Same Ol' M.O.: GTA4 is GTA, for better or worse [REVIEW]

Posted by Gary Hodges at 6:41 PM May 13, 2008

Reviewer's note: This is my unabridged review. The standard 600-word variety is available at any Village Voice Media site.

If you read a review the way I do, you’ve already skipped down and read the score, and now you’re back up here to see what the hell my problem is.

All I can say is: Peace, brother. Grand Theft Auto IV is a fine game, with tons of content and all the great moments you’ve come to expect from the series, from high-speed freeway chases against traffic to the hookers that come with a GTA-patented, baseball-bat-assisted money-back guarantee. The story is engaging, the city meticulously detailed and massive, and the game’s lead – Slavic heavy Niko Bellic – not only has a sort of nihilistic charm, he finally solves the riddle of what Boris Badenov would sound like getting a blowjob.

Never has an 8 looked so low as when applied to this, the crown prince of modern gaming and the biggest release of 2008 (if not this entire console generation). But by the same token, never has a 10 out of 10 looked so high – and so inordinately generous – as when applied to the flawed Grand Theft Auto IV.

If you’ve been faithful to the series, resisting the temptations of tawdry flings with Saints Row or moonlit nights skipping across the skyline in Crackdown (or even a day at the mall with Dead Rising), GTA4 seems a revelation, a huge advancement of the genre that deserves all the gushing praise it’s received. But if you have dabbled with those others, you can’t help but admit GTA4 is distinctive in only one meaningful way: it’s the first in the series to feel a bit stale, suffering in comparison to rivals that, till now, merely nipped at GTA’s heels.

Take the driving. The first time you accelerate down a road in GTA4, it feels like you’re about to take off in an airplane, the car getting lighter and lighter until even the slightest bump sends you skipping and bouncing across the asphalt like you’re driving a moon buggy…. then it rains, and you might as well be roller-skating in a hockey rink. Eventually you learn to make the best of it, but because the handling is so squirrelly, every mission that involves chasing a fleeing car or operating within a time limit becomes pure, distilled antifun.

When GTA3 hit in 2001 there was nothing else like it in terms of player freedom or scale, so gameplay quirks – like the driving – were noted yet excused. But since then, other games have made their way to market. Crackdown, Saints Row, Test Drive, and now even Burnout all prove open-world driving doesn’t have to be ass. Is it so unreasonable, then, to wonder why GTA4’s driving can’t be at least as good? Ask yourself: “Why not GTA?”

Take the gunplay, something that’s never been GTA’s strong suit. With each iteration, Rockstar has made unimaginative, sloppy “improvements” to GTA’s aiming system, only to net more criticism each time. With GTA4, they seem to have thrown up their hands with the laziest solution of all: default auto-targeting, which – when left on – makes most gun battles virtually impossible to lose. And yet, even this can be a headache since the system gets confused by groups of enemies, often auto-targeting dead or dying foes in favor of the very live enemies tearing your body to shreds with a shotgun. Crackdown, Mercenaries, and Saints Row used variations on standard third-person shooter controls for their gunplay, and they worked perfectly. Why not GTA?

Hell, take the walking. Niko’s default walk is more of a window-shopping amble, just slow enough to be useless. To get the lead out, hold a button while walking to run or jam on it to sprint. It’s a perfect example of Rockstar’s convoluted, overly complicated approach to gameplay – isn’t this why we invented analog controls? Why not push the analog stick slightly to walk, more to run, and all the way to sprint? Now compare Niko to the nimble-footed agents in Crackdown. Why not GTA?

Then there’s all the quirks and glitches… a few examples:

Cars and people (including Niko) getting stuck in the environment. Niko can’t run down a flight of stairs, he always cautiously takes them one step at a time – apparently more worried about tweaking his knee than the drug dealers or cops who are chasing and shooting at him – so I took to leaping down flights of stairs… until on a couple occasions Niko’s head would get stuck in the flight above him, leaving him hanging in midair and waving his arms as if in a freefall.

Broken missions. A few hours into the game, Little Jacob (Niko’s amusing Rastafarian friend with an accent so thick, he’s almost incomprehensible) called me to hang out and play pool. We played a game, finished, I took him home – and he refused to get out of the car. Took him for a game of darts, still refused to go home. Drinks, the strip club, a chicken sandwich… two days later, he’s still following me, and I’m locked out from every other mission because my playdate never ended. Since I worried shooting him might have repercussions, I was forced to reboot.

Cops materializing out of thin air, pairing nicely with vehicles you parked nearby for a quick getaway that magically vanish.

Cell phone conversations force you to walk. After completing a mission, Niko automatically calls up whoever hired him to let him know it’s done – and when Niko is on his phone, he is forced into his walk animation (which, as a gamer on the NeoGAF boards aptly put it, “is like walking on a waterbed”.) The problem is that most missions involve Niko raising all sorts of hell somewhere and drawing the cops – which now you can’t run away from, since you’re on the phone.

Scripted chases and shootouts with silly requirements. Why do I have to follow the biker gang on a motorcycle when a perfectly good car is right next to me? Why am I obligated to drive a moped for certain missions? If I know where someone is escaping to, why can’t I just go directly there and wait for him, rather than have to stay within 50 yards of his entire, erratic flight?

Forcing players to play by the rules in a game that should be rule-free. Why do I have to play through the story to be allowed access to the entire city and buy better weapons? What about the huge number of gamers who buy GTA purely to run over pedestrians, go on rampages, and see how long they can hold off the cops before being killed or arrested¹?

Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. There are open-world games without these issues – why not GTA?

Almost none of these woes are new to the series. They were true of GTA3 in 2001 and every GTA since. Yet seven years later they’re issues Rockstar has stubbornly refused to deal with, and with other games doing these things better, GTA’s continued shortcomings are harder to justify or excuse.

I make a point to say stubbornly rather than inexplicably. I understand perfectly why these issues persist; why wouldn’t they? Every iteration of GTA – warts and all – gets waved on through by reviewers, rubberstamped with a “10 out of 10!”, and every one sells millions. How can I argue with critical acclaim and a pile of money the size of Mt. Baldy? Don’t those two things invalidate my whole argument?

No, not really.

These aren’t minor gripes. This isn’t whining about cutscenes that drag on or flicker on distant textures or pop-up. GTA4’s weakenesses are in its core gameplay; they’re in what you actually do as a player on the most basic level: move around the city, drive, and shoot. Is the writing good? Yes. Is the city impressively huge? Yes. Is there enough to do here to last you for weeks? Absolutely. But all of that is secondary to what the actual game is.

Some will say I’m being overly critical. I disagree: I think I’m being a critic, which sometimes means pointing out the hooligan has no clothes. And I’m not sure who’s being served by writing off GTA4’s flaws – as normally hype-proof Edge magazine did – by shrugging and saying “Well, that’s GTA, you know?”

When sloppiness and complacency can be excused because it’s become expected of the series… what’s the point in reviewing these games anymore?

Grand Theft Auto IV
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: M (for Mature)
Score: 8 (out of 10)

Footnote

1 If this is you: Cluckin’ Bell is the place to make your stand. Drive a car through the double doors and park it to block access to the back room, get behind the counter, and you can practically pick people off until you run out of ammo.