Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City Review

"I'm the only man in history to have the hottest gay and straight club at the same time, and I'm about to lose everything!"

If Grand Theft Auto 4 was the game that I forgot about (so totally that I couldn't even remember Niko's most bare basic character motivation until I played it again) Episodes from Liberty City is the game replaced it totally in my mind. I played GTA 4 a lot back in the day, but I played Episodes a simply obscene amount of time, to the point where there were certain beginning cutscenes I could recite by heart like I was playing Skyrim. It was eerie how deeply I ingrained these two campaigns in my heart over years of playing and replaying them, all the while never quite acknowledging the fact that these were, indeed, smaller slices of game than the main chuck. I always thought back in the day that together these games were about the length of GTA 4, but today I can see that was nowhere near the case. These were spin-offs there to supplement and complete the open spaces intentionally built into the GTA 4 campaign, not replace GTA 4 in it's entirety.

After the release of GTA 4, Rockstar had a plan to do something they had never done before and don't seem willing to do again anytime soon (but we'll see what those greedy Sony execs do) they bought an exclusivity deal. Now back in the day we weren't as familiar with how these deals work as we are today, so when news came out that 'Episodes From Liberty City' was going to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, it was like a seismic wave had rocked the world; people couldn't believe the reality of living in a world where half of GTA's fans, or more, would be barred from the franchise. Of course, in hindsight that was obviously going to just be a timed exclusivity, GTA was too grand to be limited to one platform. Keeping it off the PS3 would simply be theft. Honestly, a port might well have been automatically in development. But even with that expectation, the manufacturers went so far to print that ratty 'only on Xbox' tag on the front of the packaging. Can you blame little-me for being fooled?

It felt like my duty to pick up 'the GTA game that went too far for Playstation', and maybe that sense of compunction was what encouraged me to live with the disc as a permanent feature of my console's disk tray for the next few years. I believe that may have been one of the first occasions wherein I allowed myself to be truly swept by the hype train. I watched and rewatched the trailers, memorised the dialogue, counted off the days on my calendar; I devoted myself to the coming GTA game knowing that I was going to love it. And coming back to it after all those years it's inevitable that some of that residual love is going to reside, like leftover mucus in an emptied wind-pipe; clogging up my precious objectivity! But I've held my head as straight as I can and think I can approximate a non-biased judge just long enough to write this blog.

Episodes from Liberty City is a game of two halves, following the story of the other two protagonists who make up the first Trio of  the HD era. (It's going to be weird going to only two protagonists for GTA VI... maybe they'll throw us a solo DLC; give the fans what they crave.) Our criminal tales are told adjacent to the events of GTA 4 proper and feature plenty of cross-over between characters, and mission locations; and even some missions themselves. 'The Lost and Damned' follows Johnny Klebitz, temporary road captain for the Lost Motorcycle gang and 'The Ballad of Gay Tony' features Luis Lopez, business partner and official full-time bodyguard and maid for the 'queen' of the Liberty City club circuit; Tony 'Gay Tony' Prince. Narratively 'The Lost and Damned' should be played first, but for some reason 'The Ballad of Gay Tony' contains all of the basic control tutorials when you first start it up. The biker one doesn't. (Strange little oddity, that.)

The Lost and Damned is, and I mean this without sarcasm, Red Dead Redemption 2 with bikers. Honest to god, if you take the bare basic elements of Red Dead Redemption 2's narrative and squeeze it into as tight a campaign as it can possibly get, replace the horses with horse power and shave Arthur bald; you've got 'The Lost and Damned'. (So there's the solution for folk who say Red Dead Redemption 2 is too long; you get the worst GTA HD game to enjoy. Lucky you!) Okay that's being a little mean, but I don't retract it. Grand Theft Auto has a high enough quality bar for each of it's games that calling this the worst of the HD era is by no means a brutal condemnation of it's quality to total crap tier, but I don't think anyone would disagree that for some reason, this tale of bikers and betrayal just isn't compelling in the slightest. So much so that in GTA V- actually, we'll get to that in my GTA V review, I have a theory about that scenes significance.

The Lost and Damned is no great revolution on the basic elements of your typical GTA experience, you wander the open world of Rockstar's highly detailed New York clone, Liberty City, and accept missions between bouts of, typically chaotic, freeroam fun. But there is a twist. In the Lost and Damned you have the might of the Lost motorcycle gang a mere phone call away and most conflicts in the game are specifically designed to be fought with an entire posse of AI bikers at your side. You can even summon them out of mission to help you fight off the police if you so desire, making them better buddies than the GTA V crew, who don't even bother answer their phones if you call them doing a police assault! So how are these AI companions? Rough. They can't drive those bikes they love more than life itself very well and for some reason they seem to jump in front of live-fire exchanges believing themselves to be bullet proof. (They are, in fact, not.) The game has an in-universe memoriam board that mourns the loss of any gang member you lose in the line of duty. I had that wall filled up before I was mid-way through this campaign; there's no saving these chumps.

But I suppose their impending doom fits alongside the decidedly distinct cinematically appealing thematic choice that fundamentally shifts The Lost and Damned away from GTA 4's realism. Stylistic flourishes and fonts have been baked into the UI with a scratched aesthetic on top to play up the rebel rider concept and the colour saturation has been tweaked in a manner to make the world feel like it's being played on an old tape. An aesthetic completed by one of my least favourite graphical tricks: (one which thankfully has a toggle in the options menu) screen noise to make the visuals look like a literal mess... What it all says is pretty clear, the art is no longer interested in making you feel part of a world that feels real, this story is going to be about the melodramatic tragedy of a biker club doomed to blow itself up in a blaze of glory.

Alongside the general aesthetic there are actually in-game mechanics which lean towards a style I would describe as 'arcade like'. GTA 4 changed pickups to no longer be floating icons but items actually placed into the world with a slight orange glow so you can make them out, probably figuring that the floating item icons break the illusion of the faux physical world. The Lost and Damned (and TBoGT, for that matter) veers away from this with the whole 'ride formation' system when you follow behind the Road Captain and have to line yourself up with a giant emblem that magically appears behind him in order to get an inexplicable boost to your health and/or armour. We also see this shift in the new 'Gang Wars' and 'Bike Races' job system which, rather than requiring the player to call up a potential job giver on the phone and risk them not being there, presents a steady string of dynamically spawned missions all over the map like Ubisoft mission markers that constantly replenish themselves allowing the player to grind them over and over. (For a pretty underwhelming reward, mind you. Weapon spawns in your apartment aren't worth the 50-mission minimum.)

This presentation of quick and constantly accessible action is in line, again, with the more explosive sort of gameplay that these spin-offs play to. Every mission tends to result in heavy gunfights with dozens of participants aided by a couple of new powerful fun weapons like a sawn off shotgun that can be used on bike-back and a grenade launcher which always seems to launch it's payload under and then behind cars you want to blow up. (It does explode on impact but good luck nailing that trajectory.) It all fits closer in line with the bombastic campaigns of GTA past with the added bonus that, since this is supposed to played after GTA 4, you don't have to sit through the relatively tame intro chapters before you get to the chaotically charged 'kill a whole gang' missions. This abundance of action does, however, prove GTA 4's point with it's decidedly more tame presentation. Restrained and relatively rarer bouts of action tend to be more impactful than sustained explosive content that desensitises the user. 

Honestly, there were only a handful of The Lost and Damned fights I enjoyed as much as GTA 4's and think that's a testament to the strength of 4's slower but more enduring structure. The other part of equation is however, the stupidly large battles you'll fight both in missions and gang warfare during which the progression of battle is decided by your swarming and stupid AI companions rather than the pace of the player. Trying to keep up with their mindless wanderings can too easily land you in the middle of a killing floor of gunmen whilst you end up firing wildly everywhere. Exciting perhaps in a very base sense, but lacking in the insightful structure that can benefit from clever escalation and spikes in tension. Everything just sort of stays at the same violent base-line, and that can make the action stale quicker. But we're talking about the higher theories and concepts of game design here, stuff that most games don't ever consider anyway; let's narrow our scope to a much more universal aspect of games; the narrative.

Much as I said before, The Lost and Damned is a Red Dead Redemption 2 predecessor, telling of the downfall of the The Lost's Road Captain, Billy, and how he brings the gang down with him, peppered with an ass-kissing side character who you hate, a man versus mentor split and a 'Wild Bunch' finale at the end. Bikers are often considered the modern day cowboys, so the parallels are fairly strong. Johnny Klebitz is a much more active antagonist than Niko was, with actual compunctions and choices he makes for himself, and moral boundaries he chooses to uphold. Niko's descent into the underworld perhaps necessitated his somewhat inactive observation of the narrative that unfolded around him, wherein he simply grumbled about jobs and then did them anyway; but I prefer the sense that my protagonist has a direction he's going so that even when the thrust of the narrative isn't present in the immediate, I still feel like we're progressing in some fashion. Sure, Johnny is still a belligerent arse in a manner that is meant to reflect the wider Biker culture, but he also posses protective leadership principals and some jaded, but still potent, solution of loyalty and duty that sets him apart from the likes of Billy.

My problem with The Lost and Damned actually comes from its tiny campaign, in which the ideas and characters that Rockstar are explored struggle to fit themselves in. A lot of the side characters don't get so much as a single piece of meaningful development or introduction; we know that Angus is in a wheelchair but unless you call him up between missions you'll have no idea what his importance to the club even is. And Billy is a pale substitute for Dutch Van Der Linde. The man is an dickhead and self absorbed clown of a leader, and we're given absolutely no explanation of why he's like that or who the man must have once been in order to serve as an effective leader of the gang once. We see the characters around him act with shock and confusion as he makes blatantly destructive decisions for hardly any reason whatsoever other than to soothe his bloodlust, but we have no reason why they're surprised. As far as I know, Billy has forever been a terrible leader.

The highlights of the game are really the way it slides in and out of the GTA 4 narrative, and even slightly touches on TBoGT. We get to learn a little bit more about the diamonds and who's hands they changed with, and I like the through line of these valuable cure-all money injectors that everyone swaps hands with and no one benefits from. But The Lost and Damned mostly keeps to it's own undercooked narrative with climaxes that feel rushed and unearned and a cast I never really had a chance to understand and so didn't get attached to. I only really like Johnny in comparison to everyone else he interacted with, and even then there's a shade of narrative/gameplay dissonance that makes it hard to fully immerse myself with him. Such as how the Gang Warfare minigame pits you against any gang in the local area, not just the rival biker gang you start beef with in the narrative. Which is odd given that Johnny is against senseless fighting, but then has no problem picking fights with the Yardie gangs out of nowhere or even the mob... when he's supposed to be working with the mob for most of the story! It's just confused, for the most part, which is probably why most people choose to forget The Lost and Damned altogether.

The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the otherhand, is TLaD's antithesis. A colourful champagne-popping alternate face of the spin-off with popping glitzy glamour all over the UI and a brighter night-time palette tint to highlight the main attraction of this ballad; Nightclub life! Much as I did enjoy the utter desaturation employed by GTA 4; getting to see actual colour in the world even at night is a nice return to normalcy for me, as this is the game in the GTA 4 trilogy which best recalls one of the most important side-elements of older GTA games; a celebration of hedonistic excess! Not to the extent where that's the entire crux of the game like some of it's contemporaries, but enough that you can enjoy yourself in a simulated world where nothing matters without having to reflect on the harsh turmoil of life as an impoverish immigrant who drags himself through the criminal underworld, building a name for himself but isolating himself in the same breath. 

The nightclub life is more than an aesthetic, it's a genuine optional gameplay mode where you 'manage' the club by being a bouncer during the night. It's painfully boring to do so, basically just being a walk and stand simulator until a cutscene happens or some other event drags you away, but at least you get to soak up the very well realised atmosphere of "the hottest straight club in LC". I doubt a ton of concept and thought was pushed into realising this idea beyond figuring it would be fun if players got to soak in the Nightclub outside of missions, which remains just as true for the other minigames that TBoGT adds to the minimap including Drug Wars (which is literally just TLaD's Gang wars), Parachute trials and Dance minigames. I'm going to be a little unfair here, but there is a comparison to be made... GTA's club themed minigames suck next to Yakuza's. Their dancing minigame is rhythm based where you have to jab the joystick in time to the music (which is pretty odd and uncomfortable) and calling the Bouncer job a 'management' mode is ridiculous. Where TBoGT brings it's best, however, is in the narrative.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is, throughout it's playtime, a celebration of all the crazy excess that the Rockstar franchises are capable of, often to the detriment of the cohesiveness of events, but you know what; I don't care if everything that happens makes sense when the writing is this good. The Ballad shares the same rough length of The Lost and Damned but that length shoots past like lightning because the characters are all infinitely more likeable and you'll find yourself greedily vacuuming up every single scene. Pretty much since Vice City the quality of narrative and character writing at Rockstar has been at a higher level of quality where dialogue is clear, characters are popping and the narrative is engaging; but The Ballad of Gay Tony might be the only game, and I'm counting GTA V in this too, where the dialogue, in particular, is a knockout in practically every scene.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that Gay Tony is perhaps my favourite character in the GTA franchise, as the aging neurotic nightclub owner who's too busy snorting half of South America up his nose to deal with his empire crumbling down around him necessitating Luis, a frankly stellar straight man, to patch the holes in his sinking ship. A character like that can so easily be unlikable and annoying but Tony is just that perfect mix of witty, pitiable and manic to worm into that special place where you can't help but love the man. But not just Tony, all the side characters are to some level worthy of their time on screen. From the obligatory man you love to hate; Rocco, to the guy too rich for his own good but honestly more of a socially-illiterate weirdo than an actual scum bag, Yusuf Amir. This game even managed to make me somewhat like a character I couldn't stand in GTA 4, Brucie, by introducing us to his considerably worse brother, Mori, and exploring how his inferiority complex led to his apparent overcompensation.

Luis is sort of a character without any significant compunction of his own, but in his role as Tony's wet nurse he is perfectly placed to be the guy who suffers for every enemy that his boss makes. You never worry about the progress of the narrative feeling sluggish because of the relative shortness of the narrative, and rather cleverly Rockstar found a way to wrap up The Ballad's narrative, the diamond overall subplot and GTA 4's last hanging loose thread all within a neat campaign. And with missions that are simply insane and rememberable, such as when you snipe a tank out of a sky crane, or fight off police helicopters from the roof of a speeding train with your explosive pellet shotgun or turn an experimental military attack helicopter on a yacht full of international gun smugglers you just stole it off. All of these missions are the kind that sound crazy on paper and live up to that fully in the flesh, the best of all worlds!

I consider The Ballad of Gay Tony to be the 'Assassin's Creed Brotherhood' of GTA 4, as in the follow-up experience that shaves off all the chaffe of the long base game without losing what made it effective and fun; and sprinkling excitement all over the package to make it ridiculously fun. The free-time conscious who find playing through an entire GTA intimidating can find themselves perfectly served with this masterfully balanced slice of everything great about GTA; explosive action, memorable characters, varied side activity, (although not always fun) and a satisfying narrative experience. And it's the first Grand Theft Auto game in the franchise's history to realise that it's campaign is so good that it needs a replay mission system. Even The Lost and Damned, which released on the same disk, didn't have a replay system. I don't... that really doesn't make any sense to me. (Red Dead Redemption 1 had a replay; they really should have learned.)

Playing through the GTA 4 trilogy again after all this time has been a delight; and I've loved relearning what it was about this era of Rockstar that made their games industry juggernauts. Finishing off these two side games has been like coming back to old friends and remembering their wrinkles and their wit at the same time; where some have grown long-toothed and rambling, others have matured perfectly with age. I don't think my view on these two games will be any great upset for commonly accepted opinions on the quality of this trilogy amidst the community, but I've enjoyed reaffirming for myself what I always quietly believed to be true. In terms of ranking, The Lost and Damned is going to miss my recommendation just slightly with a B- Grade, being my least favourite of the trilogy. The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the otherhand, demonstrates the potential of leaner, better, experiences and pushes itself to an A- Grade; with my tacit recommendation for open world lovers and even Saints Row fanboys. I think the whole spectrum of open world enjoyers can find a lot to love in the Ballad. This whole era of reviews was supposed to lead me to another Rockstar property, but have instead sent me a little astray to another franchise my subconscious told me was probably a damn decent spiritual successor to what GTA 4 was trying to accomplish. Come see if my subconscious callously lied to me when I review 'Watch_Dogs'.

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.