14 DAY TRIAL // 
A whole lot can happen in a Liberty City minute (which is much longer than the little known New York minute). As I stroll down the road in my Macana, looking for a better ride and maybe some isolated guy I can deprive of his money, a police car rolls alongside me and parks abruptly as cops go after a hooded figure. There's some gunfire and then the sound of more police cars. I am not the focus of their attention, which is a first for my GTA experiences. As I use my right stick to change my view and check out a Hummer decked out in the American (Libertarian? Where's this Liberty City really at?) flag that's parked on the left, I don't notice the police car right in front of me and bump into it thereby triggering a police level rise. One lone star. This should be easy to outrun. Which is a good thing as the police lays off you after you exit their attention circle for a few moments (about 30 seconds, I reckon).
But the chase is wild and I see myself up to two star level attention, which is bad as the area of their activity is increased. I can still make it out of it if I get on to one of the longer and straighter roads and push the pedal to the metal. Sadly, I can't quite steer around one of the police cruisers that tries to block me and I end up on the side, with no chance in hell that all four of my tires will again reach the road at the same time. I press Y to get out of the car and I get a welcoming committee of three officers. Shotgun in hand, I spray the first two easily as the third ducks behind his car and peppers me with bullets from this handgun. I also go into cover and open fire with my pistol, as I don't have a lot of ammo in the shotgun and the UZI is not worth using on just one lonely target. As the firefight is about to end with the policeman's defeat, the car I initially drove goes up in a pink orange blast and the screen goes black and white as I fall into unconsciousness. I woke up in front of the local hospital, still a little groggy. Man, that's intensive.
You know what GTA is all about. From the first game in the series, with its top down view and its gratuitous violence to the sprawling urban areas of San Andreas, the series was all about gun play, running missions, jacking cars and sometimes enjoying a cup of coffee at a girlfriend's house. The main concept is in no way changed in GTA IV. But almost all aspects of the game are improved upon. The city is more detailed and the pedestrians have more character. The story is more convoluted and ultimately engrossing, even if some touches are a bit hard to swallow. The gameplay mechanics are nice and you'll feel familiar with them immediately.
GTA IV tells the story of the American Dream as seen through the rugged eyes of Niko, who arrives on a ship coming from somewhere in Eastern Europe with high hopes. His cousin Roman has repeatedly lied to him about the riches he enjoys in America and Niko is pretty disappointed when his cousin turns out to be a lowly taxi driver with a lot of shady connections. As the game progresses, the main character will go on raids, date a lot of women, kill a lot of people, spare some and generally cause mayhem in Liberty City while redeeming himself. Ultimately, GTA IV is a game about actions, consequences and deliverance.
As always with GTA, on one hand we have the story-driven elements and on the other the random stuff you can do around town. Both are exciting in their own right. You could easily spend a few hours just taking over cars and then getting chased by the cops. It's game in itself. But most of the fun will come from doing the story missions and then enjoying the cutscenes and unlocking new zones in the city where you can roam.
The hub of the Liberty City experience is your phone. It ends up being more helpful than any other gadget in the history of gaming. You can use it to get missions from characters that give you their number. You use it to set up dates with in-game hotties and you use it to call cabs that can get you around town in no time (for a little extra money). The phone even allows you to restart failed missions, by simply answering to a message that arrives when you don't get your job done.
GTA IV has deep, compelling and ultimately rewarding gameplay. No review can cover all that's going on in the game, so I'm only going to touch on some elements I found interesting and/or frustrating.
The aiming is now more smooth thanks to auto-aiming and, if you don't like it, there's also the option of turning it off. Firefights generally seem to be less of a headache than, let's say, chasing missions. The game doesn't offer immediate access to such gems as the AK (inevitable, really, especially given the origin of the protagonist) and the sniper rifle. One idea I've seen thrown around is to go and jack a police car as soon as possible to get a shotgun and then a pistol, but it kinda breaks suspension of disbelief when following the plot.
The driving gives me very mixed sensations. There are times and missions when I pull tight corners without breaking a game sweat, and there are times when I just run over anyone in my path as a prelude to hitting the first wall that's in my way. It really is very much dependent on the cars and on the way you set your camera (which tends to wiggle around a lot when chasing another car, unfortunately). The cars you get early in the game are very much sluggish and unresponsive but the situation does get a lot better as the game progresses and there's always the option of jacking a police cruiser that totally pulls its weight as far as a good car goes. There are also some issues with the driving and shooting mechanics (love the way Niko uses his elbow to break the window before shooting) but, apart from some driving missions where restarts are the norm rather than the exception, the game handles well and the driving makes for entertaining and engaging gameplay.
The idea that food, together with lap dances and medical personnel, can restore health to our beloved character is somewhat ludicrous, especially as it can bring about crazy dashes to that soon-within-reach hot dog stand that often lead to spectacular physics effects as you get hit by a minivan. But it works within the game, to some degree.
If the above detracts from the realism of the game, the Euphoria engine adds a lot of realism. Try getting hit by a big car to see what I mean. No fall is the same and no running sequence looks like another one. It's pretty impressive and, even if not all the movement in the game is handled by Euphoria, it really adds to the immersion element. The drunk sequences, and especially drunk driving, should be strong enough to put some youngsters out there off drinking and driving.
There's a phenomenal amount of content in the game, and that's beside the central plotline. You can actually sit down and watch on TV a dozen or so channels that offer a mix of talk-show, movies and documentaries. There are various radio stations that feature very diverse music and cool hosts (I crashed my car more than once because I paid more attention to the radio than to the road). You can go down to the subway and then go running through the tunnels (this way, you can even go straight to the supposedly locked-down areas, but the police is gonna want to kill you real bad). There's in-game Internet with fake sites that you can explore, and there's the computer in the police car that gives you access to the most wanted list. There are loads of references in the city for a lot of things, even to the protagonists of the previous games. Rockstar clearly loves the idea of the living city where you can do more than follow pre-scripted missions, which are sometimes very well scripted and sometimes less well scripted. There are minor glitches, too. I went to a burger joint with Roman only to discover that when we finished our meal no cars had moved. I also got a chance to do a little moonwalking as I climbed down a building, before tumbling to my death below. It's nothing much, it's certainly not game breaking but it tends to kill suspension of disbelief.
The main issue with missions is that they tend to get very long and there are no checkpoints in the missions themselves. Of course, restarting via phone message is very cool, but you still have to go through all the stages that you've already gone through before. The other gripe I have with the story is that it starts off really slow with the first about 10 hours of game being more babysitting than anything else.
The dates are still there and each girl you date offers various bonuses. You also go on so-called "man dates" with various male buddies, which usually involve a lot of drinking (try driving while fully loaded with alcohol). The dating concept is nice and the perks are worth it, but the mini-games and the choice of restaurants are a bit of a let down.
The game looks good, especially on HD. Problem is that many things are small. The various hints that pop up in the top left part of the screen are hard to read. The minimap is hard to look at and it can cause crashes as you stare at it and don't pay attention to the driving. The phone is quite cool as mission hub, but small and too much to the left of the screen so you'd better use it while stationary.
There are some really breathtaking vistas on which you can lay your eyes. The sun looks awesome from the bridges, cars after a bit of rough driving are spectacular, NPCs look good and move nice, cutscenes are well directed and nicely rendered. There's a bit of blur when looking into the distance but nothing very annoying. Night chases might need a bit of squinting, too, but again it's a fairly minor issue. However, some of the stuff on the screen just needs to get bigger for the gameplay to be smoother.
The audio is nicely done. The only thing missing is the option to get a custom radio station with your own music, but otherwise the radio stations have plenty of cool tunes, from jazz to rock. Personally, I very much like the way Radio Vladivostock sounds, very much fitting for the main character. And the general chit chatter is also a pretty interesting and extremely funny social commentary (try and catch the bit about the pharmaceutical companies). Weapons sound good and powerful, as do most engines from cars. One of the rasta guys you meet in the game deserves to get a prize for most unintelligible character in a videogame. Other than that, the dialog is pretty original and manages to deliver much of what Niko is early in the game.
Be warned that the language can get pretty brutal at times. Especially when some of the in-game characters refer to women in the sleaziest ways possible at a rate of about 3 M-rated words for every sentence uttered. I can get the fact that it's supposed to add "realism" and "authenticity" to the game, but it gets pretty old pretty quick, to the point where it doesn't add to the game but rather negatively impacts the whole experience.
Multiplayer
The game offers complete multiplayer support, with up to 16 people being able to compete in a variety of game modes. The entire city is open in multiplayer. You can do car races in multiplayer through a series of checkpoints while battling your opponents, or you can opt for a game of cops and robbers where the bad guys need to escort their boss out of a section of the city while the cops try and stop them.
The Social Club is also part of the multiplayer component of the game. There, registered users can opt to compare their experience and be ranked by taking into account a variety of parameters related to GTA IV.
Conclusion
Get this game. It might not be all that the hype made it out to be. It has some minor issues, mainly due to the driving mechanics and the way some missions work, especially the absence of more numerous checkpoints. It starts out a little slow in the plot department but it really does pickup after a certain point. Niko is more humane and interesting than any GTA hero before him and he really pulls the game together. Liberty City, or GTA New York as it should have been called, is nicely laid out and beautifully rendered. It's the best open world I've played yet, even if at the start of the game you have to work a little to unlock all the areas.
The core gameplay is solid, even if some minigames (bowling, argggghhhh) are lousy. You get to shoot, fight, run from the police, chase enemies, shoot some more, pick up cool weapons, shoot again and after all get your revenge on an old enemy. GTA IV creates a cool world where you can live the American Dream. A twisted, sometimes evil version of it, but still the American Dream. Step into the shoes of Niko and visit Liberty City!
