What can be said about Grand Theft Auto IV that hasn't already been said about Grand Theft Auto IV? It was the next big GTA title, the first for four years, here to show off the next generation of consoles. Everyone wanted to see what it was capable of. Could the leap from San Andreas to IV be as big as the leap from GTA2 to GTA III? Would it live up to the hype? Was the push for realism going to make or break it?
When we look back on the GTA series, it often feels like GTA IV is a bit of a forgotten child. It's grey and miserable, the streets of Liberty City grubby and soulless. Wouldn't you rather be on the sun-soaked sandy beaches of Vice City? Wouldn't the countryside of San Andreas provide a better time? Well, yes, I think I would rather spend my time in any of those settings, but if you asked me what actual GTA game I wanted to play the most, I might be tempted to say GTA IV and mean it.
I've played through the PlayStation 3 version a couple of times, but at some point in 2017, I decided that it was time to play the PC version. I grabbed some screenshots that I guess made much more sense in the moment than they do now...
Let's see what I can remember first, and then we'll have another crack at it.
Fun Times
GTA IV was always going to be different. From the first trailers released into the world, the game didn't look like the others. Sure, the character models were still somewhat caricatured in their proportions, and the whole "let's make a commentary on the state of the world" through-line was ever-present, but this was going to be a bit of a grittier, more grounded, Grand Theft Auto story.
Niko Bellic arrives in the United States to live with his cousin Roman, who promises a better life than anything they could have gotten back home in Eastern Europe, though if his apartment is anything to go by, we've got a way to go yet.
Roman owns a taxi service, but owes a lot to various loan sharks and criminal gangs of one form or another, and you can already get a picture of what we're going to have to do to sort our lives out - and it's not going to be pretty.
What is pretty, if you look at it the right way, is Liberty City itself. Hundreds of thousands of reference photos from New York City have been used to make the GTA version of it. The run-down apartments, the dirty streets, the dark alleys you don't want to find yourself in, but also the parks that you can hope to find some quiet in, and the riverside views you can get of the city on the other side.
I like to try and find something to enjoy in what, at a glance or on the whole, could be considered a bland place to be. Love the place you're in, and all that. Exploring your surroundings is a joy, and in GTA IV, getting to know where your mission markers are going to pop up and how to drive through traffic to get to them is a bit of a necessity, even with a GPS system.
Your earnings can be spent all over the place, on clothing, entertainment, sports, you name it. GTA IV is a living world, with as many activities to do outside of the criminal underworld you're inevitably going to be taking part in. Your mobile phone will ring with characters you meet asking you to go out for an evening, and it's your choice to go along or not, increasing or decreasing your reputation with them accordingly.
But it's not what vast numbers of gamers buy a Grand Theft Auto title for, is it? They don't really care about what an Eastern European immigrant gets up to in his downtime. There's talk of us looking for someone. Someone bad. And we're going to need to fight fire with fire.
I haven't got any screenshots of that from 2017, however, so it's time to fire up the game for the first time in years to go out and see what kind of madness we can get up to.
Frustrations
In the years since I played, Rockstar has deemed it appropriate to make GTA IV easier to play on modern PCs by seemingly stripping out the Games for Windows Live stuff (whey!) and plonking everything into their own launcher (boo!).
I haven't tested it, but I think I'm now in a situation where if I click on GTA IV in GOG, it'll load up Steam to load up to the Rockstar launcher to play the game. Maybe. But it runs, and runs pretty well.
Not sure where I am in the story, I head towards a mission marker for Gerry McReary, which turns out to be a bit of a classic mission for GTA.
Further Fun Times
A car bomb. Is there a GTA game that doesn't feature a car bomb? I'm not sure of my relationship to Gerry here, other than a business colleague. We do a rather famous GTA IV mission for this Irish family. Have I done it in this playthrough yet? You'd have thought I'd remember, but no, no idea.
The drive into the alley to pick up the bomb was uneventful and allowed me to enjoy the nighttime scenery. As I say, on the whole, it might look grey and featureless, but there's something a little special here, in this alleyway, where there shouldn't be. Maybe it's the nostalgia talking. Perhaps I'm just looking forward to playing GTA IV so much that everything is fun, I don't know.
Bomb in hand, we've got a car to find. Luckily, GTA IV has plenty of markers and GPS navigation routes for you to follow that getting lost is largely out of the question. You might argue that signposting everything so blatantly dumbs down the game to the point where it might as well be playing itself, but then this is one of the biggest selling video games of all time - dumbing it down must be good for some of us.
Grand Theft Auto games, while scripted and story-driven and often inspired by cinema, aren't very cinematic titles. You don't watch GTA IV anywhere near as much as you play it, which is a good thing. Cutscenes are often short and fairly straight to the point, this latest one giving a sentence of dialogue and a fancy camera angle before dropping us right back into gameplay.
Ah, well, a shootout was almost inevitable, wasn't it? I don't know why I would ever have thought it wasn't going to happen. The car we've bombed belongs to... someone. And by blowing it up we're making it look like someone else did the job, apparently. Again, not sure who, but there are some angry armed folk here, so we can finally talk about the gunplay.
The lock-on system here puts your aim at centre mass and indicates how much health and ammo your target has so that seeing how much work you'll need to do to kill someone is a breeze. You could pull down the trigger and fire away, safe in the knowledge that you won't be shooting at anything else while you do so, such is the stickiness of the lock-on, but you'll still hit whatever your target is hiding behind, and so on.
If you nudge your aim up a little, though, you'll have a kind of soft-lock on the target's head, which is always going to end the fight quicker than anything else, whether you're armed with a pistol, machine gun, or rocket launcher.
Whether I'm running some friendly settings or not I don't know, but GTA IV is accessible to play and comfortable for the most part. It has its quirks, but I feel at home. Perhaps because I've played so much of it, and the series as a whole? I'm not sure, but I like what I'm doing.
Well, to be clear, the gaming side of things. Liking a car bomb and deadly shootout isn't cool. Nor is the ludonarrative dissonance that's going on, but those are big words that I don't use for a reason...
After the bullets start flying through the skies, the cops are bound to turn up, and so our mission ends with the objective of 'run away'. Sadly, running away often just involves straight-lining it as fast as possible. The odd cop might turn a corner and catch sight of you once again, but in many cases, the chase isn't as chaotic as it could be.
Finishing up the mission with a phone call to Gerry, who likes my work and offers me more, I note that I'm just a block or so away from Playboy X, who has a mission for me of his own.
While I couldn't tell you who Playboy is or how we got to know him, I do recall this mission or at least some of it. Something is going on at a construction site on the coast, and that something needs to be dealt with for reasons. Even with the subtitles on, I wasn't following the reasons, hopefully because they're all out of context in the wider story, and I've just forgotten what's going on - otherwise, it's because they just make no sense in the first place.
Anyway, sniper rifle and grenades in hand, we get to use a window cleaning lift or something to get up to the rooftops to snipe away some guards on these cranes.
It wasn't as cool as I thought it might be, even with the cutscenes of three guards silently falling through the skies to the floor below. Does nobody in Liberty City look up? Is an Eastern European walking through the traffic with a rifle that normal a sight that nobody cares?
Whatever the case, back on the ground after twenty seconds of sniping, we head into the construction site to find some union leaders. Being a GTA game, "find" means "kill".
Niko isn't the quickest of guns for hire, but a cover system and that generous lock-on makes things a breeze, no matter what weapon you find in your hands. Mopping up everyone in sight results in another successful mission. Again, it wasn't an amazing example of GTA IV at it's best, but it is very much GTA IV.
With that, it's time to find a safe house and get some rest.
Final Word
Having no idea on who these people are or why I'm working with them isn't an ideal situation to replay GTA IV in. I'm going to have to roll back the clock and start a new game to relive Niko's story in the right order.
It's a story I've seen before a few times, and want to see again, but not necessarily because it's a good or memorable story. I guess it's hard to say whether any GTA story is good or memorable because each game is packed full of individual little memories that players pull out.
Out of place missions, funny dialogue, perfectly timed songs on the radio, ridiculous stunt jumps... GTA IV is another sandbox full of things to do, so long as those things are of a somewhat criminal nature.
I know I like GTA IV. I can't point to anything particular for the reason why. Is it because it's a GTA game? Is it because it's easy to play? Is it because it's been a long time since I last played it? Is it because I'm easily pleased? Is it because it's a masterpiece?
There's something about it that calls to me, and I'm starting to wonder if it isn't Niko and the many other cast members there are, but Liberty City itself. And again, not necessarily because it is a huge playground packed with little details to make it feel like a real place, but because of some sort of allure.
Wouldn't it be nice to just drive through the city, or grab a hotdog on the sidewalk, or meet someone in an Internet cafe? It's the little things that make me want to go through this game again. That there's a huge, action-packed story to go through as well is just an added bonus.
Fun Facts
Estimated production costs were recouped in a single day of sales. Profit was earned later that same day. Half a billion dollars in its first week on the shelves cemented GTA IV as a top video game.
Grand Theft Auto IV, developed by Rockstar North, first released in 2008.
Version played: PlayStation 3, 2008, via memory,
PC, 2008.