Awesome Atrocities is a series of reviews created by King Lyger. The scoring system is represented by words: (from best to worst) Awesome, Great, Good, Okay, Bad, Awful, Atrocious. Games are judged on graphics (how the game looks and how smoothly it runs), sound (the quality of the music, sound effects and voice acting), story (how engaging and well-executed the story is), control (the responsiveness and ease of using the controls), and playability (how much fun the game is to play and replay). The overall score is not an “average” of the other scores.

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV
Systems: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Developed by: Rockstar North (PC: Rockstar Toronto)
Produced by: Rockstar Games (JP: Capcom)

General consensus can be a scary thing. Any deviation from the public norm is judged based on the size of the deviation. Constructive criticism can be applied to the smallest of errors, while going so far as to not like the game leads to backlash, curses and even death threats. For this reason, I've kept relatively quiet about this triple-A title for a long while, but recently trying it again has forced me to speak out.

I've played GTA4, front to back, in the daft hope that somewhere within this disc was this perfect, game-of-the-year candidate that so many reviewers were playing. But, like a man watching the slots spin with the last dollar to his name, I came away disappointed and horrified, as the moment of triumph never came. I was left defeated and dejected, wondering where it all went wrong. I had cursed myself, for wasting my time, effort and money.

Grand Theft Auto IV might be aesthetically pleasing, but there isn't much to the gameplay that warrants it. And sadly, there isn't much substance once you take a close look inside Liberty City. It's an array of advance graphical technology that, ultimately, amounts to nothing.

GRAPHICS

Liberty City is a huge metropolis. Three islands, hundreds of city blocks, and thousands of people all take whatever processor the game is on to its limit. There's a whole lot of variety in the different islands, largely because Liberty City is based off of New York City. From Times Square to Hell's Kitchen, every part of NYC seems represented, all done with a dose of sprawling urban goodness.

The character models all tend to be mixed up well enough thanks to a system that assigns different outfits to the NPCs so that the guy you see walking down 5th Street isn't the same one walking down 7th Street. The car models also show up with enough variety that I never felt as if I was in a traffic jam with the same four really bad drivers on every block. Too bad the license plates are all the same.

As good as the game looks, there are a few noticeable broken links in the chain. The frame rate tends to stay pretty consistent when just traveling around Liberty City, but there is some slowdown when the inevitable gigantic explosions from cars and rocket launchers and helicopters, and I also experienced some in gunfights with a lot of opponents. Not to mention, there's a lot of pop-in texture when traveling at a high rate of speed.

But overall, there's a lot of different textures around, and the character models have enough detail and variety that stopping and looking around can make you appreciate just how lifelike Liberty City looks.

SOUND

But, as good as the city looks, the sound never quite reaches the same level. The voice acting is pretty hit-and-miss across the board. Thankfully, the main character, Niko Bellic, has a pretty good voice actor. Given the sheer amount of dialogue he has to use, one would hope. His acting never floored me, but there was enough talent to give the main character a bit of personality. The rest of the cast ranges from decent to excellent. In particular, the “on the streets” TV show host did a great job at making his character annoying, which gave his death quite the satisfying feel to it. The solace you can take here is at least he's intentionally getting under your skin.

The music on the radio, though, doesn't do the voice work any justice. It's like getting a nice, juicy steak and having to wash it down with mud. The radio stations range from bad rock to bad rap, all of which is about as entertaining as beating your head in with a brick until your skull starts to bleed. The liberal and conservative mock radio networks are pretty funny the first few times you listen to them, but even the funniest of jokes gets old if you hear it too many times.

STORY

Niko Bellic is a Serbian immigrant to the United States, lured by his cousin Roman with promises of boozing, womanizing and the easy life. What Niko finds is that Roman has adapted to American life far better than he could have imagined, because Roman was spewing some good old American bullshit. A dilapidated taxi service and a hole-in-the-wall apartment are what Niko actually left his home for. While trying to adjust to his new life, Niko has to do some dirty work for local thugs and criminals to earn some cash. Niko's also got a personal stake in his trip to Liberty City: while fighting in a war, his unit was betrayed. The person who sold them out is in Liberty City, and Niko will do whatever it takes to find out who and why.

The part of the story that drives some of the plot concerns a criminal named Dimitri Rascalov, a man willing to screw over anybody to get ahead in the underworld. Honestly, the plot about Niko's past doesn't go anywhere until the last part of the game, and Dimitri and Niko's interactions come off fairly forced. Dimitri himself is the classic card-carrying villain, who wants to screw Niko over for the sake of screwing him over. I can imagine him practicing his “I lied” speech in front of the mirror every night before he goes to sleep.

There's also a lot of side stories that Niko can get himself involved in, most of which end pretty anti-climatically. You're often given moral choices on whether to kill a character or let them live, but in the end, the game is pretty linear, and the moral choices eventually mean nothing to the overall series of non-connected plotlines.

However, the tales of revenge are played out fairly well in the last act of the game, and Niko's characterization as the guy whose past drives his life is done really well. It's just too bad that the main story is dropped so infrequently that it practically fades into the background, like driving past a fast food joint and smelling the beef cooking when you're hungry. It's just not fair.

CONTROL

So the game looks good, sounds okay, and has a decent story. But how does it play? Well, sadly, all the pretty stuff peels away when we get to controls. Nearly all the control schemes are unintuitive and either too precise, or not precise enough.

The worst offender in control has to be when driving. Considering you do so much of it, you'd think the control would fit the bill. But it doesn't. If you move forward with any kind of relative speed, your car stops turning and starts swerving. It's a pain in the ass to control, and nearly impossible to tell where a car is going to end up when it starts moving that fast. And move fast you will. Instead of holding down the “accelerate” button, I had to do a lot of holding it and releasing it to maintain any kind of speed where I didn't unnecessarily get the cops on my ass.  And considering police are not known for driving slow when chasing your ass, expect your cars to need a lot of body work. Some way to self-impose a speed limit, like in Mafia, would have been nice.

The shooting controls are at least decent, but shooting also has its share of problems. Once I was locked onto a target and firing, I found it was difficult to change what I was aiming at, having to cycle through my available targets I wanted to shoot until I found the right one. Not only does this break up the pace of battle, it leaves you open to being torn apart by what I have come to define as “a shitload of lead.” The cover system, again, worked fine, but there were occasional times when Niko would get behind the wrong object for cover or simply not go into cover at all. It happened infrequently, but it happened. It's like living near an active volcano that could erupt: just because it only rarely happens doesn't mean you can ignore it.

God help you when you have to combine the two and shoot while driving. The “lock-onto-a-target-then-shoot” method of taking down your enemies is replaced with the “fire-randomly-and-pray-to-God-you-hit-something” method. Trying to focus on aiming your gun while driving is a test in frustration with no make-up exam. I played the game for a good chunk of it, and I couldn't ever find a way to correctly aim and drive. I'd often crash into a wall and waste half my ammo firing at thin air, cursing the gun gods. What really bothered me, though, is how often I had to do this. I literally stopped playing the game because one drive/shoot mission was so frustratingly impossible that I decided I would rather try and thread a sewing needle with a semi-truck full of sulfuric acid than drive and shoot at the same time. It's that bad. If I was playing these sections wrong, GTA4 did one hell of a job keeping the right way to play it from me.

PLAYABILITY

This is where I've got the biggest gripes. First and foremost, the mission system from previous GTA games has returned, which is fine. What is not fine is the boredom that comes when playing it. The missions themselves have little variety to them: drive to location, get objective, drive somewhere else, kill somebody, any combination of at least two more places to drive or people to kill, lose the cops, then a phone call and a payment. I often found myself fighting enemies using the exact same tactics over and over, which made the gun battles grow tiresome, leaving me little incentive to finish. Video games are known for their repetition, but GTA4's missions quickly become tedious.

But the tedium turns to anger and fury in the second half of the game, when the missions start becoming thirty-minute long fights for survival, including huge gun battles with hordes of criminals, daring flights from police, counting ammo bullet by bullet, and madcap full speed races through every section of Liberty City... all without checkpoints. This is the carnal sin of GTA4. These long missions have no checkpoints whatsoever, and if you screw up even once, you have to start them all over again. I've been told by others that it's supposed to make the game more challenging. And that's true. It is tough, but it's the wrong kind of tough. It's not Ratchet and Clank “difficult but beatable” hard, it's Battletoads “next to impossible, trial and error, train for fifteen years and still clear it though sheer luck” hard. It's a challenge that comes more from things beyond your control, and that's no way to add difficulty. That's like saying a math test is hard because it covers material you've never seen before.

An area of gameplay that's shoehorned on the player is having to build and maintain relationships with people. The game tries to offer incentives for getting these people to like you enough by way of giving you gameplay bonuses, but the bonuses are all so negligible that it's nowhere near worth the effort. Roman's special ability, for instance, is being able to get free taxi rides. But the normal taxi rides cost, at most, fifty bucks, which Niko could make in five minutes. Brucie's special ability is helicopter rides, which are fun to look at, but nothing else.  Some abilities, like instant healing and lower police presence, sound useful at first, but you can only use them once in a while, and they're not much good in the heat of battle, either, considering how long the calls take. The constant phone calls you receive from people asking you out on dates or to hang out quickly get annoying, and the game makes you feel bad for turning the offers down or not calling someone for a while. And even if you do accept the offer, you have to get to a certain location under an intense time limit. Which means if you're on the wrong side of the city, your friend will just get mad at you, and your relationship will turn even more sour. Imagine if you were in a relationship where you had to show up to your lover's house five minutes after the phone call ended. You'd never get laid again!

The open world sandbox gameplay is back again. If you don't want to do the missions, you really don't have to. There's a whole multitude of mini-games, including bowling and pool, and of course, running people over with cars and causing mayhem. These are fun little time-wasters, and there's nothing wrong with mayhem for its own sake once in a while, but I wish it helped you out with finances a little more. Having some sort of “Rampage Mode” where you were free to smash, crash and kill without fear of the cops would've been nice.

The online multiplayer modes range from simply “kill everybody” to complicated games of cat-and-mouse between two teams. There's enough variety in the different mission types that you can have fun no matter what your preference is. There's very little avatar customization, though.

OVERALL

Grand Theft Auto IV is proof positive that creating giant, sprawling worlds means nothing if you don't do anything with them. The story is okay, and the game is nice to look at and listen to, but most of the game is repetitive, unintuitive, and frustrating. Hanging out in Liberty City can be fun, but don't stick around too long.

Graphics: Great
Sound: Okay
Story: Okay
Control: Bad
Playability: Bad
OVERALL: Bad