The game is exactly the same as the previous ones, but it looks nice and you don’t lose your guns when you die.
I haven’t tried multiplayer yet.
don’t know about the single player - seems like an improved engine but perhaps not much more. Multiplayer, though, is where it’s at. The game is worth it just for that.
I haven’t seen a lot of it, but it seems to me that stuff is usually in the later missions anyway so probably. For example, one of the early missions has you chasing a guy across town and fighting him hand-to-hand in a warehouse office. So anything you try to do that would prevent that conclusion to the mission gets defeated; you can’t use a different car so you can’t really ever catch up, but if you get too far behind and just make your way to the warehouse, you fail, if you try to block him with stolen cars they disappear etc. Thus far all the missions have actually made sense, at least, unlike some of the crazy counter-intuitive adventure game shit you had to do in San Andreas. But the lack of mid-mission checkpoints is annoying.
I disliked GTA III and VC; skipped SA because I hated its predecessors; rented GTA IV this week. 3 or 4 hours into the SP game, I have been pleasantly surprised. It is not a radical departure from its predecessors - it’s still a semi-linear crime-story-driven cutscene-riffic game in a semi-open city environment - but it refines the formula enough so it goes down smoother. The graphics are no longer quite so f’ugly, the writing and cutscenes are sharper than ever, and so far I haven’t hit any missions which piss me off (knock on wood). It’s not all good, though: controls are somewhat improved, but driving still sucks, the camera is usually not your friend, and the AI probably won’t win any awards.
It’s no Crackdown, though.
Basically, I would say if you disliked the gameplay structure of GTA III et al, GTA IV probably won’t change your opinion; but if your objection to its predecessors was their execution, not their setup, I’d say give it a shot.
It’s definitely worth ‘playing’, if not worth ‘buying’.
I love it, myself. I can completely understand the complaints others have against it, but I don’t really think about them as much when I’m enjoying it.
Bought a 360 on Tuesday solely for this. Tuesday night, dove into single player for four hours, ending with a ten-minute taxi-ride across Broker just gazing at the city through the passenger window, taking in the sounds of the city breathing and watching people interact with each other. Left thinking “This was so worth the £30 ($60) I paid for it.”
Last night, jumped into a Free Play game with two friends. Didn’t shoot each other at all, just stole some superbikes and tore through Times Square together, found helicopters and tried to land on the Empire State, jacked boats and bumped across the waves all the way around the island, discovered a ship wreck and a weird amphitheatre, watched the sun rise, skidded motorcycles under the wings of taxi-ing passenger jets, did jumps off runway buffers, went sky-diving into the East River. Left thinking “This was so worth the £200 ($400) I paid for the 360.”
The taxi rid in cinematic mode is really cool, right up to the point where the useless driving AI gets stuck in an unresolvable traffic jam and you have to get out and walk. I took a cab across the bridge from the strip club. But first I had to get out of the cab and move the car I’d stolen, because the cab driver kept pulling forward and back, forward and back, never going around the car that was just barely in the way of where he wanted to go. Then I got across the bridge and after sitting in the immobile cab fore a couple minutes, got out and saw that an SUV had missed the toll booth slightly and was now sitting there diagonally across the lane blocking all traffic, and it would never resolve.
I’ll chime in and say totally worth buying.
You could also just hit the A button at that point and magically warp to the destination point for a few more dollars.
I’d say it’s about as different as Oblivion was from Morrowind.
Well, I was riding it specifically to get the “no skipping” achievement. Luckily, it gave me credit when I got out of the cab.
Alright, I’ll probably play it then.
You should, it’s definitely a good game. It’s just not a knock your socks off in the first hour game. Right now I’d rate it 8/10.
I agree with shadarr. I’ve posted a lot of critical messages in regards to GTA4, but not because I think the game is horrible. The reason I am so hard on GTA4 is that the game is generally very good but has these glaring flaws that would have been so easy for them to fix. If the game just sucked or was mediocre I’d give up on it, but the fact that it is mostly brilliant and fun with some random braindeadedness mixed in is what makes me so frustrated with it sometimes.
But I’m not sorry I bought it, and I’ll probably be playing it for months.
I need to stay off the forum for a few months or I might find myself more unhappy with my credit card balance.
I agree with this statement. The good scores had somehow deluded me into thinking that my experience with this one would be different than the experience with the others.
But while some issues are gone, other ones remain. I tried my best to get into the game, but I just couldn’t make it happen.
Thanks for this thread. It provided new opinions and thoughts not available in the other GTA IV threads. :)
Not one little bit, no it doesn’t.
And I don’t like the driving at all yet (7%). Way too touchy. But I like the lock-on.
I have played all of the GTAs except Vice City. I enjoyed them for a while, but never came close to finishing any of them. I am not sure if I will finish 4 either, but its definitely the most fun of them all, by far.
I’ve only played it for the first hour or two (haven’t even gone on my first date, and only had one combat mission). It’s tedious. But I’m betting from comments that it opens up a lot after that, so I’ll keep going to get to the good stuff.