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Warning: Spoilers
Usually when "Grand Theft Auto" comes out, it takes a good week or two for the initial "WOW!" factor to wear off. I purposely put off reviewing this until I had completed the entire game, because by then I knew I'd have some time to take it all in and form a more objective opinion.
First of all, early criticisms included accusations that the game was "too short." Yes, perhaps - if you rush through it over the course of a caffeine-enhanced weekend. For those of us with modest social lives and jobs who can't devote 12 hours a day to a video game, it'll take a while. I played about 35 hours before beating the "basic" single player missions - and I say "basic" because there's a lot more to do in the game once you've completed the main structure. I can still get in a cop car and chase down criminals if I want to, or perform assassinations, or find all the stunt jumps, or street race cars. It's quite limitless.
But anyway, like I said - it took about 35 hours to beat the main structure of gameplay, which translated into a solid two weeks. It may be a tad bit shorter than "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" but I had so much fun I wasn't counting.
The pros of the game are: better graphics, more realistic graphics engine and physics, better on-foot fighting/gunplay controls, more attention paid to the storyline and characters, and an overall more expansive universe.
The downsides are: even though the controls for fighting are better, they still need drastic improvement; the whole "duck/dodge" thing is quite lame and doesn't work half the time. If you lock onto someone and try to lock onto somebody else instead, it doesn't work correctly - or fast enough. Sometimes during missions I'd try to lock onto the villain and end up locking onto a pedestrian further away. The "free aim" pressure sensitivity is also confusing.
I do think there's a bit of contrivance towards the end of the game as well. I won't put any spoilers in, but suffice to say you're playing a fairly ruthless thug who has a heart compared to past GTA characters but nonetheless has no qualms with kidnapping a girl and referring to her in derogatory terms, or killing countless people, but is then expected to show more depth towards the end for a female character that is underdeveloped to begin with. I can understand what they were TRYING to do and I admire that, but they should have expanded the relationship between Nico and Kate before attempting to pull that off. Nico ends up coming across as something of a self-absorbed person at the end, because you have to wonder if the motivation for revenge is really because he cared about this other person or whether it's just because he wants to prove to himself that he has room to care about someone.
Really, though, that's the only fault. The overall mechanics of the plot and the expansiveness of it all is cinematic and deeper than any other GTA game.
The physics are far better than previous games which has caused some people to complain because they can't flip their cars a hundred times and keep driving, but I liked it. Liberty City is totally revamped and looks and feels like a real, living city - it's amazing. The attention to detail is quite impressive - non-characters walking down the street just start smoking cigarettes or drinking coffee. Sometimes as you pass by someone too fast they'll drop their bag of groceries or stumble over. I can't wait to see what a GTA game will look like in ten years' time.
Too much has already been said about this game for me to add anything new or insightful, really, but I will end this by saying I disagree that it's "by far" the best game of the series. I love it about as much as I loved "Vice City," which was probably my favourite. It's hard to compare them because each has their strengths. I didn't like San Andreas quite as much as Vice City but even "San Andreas" had the benefit of planes and skydiving and bicycles which have been removed from GTA IV. But basically I think this fits in well with the others; it has enough advancements to be truly "fresh" while still providing the same dark humour and basic gameplay attributes of previous games. It's a solid addition to an already excellent franchise and just a lot of fun.
