Yes! Another GTA review. In fact as you might have noticed the web is full of them and it seems they all are love letters to Rockstar. The current Metacritic score is 99 and several reviewers are calling it the best game in many years.
The game itself takes everything that was great about the older games in the series and makes them better, ALOT BETTER. The game has only minor flaws, in fact very minor flaws. Stuff like not being able to run down or up stairs and shadows looking a bit weird. I also had a few (2 after 7 hours) freezes, but since there is an excellent autosave system they don't do allot of harm. The game could hardly be called innovative but since the concept is so great it doesn't need innovation.
But this game isent GTA!
Really, it's not. It might have fooled all the reviewers of the world, but not me! I wont be taken in.
Let me take you back to the days of GTA III and GTA: Vice City. These games were completely awesome, the driving, the colors, the cultural atmosphere and above all; the cartoonish violence. We loved driving around as our avatar without a personality, killing killing killing. But there is still killing in GTA IV, lots of killing. There is also pop-culture, awesome radio and everything we like about the game.
But it isn't the same game, don't let yourself be fooled by the facade. Actually, i don't blame you if you are. It looks exactly like we would expect from an extremely polished entry of the series. But it's no longer a cartoon! This isn't fantasy anymore, this is a real game. In fact, Liberty city is a real city located somewhere of the coast of Nebraska. In the city you can find millions of radio controlled Bosnian immigrants that run around killing people.
But now i need to elaborate. What proves that this tittle is an impostor is because it doesn't play like a GTA game. We think of lots of great things when we think GTA and all of those are here. But they are just a facade. This is a really serious game, the characters aren't ridiculous; they are real. The streets aren't crushed by gang war anymore, in fact i haven't been able to identify any "gang NPCs" so far in the game. There doesn't seem to be any gang cloths anywhere in fact. The streets are populated by anonymous individuals and you don't see the same model a million times. In the older GTA games the cities weren't real, they were satires of cities. Animated paintings made out of polygons and pixels. But now they have a real city.
It lives and breaths, sucking up the air from your living room. Consuming your soul, chaining you to your TV. Only with great discipline did i manage to tear myself away from it.
GTA is all about playing pretend, in a pretend city.
This game, is not GTA. Its Grand Theft Real and it is so much better then what any GTA game could ever be.
Buy it.
The game itself takes everything that was great about the older games in the series and makes them better, ALOT BETTER. The game has only minor flaws, in fact very minor flaws. Stuff like not being able to run down or up stairs and shadows looking a bit weird. I also had a few (2 after 7 hours) freezes, but since there is an excellent autosave system they don't do allot of harm. The game could hardly be called innovative but since the concept is so great it doesn't need innovation.
But this game isent GTA!
Really, it's not. It might have fooled all the reviewers of the world, but not me! I wont be taken in.
Let me take you back to the days of GTA III and GTA: Vice City. These games were completely awesome, the driving, the colors, the cultural atmosphere and above all; the cartoonish violence. We loved driving around as our avatar without a personality, killing killing killing. But there is still killing in GTA IV, lots of killing. There is also pop-culture, awesome radio and everything we like about the game.
But it isn't the same game, don't let yourself be fooled by the facade. Actually, i don't blame you if you are. It looks exactly like we would expect from an extremely polished entry of the series. But it's no longer a cartoon! This isn't fantasy anymore, this is a real game. In fact, Liberty city is a real city located somewhere of the coast of Nebraska. In the city you can find millions of radio controlled Bosnian immigrants that run around killing people.
But now i need to elaborate. What proves that this tittle is an impostor is because it doesn't play like a GTA game. We think of lots of great things when we think GTA and all of those are here. But they are just a facade. This is a really serious game, the characters aren't ridiculous; they are real. The streets aren't crushed by gang war anymore, in fact i haven't been able to identify any "gang NPCs" so far in the game. There doesn't seem to be any gang cloths anywhere in fact. The streets are populated by anonymous individuals and you don't see the same model a million times. In the older GTA games the cities weren't real, they were satires of cities. Animated paintings made out of polygons and pixels. But now they have a real city.
It lives and breaths, sucking up the air from your living room. Consuming your soul, chaining you to your TV. Only with great discipline did i manage to tear myself away from it.
GTA is all about playing pretend, in a pretend city.
This game, is not GTA. Its Grand Theft Real and it is so much better then what any GTA game could ever be.
Buy it.
