It's GTA, what more can I say?
Gameplay:
This game plays the same as previous titles, you start at the bottom of the pile and work your way up. It may be the same formula as previous GTA games, but it works and continues to feel fresh in this installment. You illegally enter America seeking your cousin and hope to put your dark past into the past. When you get there, the glamour of money, mansions, fast cars and women that your cousin told you about isn't quite so. But very quickly you work into a criminal ring and must work your way up. Unlocking islands, missions, weapons along the way.
The game is much deeper than previous games and theres much more to do. It's almost like San Andreas mixed with GTA III Liberty City. This is very good, because obviously when bored of the main storyline you can go off and play pool, go on a date, go drinking etc. In fact the many characters you meet in game will constantly harrass you to go out for the evening, something I got quite tired with, although you can put your in-game mobile phone on silent to not receive their calls. The in game phone I must add is a brilliant feature, it enables you to ring in game characters, take photos, start multiplayer games etc. It also means you can phone the police to create diversions or if you need to steal a police car for a mission.
The main storyline is a very deep and gritty game as you'd expect from the series. From drug dealing, stealing cars, abducting the mob bosses young daughter and so forth, GTA IV has it all. I don't want to give too much away in this review which is making it hard to write, but for anyone who hasn't finished the storyline, I highly recommend it. The game isn't very long, a casual gamer could complete it in about 20 hours or so. But the amount of side content is inmense. I mean, the fact you can go in a internet café and surf the in-game internet(kind of wish it could be modded to allow the surfing of the real internet, now that'd be awesome), you can find dates online and pimp your phone etc.
Graphics:
The graphics on the PC are far superior to its console counterparts, however, you need a fairly high end PC to turn it up without issues. Even on my system(Athlon X2 6000+, 4GB Corsair DDR2 RAM, 8800 GTX XXX Edition) I could only run it on medium high settings with a FPS of around 40. Glitches are common, nothing serious, mostly textures occasionally taking a little while to load causing roads to go to a low res texture before high res. A few buildings do corrupt when you go in them where the walls disspear allowing a view into the games ghost world. Don't get me wrong, these issues are few and far between and don't get in the way. For a game born on PC I would expect better, but don't let it stop you.
Sound:
The sound FX in the game are nothing special, the main issue is the radio isn't as good as GTA Vice City or even San Andreas. It's proberbly the worst ever with no good songs. That problem is easily solved on PC with a custom radio station, now called Independence Radio.
Multiplayer:
Fantastic, multiplayer is back! Is it good? well, depends. I play it over LAN with my fiancée and myself just driving around pissing about, its great fun. Online? well, not so much fun overall. Sure sometimes you'll get into a fun game, especially the turf wars and nothings better than running down someone. But multiplayer is a good feature and i'm happy it's back, thank you Rockstar!
Modding:
The game is mod friendly, although with 3rd party patches. Textures can be changed, cars replaced etc
Overall:
This is a must for any GTA fan, my review is very cut back for 2 reasons, A. theres way too much in this game to list B. I don't want to give too much away. This game is best if you give yourself a few hours to get into it, get stuck in and let it draw you in. It's a superbly immersive game and after having it for almost a year I still go back every so often, that's value for money. Especially as it retails for about £20(about, $32 i beleive).
I give it a score of 9.0