Grand Theft Auto IV Review

This is the victory we fought for.

After playing through the entirety of the Grand Theft Auto 3D saga, it was only a matter of time before I moved onwards to the HD era of GTA games; an era so named for it's total transition of the very gamified PlayStation 2 era of Grand Theft Auto games to a much more grounded vision with a greater focus on nailing a convincing world simulation. Of course this would mean coming back to one game that I've held something of a stigma towards for many years now for being the dour and boring uncle of the Grand Theft Auto pantheon. Not quite a true sequel to the ambition of San Andreas, but not quite a spin-off title worth being pushed aside in this impromptu journey across the Grand Theft Auto franchise. And in refreshing my memory of Grand Theft Auto IV I was happy, although not entirely surprised, to find my concerns and prejudices to be somewhat overinflated and exaggerated. I'm glad to say I quite enjoyed my GTA IV playthrough.

But why was I so stand-offish on GTA IV from my first playthrough? (which I did back when it first launched) And why was that playthrough the only one I did? (I played the 'Episodes' spin-offs countless times more.) It was an impression I believe was born both from the drastic shift in tone that IV mounted in comparison to the last game, the just as strong shift in innovation priority which defied my natural expectation as a consumer who just wanted bigger and louder and the wave of pop culture diluting my own recollection into remembering GTA IV as much more boring than it really was. We've all seen the old memes about the hang-out system and Roman constantly bugging the player to go bowling, and somewhere along the line that impression of the package melded into my own.

I think the greatest offender for this light brain-washing was a contemporary of GTA IV that I was quite infatuated with. Saints Row 2. That was a game that embraced it's silly goofiness in order to differentiate what was initially a very derivate gangbanger franchise and become the zanier, more adrenaline fuelled cousin of boring old GTA. Most famously celebrated in a trailer that literally compared the most boring aspects of GTA IV (going bowling, watching TV etc.) to the silliest moments of Saints Row 2. (Setting yourself on fire on a buggy, spewing septic waste on passerbys.) It was a propaganda video, and intentionally very tongue-in-cheek; but it's ultimate legacy might have been more effective than the team were going for because when I think back to my childhood, the GTA they painted was the game I remembered; not the one I just played through right now.

Of course, none of that is to say that Grand Theft Auto IV wasn't in anyway a slow and sometimes tedious experience; in fact I think there are some considerable problems with pacing and narrative, as well as the frequency of certain activities, which bar me from considering this the Masterpiece that some of the community assert that it is. But when I take the game for all of it's successes and judge them up, I can certainly see the ground those people stand-on when they make their hill to die on. Grand Theft Auto IV is a worthy sequel to San Andreas, just not in the way I expected it to be when I first played the game all those years ago, and I very glad I took the time to relieve that experience and clear up those murky recollections once and for all.

Firstly, I want to talk about that tonal shift I keep alluding to which colours a lot of opinions about Grand Theft Auto. Before IV and even after, Grand Theft Auto had this aura of flamboyance about it's action and presentation that served in the creation of the satire-world that GTA inhabits. Whether that was with cartoony violence, thematically over-the-top UI script, or huge ridiculous spectacle; Grand Theft Auto leaned into the flashy and loud over the serious and contemplative. IV doesn't abandon these principles entirely, and the Rockstar flamboyance is still stretched over the skin of the world and some of the sillier characters and dialogues, but narrative weight is a new prime focus of development and you can feel that hanging off of every new system IV introduced. This time it was all about nailing the story of Niko Bellic. 

To this end the entire presentation of Grand Theft Auto IV was toned down significantly, to a degree that would come to be the style of that generation of games. (Thanks in no small part to this game.) The UI is minimalistic and dynamically fading, monochromatically coloured with a stark unembellished font. The general world palette was seeped into duller and more mundane characters, to some degree better fitting the entirely built-up environment of New York based-Liberty City, whilst to some degree taking the artistic direction even further than that. During nights in particular the colour seems to literally drain out of the world to the point where your screen is almost approaching grey-scale; indicative of a world that attempts to better explore the grim toil of a life drowned in shades of grey.

I think that the renewed focus on systems that have been characterised as 'mundane', such as managing friendships by keeping in touch with people, living in run-down apartments and never expanding to the mega mansion of late-game San Andreas and even being forced to slow down and pay your way through toll booths on a certain overpass; all contribute to that same vision. A vision of a world that is not quite as glamourous and glitzy, but rough and real and even grimey at times. I've bought this up before, but it's impossible to review Grand Theft Auto IV without addressing the phenomena where creating a world that feels bound by the constraints of the real world inherently makes it so that when the player breaks free of those constraints and does something wild, like get in a close-range shotgun fight with Italian mobsters or blow up a car in traffic with a rocket launcher, that juxtaposition heightens the impact of the excitement. Of course, this approach does have it's consequences too.

Some of the innovations that where tipped towards feeding this theme for GTA IV push over the line to being tedious for the sake of being tedious. Forcing players to walk around clothing stores to find the piece of clothing they want to wear and then trying it on to see if they like it and then buying it is just several steps too many to show off an interactive dynamic context window. Cutting back on the RPG elements and car customisation of San Andreas, on the otherhand, just feel like downgrades from their previous game, and yet I'll bet that at some point in development the team's refocusing away from expanding those sorts of features was justified with "Those ideas don't quite suit what we're going for this time around."

Additionally, I think this thematic shift tainted the team's approach to mission design in an overall negative fashion, particularly in the beginning opener levels. The first string of missions in GTA IV, forming the entire first act pretty much, are painfully slow as the game walks you through practically each new innovation that game has to offer barefaced and bald. As in, some of these missions are so rudimentary and bare faced that they literally exist only to introduce the new physics system, or the new Internet Café, or whatever new thing the game has to show you, and then immediately ends. Ideally you want tutorial missions to be woven into actual narrative progression so you're being taught whilst pushing forward the story, but early GTA IV has absolutely no interest in moving the plot along or even laying out the foundations of the plot beyond the bare basic. 

You're an immigrant who has little problem working with the mob. That's literally your only motivation for the entirety of the first act of the game. San Andreas may have offered very unspecific and soft edged motives, such as 'cleaning up the hood' or 'bringing back the Grove', but at least that was something to cling on to. Early Niko seems to stand for practically nothing and want seemingly nothing which makes it annoying to endure that snore-fest of an opening act until the later missions where general events start actually happening. Pretty much from the moment you're pushed into killing your first main character, the actual narrative picks up and begins to propel itself. (Which, incidentally, is also when you learn that your main character has motives! Something I actually forgot from when I first played the game; I'd wiped my mind of this game that thoroughly!)

The passive protagonist is a common problem of open world games and Grand Theft Auto games in particular, but for the majority of the time it's not a huge glaring problem because the storylines are just vehicles for causing carnage that aren't really supposed to make any real sense. GTA IV changes that expectation with a personally driven revenge plot, but does very little for fixing the passive protagonist problem beyond having Niko loudly exclaim about the people he's looking for every now and again. Not too much that it get's annoying, but rare enough that you can begin to forget exactly why you're stealing Heroin from the Triad for small-time Italian gangsters. One of the criticisms that Red Dead Redemption received when it first released (Which I heavily disagreed with at the time) was that the narrative spins its wheels as the player is constantly doing favours for pay-offs that never come. But for GTA IV getting stiffed out of your promised favour is like a core running theme; and it can start to make the story feel a little structureless after the fourth contact you've burnt with nothing to show for it.

But there is a formula which drives the plot, and it's a time honoured tradition of Grand Theft Auto spruced up with a constantly repeated, but effective, cap. You are ferried across three islands that are initially blocked off from you but get slowly opened up as you become more familiar with the city and the 'Six Degrees of Separation' start connecting you to all the filthy hives across the city. I actually really like how well this game does integrating you into the various walks of criminal life from street dealers to community pushers to organised gangsters; you really do touch every division of the underworld throughout your journey into the muck. And most of the contacts you make are capped off with a point at which you have to kill a named character you've worked with, cutting off that contact entirely. It's an effective stopgap which is recycled three of four times throughout the game and though it begins to become a bit predictable by the late game, I like how it reinforces that previously untouched moral of this new face for GTA: the wicked dig their own graves.

Morality stings at the heart of GTA IV in a way I don't think the franchise has every really addressed before, at least not with a totally straight face. The scars of the unspecified war which Niko waged are addressed frequently and the unspoken question of whether his quest to vindicate the dead is making him worse than his quarry touches at the edges of the narrative tapestry. There's not so much pathos of this theme, however, which can make it feel somewhat unfulfilled by the final credits; like a balloon blown up but never tied off. I suppose that sort of introspection is better suited for Rockstar's other franchises like L.A. Noire and Red Dead Redemption. I applaud them for even going that route, and think it serve the general emotion this game was going for well; I'm just unsure if that hollow empty note after the final monologue was played as effective as it could have been. A solid ending could have very easily been a poignant one with a little plot retooling and rewrites.

I was both impressed and pleasantly surprised to find the game has multiple endings, and though they wrap up in very similar fashions to one another, their distinctly different consequences are intriguing and unavoidable. (Rather unlike GTA V's somewhat cop-out 'Choice C' ending.) On a curious note, it really struck me, at the crossroads moment where you choose one path or another, how strikingly similar this last choice was to the finale of Red Dead Redemption 2's main narrative. Only Red Dead Redemption 2 did such a good job tackling the concept of morality and corruption that I think even that very easy and obvious choice between the 'right' and 'wrong' path evoked somewhat guttural emotional decisions. I know I was practically vehement when I made my choice at the end of RDR2; whereas in GTA IV I really just picked the option which I thought would be more satisfying narratively. (Only to find out that in the other ending, Niko gives a much better final speech. Bugger.)

There is no possible way to talk about GTA IV without at least mentioning the three-way narrative, and how cleverly that was pulled off. For those that don't know, GTA IV is actually the most substantial chunk of a trilogy of games that all tell concurrent narratives which cross over with each other here and there. The crossover is mostly on the diamond plotline, which is more important for the other two narratives than it is for Niko, but the deft with which the team managed to weave these other characters in and out of the story (both obviously and in the background) is applause worthy. At the very least it makes it a necessity for anyone playing through the mainline GTA games to also put up with Episodes From Liberty City. No great chore, those snippets of game are great as far as I remember. (We'll see when I review both if they live up to memory.)

Functionally, GTA IV was another step-up in terms of gameplay into basic cover based shooting mechanics which, whilst not exactly competitive in today's landscape, worked well enough to make combat more exciting than painful. (I still get GTA 3 nightmares for it's awful combat.) I really like the sound design on every weapon that wasn't a pistol. The rifles and shotguns all sounded brutish yet muted in that realism-style, whereas the basic pistol just sounded pathetic and the combat pistol lacked the whack that it's actual bullets landed with. Driving too is heavily improved to make cars weighty and heavy, so as to be less prone to rolling over quite so easily; which brings the driving up to the stellar standard that Rockstar has solely maintained over the vast majority of the open world gaming landscape. Only Sleeping Dogs really has driving controls that are anywhere near as good as what GTA has rocked throughout it's HD era.

In Conclusion, Grand Theft Auto IV is an unfairly maligned entry that dared to go against the grain of what Grand Theft Auto had come to stand for in order to stand out for the new generation. It pushed innovation to create a realism-based sandbox and maybe pushed a little hard into monotony is some small areas. It's narrative is ambitious and grander than it's scope at times, but paints refreshingly life-like characters in an impressively deep recreation of GTA's oldest haunting grounds: Liberty City. Playing it again after all these years proved enough to get me hooked and slapping a recommendation for lovers of open world and stories with a gentle sprinkle of grit and grunge, is an automatic act. As for the arbitrary score... that evades me. On one hand the game is timeless for what it does well, on the other the first act drags so much it makes me wonder if I could even stand another play through in the near future. Balancing everything together, then throwing it away and going with my gut instinct, (as is my typical MO) leaves me with a respectable B+ Grade to slot into my scale of game scores. Stroking greatness on account of it's own ambition and falling just a hair short for that same hubris. But I'll take a game that tries over one that plays it safe absolutely any day of the week.