Yeah, it's good, but it's not quite worth the 10/10.
Where as this seems to make a 'short' game, anyone who has played previous Grand Theft Auto games knows that the missions are not supposed to be the only focal point - arming yourself to the teeth (or, for the more daring, picking up a pistol) and then shooting the nearest civilians and waiting for the police is a great, if unnecessary, use of time.
Obviously, the best thing to compare this game to is San Andreas. What's new? Lots.
-New controls. Easy to get used to, and I played a PS2 before the 360.
-New physics. Nice explosions. You can walk into corpses and push them along.
-New animations. Euphoria is the AI system of the day. As well as the archetypal "cling on to [object] for dear life" as made famous by The Force Unleashed videos, it can do other things e.g. if you're chasing someone, they might retreat into a carpark for cover or to find some friends...
-Good storyline. I won't go into details, but there are good twists in it.
-Choices. Should I kill this girl? Should I throw this guy off a rooftop because a mob boss told me to? Would he find out if I didn't?
-Smaller than San Andreas, but more building to go into. Still, I wouldn't say it felt as big as San Andreas, even with this addition.
So, for those that don't know, you are Niko Bellic, former member of the army "back home" in Eastern Europe. His cousin says that he is living the high life to get him to go to America, but it turns out that he was lying. A bit like in "The Guru", but with less Bhangra. Along the way, you find out other reasons for Niko leaving his home country... [END STORY DETAILS]
Choices impact the game a lot. Two examples I shall give are pretty cool (to me at least). There's a guy on a rooftop. I've been told to wipe out everyone in the building. This guy surrenders. I let him live. Later on, I see him in the street. After asking how he is, he tells me that no-one's going to push him around any more and pulls a pistol! I shoot him in the head. Another time, two people I've been working for each tell me to kill the other. You can only choose one. I chose to kill a stuck-up gangster, my friend chose to kill the down-on-his luck gangster who had just got out of prison. If you kill the stuck-up gangster, you get his apartment, GTA3 clothes (easter egg!) and the other guy becomes your friend and can send you backup if you're caught in a gunfight with little ammo. Killing the nice guy nets you a big cash prize, but then the stuck-up gangster severs ties with you.
The phone is important in GTAIV. You call people, arrange to go bowling or something together, eventually unlock 'abilities' such as asking your Jamaican friend for discounts guns (sold from the back of his car) and dump one of your potentially many girlfriends. You can customise ringtones and text message tones as well as setting vibrate functions and themes. You can also access multiplayer from this phone.
You know what I said earlier about taking on cops being a big thing in GTA? Online it's just as good. As well as (the much expected) Deathmatch, Capture the Car (capture the flag, basically), Racing, Mob Missions (objective based online play), NOOSE (get your mob boss away from multiple-star cops), Bomb Da Base (bomb a base...), Deal Breaker (go for a drug deal - either side can pull out the guns at any stage, so it can get a bit tense...) and Cops N Crooks (Cops and Robbers with guns - not as violent on the playground) with team variations on a few of them, there's Freemode. A god send.
Freemode lets you do whatever you want with Xbox Live friends or random people you have never met. Me and some friends held up a police station for quite awhile before leaping off the rooftop and getting into cars. It was awesome. Some of the biggest WOW! moments happen when playing with friends. Generally, online mode is as good as you would expect - fun for as long as you can be bothered to play it, but not when you get whiney 8 year olds who claim to be 23 and try to use a deep voice and claim others are hacking whenever they die.
Veteran GTA players will like the modern touches. R3 button missions are gone, but you can call your cousin to do taxi missions for him or jump in a police car and access the police database to hunt down Liberty City's 30 most wanted or just random criminals.
There is finally a proper cover system. It works like it should - press button to enter cover, press again to exit. If it's high cover, Niko stands. If not, he crouches. You can hold the aim button for accurate shooting but possibly get shot or you can blindfire, giving you safety at the cost of accuracy.
The bad points... graphics are not as amazing as some modern games are. They're good, but not mind-blowing. Some missions are annoying and stupid. Compared to the fun missions (like the EPIC Bank Robbery or bricking the windows in a guy's shop for protection money), these are lousy, uninspiring and a waste of time. Also, WHY IS THERE STILL NO OPTION TO REPLAY FUN MISSIONS WHEN THE GAME IS COMPLETED? This was said a lot after San Andreas (especially regarding the Breaking The Bank At Caligula's mission) so whyyyyyyyyy? Sometime's the AI will get stuck in walls. Sometimes you are given 12 seconds to get across a whole section of the map. The more awkward weapon select buttons mean you can no longer select weapons whilst running. They have been mapped to the D-Pad.
Overall, this game gets a 9/10.
Gameplay |||||||||| 10
Graphics |||||||| 8
Sounds |||||||| 8
Overall Value |||||||||| 10
Tilt ||||||||| 9
Average ||||||||| 9
Very good, not quite the leap forward expected, but definitely a good game. The good definitely outways the bad. All in all, an exellent buy for anyone, especially old GTA fans. Despite the lack of planes and parachutes, it remains easy to enjoy.
PARENTS BEWARE: No matter what your kid says to you about the game being 'tame' or not that bad, there IS violence and blood and a LOT of swearing. aI'm not discouraging you to buy the game, but just make sure you know what is in the game. The kid will enjoy the game regardless, but just keep in mind that it's been given an 18 certificate for a reason. That's not to say that you shouldn't buy your 16 year old son the game. He's probably heard worse things come out of a football (soccer, for y'all Americans) manager's mouth and more blood in the film Hard Boiled. It's all up to you.