give you the lowdown on where these main cats is at.

There are some lookouts that might make our route in a little bit troublesome if we just go in all guns blazing, so we're going to go up high using a service lift and then take advantage of our long-lensed sniper rifle. There's going to be a number of ways of getting up to the top of buildings, Rockstar tells us, and the service lift is just one of them in this example. Once we're up there, we're going to take out the lookouts, and then get down on the ground and into the construction site. We can still faintly hear the car radio from way down below up at the top here.

The lookouts, who are located high up on different cranes in our line of sight, fall down a long way to their death. One of them we don't actually kill with a bullet but the shot makes him fall off and then he's a goner. A cinematic camera follows him on his descent to doom, before refocusing on Niko. Once all the lookouts are dispatched, it's time to play with some grenades that Playboy has provided, along with an earpiece so that we can stay in contact with each other while Niko is on the ground, with Playboy staying up on the roof.

We head back down, towards the construction site, actually taking the car to get over there because we can use it as cover going into the gunfight. We pull up in this large car and get out, and the car does indeed make for very useful ready-made cover from the get-go. When shooting and targeting with the right analogue stick, we can lock on, but the automatic lock-on highlights the torso area. We can then angle up or down, and if we're close enough, we can get a headshot in, which is obviously a one-shot kill, irrespective of an enemy's health level.

There are eight purple segments in the target circle that make up someone's health, which you get when you're locked on - during free aiming you don't get the indicator. Grenades work similarly; you haven't got as huge a radius as you would have with a gun, but if they're close enough you can throw the grenades at anybody you target and one grenade will do the job so there's no indicator.

Witnessing Niko defensively roll around and literally skid from one cover point to another, blind firing and then BANG, a big targeted shotgun blast that sometimes leaves a bloodstain effect on the screen, is really cool. You can blind fire over any object or from any position of cover; we can target an enemy's feet if that's all we can aim for, underneath a car for example - targeting now seems a lot more organic and flexible than before.

Just the sound of a gunfight - the patter of automatic gunfire sprinkled with the occasional bass heavy BOOM of a grenade - sounds really convincing here. "You want to make me do this?!" is one of Niko's choice phrases during gunfire combat, and among screams of, "This Polak is going down" and "C'mon I've got kids, you gotta to let me live!" from the mass of hostiles that appear, our shooting practise eventually pays off. We kill the last union leader and get the "mission complete" jingle, before advising Playboy of our success on the cellphone. "As you can see, this place is going to need a clean up," says Niko. "You the money, son! When they hear about this shit, they gonna start listening to Playboy!" Industrial dispute resolved.

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