On one hand, I can't think of a single person, publication, and even retail salesperson not discussing GTA IV. To my shock, it was even brought up as a fun fact at a my work, which is for a popular auto web site! Needless to say, there's plenty of clutter on this game and normally I would skip it altogether. At the same time, for the same reason I didn't skip buying it (which I was planning on doing), it would be stupid not to mention it for my loyal readers (which is, basically, me...great). I haven't played enough to even hint at a review, and I feel any user who's writing one that hasn't been home without work or sleep the whole time, should either. And even if you have, you're in no condition to write a review, skip it, come back to it in a week. No one reads more than one user review anyway and a game like this will have people writing reviews about it on an hourly (or more) basis. I will, however, share my initial thoughts after about 2 hours of play.
What I like:
-My number one golden star to this installment is that the city is smaller. I don't know about everyone else, but San Andreas was so much pointless driving and dying just to get back to a local hospital that I gave up on it altogether. I liked the compacted cities in GTA III and Vice City, which were still large but not wastes of space, and there were plenty of those in San Andreas.
-I like the quicker routes in the game, that outline a path via GPS to get you from point a to point b without constantly pausing and looking at the map.
-The cell phone customization and utilization is most likely a plus, but I don't know how this will play out later. It may later be a con. Love the personal ringtones and text messaging!
-The crowd interaction cracks me up. I like how the random pedestrians that are criminals or jerks will come up and pick a fight with you, even if you're standing still! It's more realistic. Got arrested my first time because I stood still and got up to get more water, came back to me standing outside the police station getting hassled again!
-The writing flows, is solid, and keeps my interest. I keep playing on just to learn more about the situations of the characters.
What I didn't like:
-Traffic, both vehicle and pedestrian seems light. I know there's a lot in this game, but I expected more people. It's possible that I haven't been to enough areas yet, so I'll keep my eye open.
-Controls are a little complicated in the beginning. You are given information as you play, but sometimes situations occur before those situations that you could have preferred knowing the controls for. I also hate the endless combinations of controls to do certain things. Probably more used to the Playstation controls as I've never played on Xbox before.
-Game is a little jerky. I must admit, I have no idea how they got the framerate/jerkyness to this point without a 360 install and probably explains why the PS3 runs smoother (although I heard of crashing/freezing issues). Doesn't bother me much, but I still feel like i'm watching something that's 24 fps in 30 fps, with a few frozen frames. Now that we see the world in 1080p, this is more obvious.
Those are my first impressions of the game. One way or the other, the GTA franchise is a huge hit and I've loved and played all of them. I was quite skeptical when I saw the condition of San Andreas that I would skip this one, but now that I purchased it I see that I made the right choice. They seemed to return to the gritty world of GTA III, which for all intents and purposes, is still the best of the previous three in my opinion. I think I'd choose to say, "believe the hype, get this game!"