Grand Theft Auto IV

Is it really worth this much hype?

	Version Xbox 360, PS3	Developer Rockstar North	Publisher Rockstar	Genre Action

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There are some minor control issues where targeting gets hairy; auto targeting, while generally almost perfect, is just plain stupid at times - at one point it insisted on specifically refocusing again and again on a picture on the wall as if it were an enemy. Occasionally, Niko's ability to shoot locks up entirely, for no obvious reason. And also there were a number of times when I exited the car specifically wanting to have a certain weapon ready for action but for no good reason it defaulted back to fists and I had to manually cycle back to the weapon I needed - again, something you really don't need surprising you in the heat of the moment.

Very occasionally, when holding Y to enter a cab as a passenger, the game thinks I 'pressed' Y instead and that I want to jack. In critical moments, this can really make things go south if a cop sees you, and if it happens when you're right at the end of a tough mission, there could be some serious swearing going down.

This is a fairly obvious one that should really be fixed: you have the option to have subtitles either on or off. I prefer them off. If you have them on, then foreign dialogue (some of it Russian, some Lithuanian, I am told by my Russian friend who was lucky enough to watch me play through some of the game since last week) is also handily translated for you. But I say this translation should appear regardless of whether you have all dialogue set to subtitles or not - or at least, there should be the option for this. Otherwise, you have a few sections (the longest being a good 10-15 seconds or so of foreign dialogue at a fairly crucial plot point) with no translation provided at all.

Partners dying on a mission due to no fault of your own continues to be one of the most pointless and annoying downsides of the series. Thankfully this is nowhere near as common or as likely as I found it to be in San Andreas. In fact it's barely worth mentioning really, as it only happened twice (even though I was covering as required and won the mission with no changes in strategy on the following try).

And finally. When failed, missions that are split into multiple parts really should restart you after the easy bit, or at a reasonably recent waypoint within that mission thread, rather than right back at the start, forcing you to do the often-lengthy easy bit again. This includes several long, non-skippable-but-trivial drives from island to island, for example in situations where you need to transport four people and can't use a cab for the trip, followed by a tough shootout. Being forced to do something easy again and again can get annoying. And the sheer frustration of, say, losing track of a target during a chase AFTER a 30-min shootout and then having to do it all over again can be crushingly frustrating. Also, there was one mission where they changed this standard to be more lenient - if you do a quick retry using your cell, it skips the initial chase and puts you straight into the shootout - I can't work out why they would do the 'right' thing on this mission and not all the others. It could be argued that repeating the whole thing is intentional by design, and yes, the pay-off feeling of reward once you get through one of the tough ones is probably all the stronger for it. But, for me there is a cut off point where too much frustration becomes a negative thing.

Fortunately, none of these are enough to dent the experience in a significant way. And for every minor gripe I list there are probably 10 details that are designed to make things work better than ever before, like the way destination selection in a cab works, looking up stuff in police databases, or using the cellphone to phone people and arrange all kinds of activities. This game is in such a league of its own that you often lose track of the scale of what's going on; you just forget it's a game and it becomes something between a movie and a game. As cliche as that sounds - it really is "something else".

At first, GTA IV was sort of feeling like a 9/10 game to me. There were a good few moments where I shook my head and jotted down another negative. But as the experience sank in, as the story captivated me, and as the pace quickened, I was very quickly humbled. It would be ridiculous to factor these minor gripes into even one point of a percentage in terms of scoring, because of the magnitude of the game as whole. By the time the end credits roll, you just know... as an overall package there is no question that this is a 10/10 game. Dollar for dollar it's arguably worth several times the retail price of most other games on shelves, and for the games industry it marks a leap forwards so significant that most developers couldn't even hope to catch up this generation.

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