Grand Theft Auto is one of the biggest franchises in gaming today. The original GTA created a new genre of game almost single-handedly, and in so doing established itself as both a powerful force in gaming and a lightning rod for controversy. People like to point at GTA as representing the most antisocial aspects of gaming, but the original title and most since has taken a lighthearted, almost mocking approach to the admittedly adult content it offers.

Despite the criticism (or more likely because of it), the Grand Theft Auto series has been spectacularly successful, so you’d think there would be little reason for Rockstar to change the formula for its flagship product. My initial reaction to the rather impressive scores being floated around by a lot of reviews was “It can’t possibly be THAT good”, and so when I started playing the game I was prepared to find lots of flaws.

And in fairness, it didn’t take that long. The game is very slow to start and it takes about three or four hours of gameplay before things really get moving. The driving physics are rather difficult to get used to initially, and will cause you to spend a lot of time abandoning wrecked cars and looking for new ones. Failing missions can also be very tedious because there are no mid-mission checkpoints. This is annoying because every mission usually starts with a 10 minute drive across town to the place where the chase or gunfight starts. If you screw it up, you have another 10 minute drive across town before you can try the chase or gunfight again.

The NPC interaction missions seem a bit tedious and annoying at first too. By the time you’re halfway through the game, you’ve got five or six people constantly calling you up wanting to go bowling/drinking/clubbing/etc. If you start picking up girlfriends (on the internet, no less), it’s even worse.

Rating:

Playtime: 40 hours

Replay value: Medium

Favorite car: Turismo

Favorite weapon: RPG

Favorite date: Kate

Favorite buddy: Packie

The biggest complaint I had though is that for what’s billed as the king of free-roaming games, there’s very little reason to roam. A lot of the NPCs do have side-missions you can go on to run drugs, steal cars, race cars, or kill people, but these get repetitive pretty quickly. They’re a good way to make money, but quite honestly, there’s not much point in making money. There are only three ways to spend money: clothes, guns, and dates. Dates are cheap, clothes are fairly cheap, and if you’re getting into gunfights, there’ll be plenty of free guns and ammo lying around to pick up.

It takes about 15 grand or so to buy everything you could possibly want to buy, and it’s not hard to finish the game with more than a million. Realistically, your cash supply is just a way to keep score. Even previous incarnations of GTA had all sorts of things to spend on. Why can’t I buy my own cars? Why can’t I customize the ones I’ve got? Why can’t I take over ownership of a strip club or run my own string of hookers, for crying out loud?

The same issue appears with the achievements. A lot of games reward you for achievement collecting by unlocking customization features or additional abilities, weapons, and so forth. GTA4 has nothing of the kind, the only thing you get is gamer score, which honestly isn’t enough to entice me to spend hours wandering around town trying to jump off things at high speed.

I was really confused about this for quite some time until suddenly, about twenty hours into the game, I finally worked out what was going on. At their essence, all games are a work/reward sort of equation. The game asks you to do something and then rewards you for doing it. I’d made the mistake of assuming that money was the currency I was being rewarded in, but that’s not actually how GTA4 works. GTA4 rewards you for playing the game by being having a REALLY good story. Essentially, you play the game in order to see more of it.

The genius of GTA4 is how amazingly alive all the NPCs are. Even the random passers-by on the street have their own lives. They talk on their cell-phones, they eat hot-dogs, they get into fights with each other and occasionally even get arrested without you even getting involved. All this makes Liberty City feel more real and alive than almost any game setting I’ve ever encountered. It’s the story NPCs that really shine, and this is easy to miss if you look at the social missions as an imposition. Yes, the club shows and bowling and darts and whatever can be sort of tedious, but it’s the conversations that happen between your character and the NPCs on the way there and back that really make them feel like real people. These are some of the most fully realized and human characters I’ve ever seen in a video game, and you can’t imagine how weird I feel saying that about Grand Theft Auto instead of some spectacularly Japanese RPG.

By the time I got to the end of the game I started realizing just what about this game makes it actually worthy of the perfect 10s being thrown up all over the internet. This easily among the best story writing, dialogue, and character development that video games have seen. This doesn’t completely excuse the obvious omissions in the gameplay department, although I suspect that they may be planning to charge us 10 bucks to fill in the gaps with some downloadable content. Even still, my own rating scale scores a game based on how well it commands my undivided attention, and GTA4 managed that quite nicely. I still don’t think it’s a perfect 10, but it’s really, really close.