Grand Theft Auto IV Hands-On

At last, we get to play the biggest game of 2008.

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The pleasurable driving experience is enhanced by always knowing where you're supposed to be going - and how to get there - thanks to your GPS system and the innovative map/radar at the bottom-left of the screen. This radar borrows more than a little DNA from Bully and is multi-purpose now. It still behaves smartly, zooming out to show more space ahead when you're driving faster, but it now also incorporates your health and armour level as green and blue markings around the edge of the circle's left and right halves, keeping things visually nice and tidy. (The oversized, stylised font of the previous games' HUD is a distant, clunky memory in GTA IV.) When you have somewhere to go for a mission or to meet someone, the direction will be marked on the radar (a small LJ icon for Little Jacob, for example - and an up arrow if the destination is above you). At any time, you have the option of pausing the game and using the full-size map to choose a destination on the GPS, which is then reflected on the radar. This marks the route out in blue, so there's no getting lost. In the higher-end cars, the GPS even tells you where to go in spoken words. Vehicles have limited long-term consequence to Niko though. Although there are parking spaces outside safe-houses, where you can store vehicles, Rockstar confirmed to us that cars are not customisable and you can't store stuff inside them, either.

Enough talk about vehicles. Back on foot, the targeting, shooting and cover system is something we became comfortable with quickly on our second attempt of the first mission. You launch into cover by pressing the right bumper and stay there until you press it again. When you're in cover, if you tap the right bumper and hit the left stick, Niko will dive from cover to cover in the direction you push, and if you double tap the right bumper, he'll automatically dive to the nearest bit of cover. If you're some distance away from cover, you can run into it, tap the right bumper, and Niko will dive or slide into that position. In cover, you can either blind fire with the right trigger (which offers loose, inaccurate aiming and scattershot gunfire), or you can lock on with the left trigger and shoot normally, which exposes you to danger but gives you accurate aiming.

When you're locked on, you can cycle through targets within sight, and you can use the right stick to accurately angle up for headshots or down towards feet or elbows (or whatever part of them is exposed if they too are hiding behind cover). Easing the reticule into the position you want is a refinement that woks very nicely, and itbenefits from the higher definition graphics because you can see what's going on and target precisely, avoiding the over-simplified auto-targeting people have complained about in the past.

Even when you're about to be arrested, you have flexible control over Niko. If you're stopped in the car, you're in trouble. If they catch up with you when you're on foot, however, they'll come within range, Niko will stop and put his hands behind his head, and as he slowly drops to his knees he can still escape out of it and run. This works up until the point when his knees are about to hit the ground. Escaping the hands of the law like this will increase your wanted level by one star.

There was only one part where we felt that controlling Niko was sluggish and that was going up and down stairs, which felt slow and mechanical. A person chasing someone in real life would RUN down the steps, but it seemed like Niko has only one fixed animation for climbing steps at a fixed speed, even if there is relative urgency.

The audio side is feeling complete now. There are plenty of radio stations (the total number is to be confirmed), and although Rockstar has asked us not to list them all, (even though we wrote every single one down and noted its genre as part of our ongoing obsessive service to the GTA community), we can probably get away with saying our favourite is The Vibe, which is RNB and soul. There's a tonne of music in there now, including tracks we've heard in our previous demos (a few of which we got away with naming). The interesting news this time around is that, far from being placeholder, we're told most of the music we've heard is music they do specifically want in the game, and have been pursuing and finalising licensing for. Most of it likely will be in there, but obviously it's best to keep it secret for now. It's more exciting for players to discover the tracks for themselves, anyway, says Rockstar. Without naming any names, we can safely say that the other genres on offer include the usual stuff as well as modern Jamaican, a specific Eastern European station.

We've said how great the voice acting is a thousand times now, but what we haven't stressed is how this is true not just in cut-scenes but during gameplay as well. It's also contextual - during one mission, we were lagging behind and Niko was told to hurry up, to which he replied, "I'll come in my own time".

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