Grand Theft Auto IV - In Brief

(This was my entry for a review competition for the Escapist. The conditions were simple, no more than 500 words. Here's what I knocked up.)

Hype, like many four letter words, carries a lot of negative connotations. Hype suggests that a product might not be as good as we have been lead to believe. Hype suggests that we are being lied to. Hype puts games on pedestals, creating fantasies that the reality often struggles to live up to. This was never going to bode well for Grand Theft Auto 4, as it is possibly the most hyped game in existence. In the eyes of many gamers, Grand Theft Auto 4 is some sort of holy treasure, like the Grail or the knucklebone of a saint. Most gamers seem to be asking themselves what they love most about GTA4 when the real question they should be asking is whether the game deserves such adulation. A worrying number of reviewers have thrown perfect scores at the game and if I hadn’t been honest with myself, I suppose I might have joined them.

I’m not immune to hype and it’s a horrible feeling to have excitement turn to disappointment. I wanted to love this game; I queued up at midnight with my pre-order ticket in my hand hoping it would be everything people claimed it would. In the cold light of day, however, I only like this game, and after such high expectations, I’m not sure that that’s enough.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s wrong with the game; it’s certainly nothing overt, but as they say, the devil’s in the details. Rockstar North have created a sandbox without equal. Liberty City is a living, breathing place with sweeping urban vistas, glass monoliths that touch the clouds and quick flowing rivers of traffic, but the populous is jarringly low-res and driving isn’t as much fun as it used to be; the cars don’t handle well and are too eager to throw you through the windscreen at the slightest bump. The combat is much more sophisticated and deadly but now every shoot-out is a major engagement with a laboured and tedious pace and it’s all too easy to be gunned down by some nameless ‘gangsta’ before you have a chance to react, forcing you to do the whole thing again. The characters are vibrant and rounded and the writing, freed from the constraints of the movie tributes of past games, has a depth and personality unprecedented in the Grand Theft Auto series; but each set of missions feels isolated and disjointed; the gameplay too nebulous and unfocused for the writing to really shine.

Like many things, the myth is often much more attractive than the reality. The myth of Grand Theft Auto 4 is that it is a flawless, peerless piece of video game art, a thing to be revered and venerated, the pinnacle of gaming to date. The truth is that GTA4 is a well made, if flawed, game that has strayed away from the gleeful escapism I enjoyed most about the series, and replaced it with something I don’t recognise anymore.

(After writing this review, I played a lot more of the game. Sadly, my opinion of it has gone down)