A masterful work. A game for generations to come.
They way everything unfolds is seamless. You could be street racing for pinks one minute, hijacking a car the next, then finish off by blasting a whole city block to hell. Grand Thief Auto IV brings so much to the table you have to choose which paths to choose because you can't do everything in this game or it will take months, maybe years to complete everything. You dictate everything in the story by the way of the gun. Some of your choices are uncomfortable and really stick with you sometimes. You can't really see the effect of your choices in the physical world. My notes are so muddled with information it's hard to describe just how everything plays out in this game. The story just feels real. You hang on every narrative, every character (which are the most fleshed out in any game ever).
You do worry about your choices but when it comes to who you want to kill in the fire fights... it's so much better this time around. The combat system has finally reached a point in the franchise that you don't worry about getting overwhelmed. You can take on twenty heavily armed baddies and not break a sweat, maybe that comes when your character was a solider in his home country. You feel like a one man army that could take out the whole city if you want to. But your enemies aren't mindless drones that don't know what they are doing, they will flank you and upgrade their weapons if they see a better on on the ground. It makes for a much better experience as your bullets just don't go where they want to but where you want them to go. Evading is also improved, you can easily hide from the police using any number of tactics. You again have to chose how you want to do this and where you can go to hide. It's a great experience when you pull it off after murdering a million people.
I think the best element of the game is the city itself. You can do everything in a real big city in this city. Restaurants, clubs, bowling, billiards, video games, and even watch TV in your apartment. You can surf the a fake internet in this game, you can online date on these fictional sites. Liberty city is alive. You see people go about there daily lives. You see drunks stumbling down the sidewalk. You see cab drivers pick up hookers. You see business men make important calls on there cells phones. It's the best fictional place to spends hours.
I can never really wrap my head around just how perfect this game is. The story warrants full marks for this game. It truely is a masterpiece of it's generation. I never thought somebody would be able to put so much into a game. It just blows me away. It truly is a masterpiece. Well done.