We're all looking for that special someone...
The presentation of Grand Theft Auto 4 is really quite remarkable; the box art in itself is incredibly well designed. Evidentially, it became a way of advertising the game also, with the announcement of the box art, a time lapse video of the team that created it, painting the piece onto a large canvas, which became one of many trailers for the game. Beyond that, the graphics are visually much more beautiful than its predecessors, using a new physics engine called Euphoria, an advanced environmental system and incredibly rebuilding Liberty City, the title is considered one of the most breathtaking sandbox environments to date.
The story begins with Niko Bellic, veteran of the Bosnian War, arriving in Liberty City to meet his cousin, Roman, to live with him in what he described as the 'American Dream.' Niko quickly finds this to be a fabrication and his cousin in fact lives the exact opposite, pursued by Loan Sharks, bullied by his superiors and working a dead end job. As the story progresses Niko finds himself rising the ranks as Hired Gun and working for some of the biggest names in the city at that time, performing hits, protecting key members of an organisation and transporting stolen goods. Nikos' hidden motives become clear, as he looks for the man who betrayed him and his squad and left him for dead. Only three men survived the treachery, so Niko goes out looking for the other two men, having tracked one of which for ten years to Liberty City, Niko must find the traitor and decide if revenge is the best option.
Within the game are several vehicles and weapons that are replicas of real versions of them, some of the weapons include the 9mm handgun, Spaz shotgun and M4 Carbine, which are generally used in most games as they are universally well known and cover all different types of armament which suit all situations, sniper rifles for missions in which you must protect someone or with Uzi's to fire from a motorcycle. The great thing about the vehicles in not just the recent GTA games, but the older titles too, as the ones featured are generally based on popular ones at the time with simple changes to the names, such as the Lamborghini Diablo becoming the 'Infernus' and Aston Martin DB9 becoming the 'Banshee', at the time of release, these were considered some of the best cars in the world.
Several months after the games release, downloadable content suddenly surfaced, the first called 'The Lost and the Damned.' In the LATD, the player controls a biker called Johnny Klebitz, who was seen occasionally in the main plot, facing his troubles in Liberty City, struggling to control 'The Lost' gang. The second piece of content released was called 'The Ballad of Gay Tony', in this the player controls Luis Lopez, who acts as a kind of second in command to an organisation ran by Anthony "Gay Tony" Prince, which walks the player into more socialite night life type scenarios. These two pieces of content were widely well received and extended the main plot exponentially, especially for DLC, which generally only spans a few hours. Beyond adding replay value to the game, new additions arrived with the content, such as checkpoints after key moments in missions, which have been missing from the Grand Theft Auto franchise; other additions include new weapons, vehicles and characters.
Incredibly it would seem that Rockstar had the whole story for the game spanning into these downloadable stories planned out since the beginning, this is evident by the characters meeting one another and hearing about the others missions. The most obvious case of this would be the pivotal diamond mission, which happens at a key moment in Niko's story in which the deal would be interrupted and he would flee to chase after the rival gang he was doing the deal with. Also present at the deal was Jonny, who in the main game simply runs away and isn't seen until later on, in the LATD you control him, and discover where he goes, which incidentally is back to his bosses to inform them of what has happened. The third DLC of course gives you control of Luis in which you are the attacker, who eventually gets the diamonds and joins Gay Tony in another deal later on, which again, Niko appears in.
The game has a large variety of characters ranging across different ages and races. Niko himself is Serbian, as is his cousin, Roman. Native to Liberty City, as it is quite literally a replica of New York City, has American citizens inhabiting it such as Brucie and his brother Mannie, who are hot headed steroid enhanced body builders. Other examples of interesting people that the game's protagonist's will meet include traditional, stereotypical Italian gangsters, of course being in rival factions which took inspiration from the Mafia, these stereotypes get involved with other well known mobsters such as the Irish, who came to the city in search of a better life and got wound up in a war with the Italians.
Generally the player will come across high ranked people, government officials, mob bosses, celebrities and highly renowned drug barons, giving the player a taste of a life that involves money, death and cheating your way to the top. On the other end of the spectrum, the player will also encounter drug addicts, criminals, bums and even murderers on the run from the law; this contrast is well needed to ground the story. Niko is an off the boat immigrant looking for work and money in the city, thusly he has to start somewhere. Again Luis and Jonny aren't exactly big names within the families and factions scattered about the place, so the game generally will start the player off working with the bottom of the barrel and then working the narrative forward to big names that the player would have heard of along the way up.
A main point of the series of Grand Theft Auto has always been to provide an emotional single player campaign to let whoever has the controller feel a connection to whatever protagonist they control, and Rockstar have always been incredibly good at providing that, with several games under their belt. Whilst dabbled with in previous titles, GTA 4 was the first in the series to have a full fledged multiplayer, with several traditional games types such as Death match and point capture variants, other unique types fill the roster with games such as Hangman's Noose in which the player must protect a VIP and transport them somewhere. Beyond those, there is also the well received free roam mode, which can be played privately with friends or online against unknown gamers, the player can explore the whole of Liberty City online, which in turn spawned many infamous glitches such as the swing, this being a small swing set that the player could park up and be launched across the map by. Despite these problems, the Multiplayer is a hugely well received aspect of the game and will most likely return in future instalments.
With the introduction of Grand Theft Auto 4, Rockstar felt the traditional rag-doll physics were outdated and not right for the new title, because of this, the designers decided to work with NaturalMotion, a software company that works on animation technology. The partnership paid off and the game was released as one of the first titles to use their new Euphoria engine. Rag-doll is generally very limp, so that when one part of the model is influenced, the rest of the model will be too. The new engine uses new technology called Dynamic Motion Synthesis which is rooted from real-time simulations on the central nervous system. NaturalMotion created this software to make it that each point of the model has a set animation point, and each point has its own properties so that it's influenced in a different way each time. An example of the technology at work is when Niko falls down a flight of stairs, when this happens; the character tumbles down the steps realistically, ragdolls would generally just glide down the steps and it would always look very buggy and wrong.
One of the most renowned aspects of the franchise is the soundtrack, every vehicle in the game has a radio and by using these, the player can choose between several radio stations. Each of the stations has its own genre be it Rock, Jazz or Reggae there is a DJ attached to each individual station including the likes of Ruslana, the Ukrainian winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, who is the presenter of Vladivostok FM; interestingly this particular station plays Eastern European music and her song 'Wild Dances' appears as one of the songs on the set list. Incredibly big names from a huge variety of genre's and eras have licensed their songs to the game, these include rapper Busta Rhymes, pop legend Elton John, Rod Stewart, Motley Crew and hundreds more, giving a much more in-depth experience and providing a more diverse soundtrack. A partnership was later made between online distribution giant Amazon.com and Rockstar to make as many songs from the game as possible available to purchase through Amazon MP3, their own music sales branch.
Other games of the same genre, Sandbox Action-Adventure, are generally very similar in the premise, other examples such as Mafia 2 and the Spider-Man series tend to have the aspect of 'sandboxing' down, in a sentence, as the ability to freely explore an environment with limited restrictions. Thanks to this, each sandboxing game tends to have its own twist; the Spider-Man series for example, is obviously very different in its sandboxing due to the abilities of the main character. The GTA franchise has always been a groundbreaking title for this genre, providing huge environments; this particular series tends to do something most sandbox games don't, which is give the player free exploration to as many indoor areas as possible, with clothing shops, fast food and restaurant locations and even nightclubs, the player has a much bigger environment to explore than other titles like Mafia 2.
With Grand Theft Auto adding modern touches to an already once beautiful environment, Liberty City finally feels complete, with the shortcomings of GTA 3 met, the addition of the fantastic characters, soundtrack, vehicles, weapons and everything else that makes Grand Theft Auto 4 the revolutionary game it is; Rockstar has once again raised the bar for what Sandbox titles should be like. Adding the thirty hour single player experience with a well refined and polished online service made the franchise what it should be, whether the character is hanging out it in a bar with an associate or taking their girlfriend on a helicopter ride, Liberty City is defiantly the place to be. If there was a higher mark than 10/10, that would be swiftly awarded, under these circumstances however, there's nothing that needs changing with Grand Theft Auto 4.