If you don’t already have the game, I’m sure you’ve seen about a billion reviews or news items focusing on Grand Theft Auto IV at this point, so I’ll try and keep myself from reiterating the same old stuff. Nevertheless, as someone who has never owned a GTA title (but has played them), I wanted to give my take on a few things, and show that the game does actually deserve the praise that it is getting.  

As recently as a week ago I had absolutely no intention of even buying the game. I have nothing against Grand Theft Auto; on the contrary, I played Vice City quite a bit and never stopped enjoying it. However, I was never able to immerse myself into the missions or plots of past GTA games. When I played (using the completed saved games of my friends), I just ran around wreaking havoc, more often than not with cheats enabled so I would never run out of guns or ammo. It was the kind of game that I liked to play when I wasn’t in the mood for anything serious or very engrossing and just wanted some mindless fun. Since I never really got into the mission aspect of the past games, I figured I wouldn’t be able to get the full value out of GTAIV. Besides, I just recently got sucked back into playing Halo 3 on a nightly basis again, so I didn’t think I was in need of a new game at the moment.

That wasn’t enough for my friends though, and a number of them kept pestering me unrelentingly to buy the game. They finally got to me, and I started reading up on it. Though I’m normally quite immune to hype that surrounds upcoming games (possibly excluding Halo-related stuff), I’ll admit that it pulled me in, and I finally decided to get the game. Apparently the hype hit me even harder than I thought though, because I ended up going to a midnight release, and managed to get the last copy that the store had. Lucky me, eh? But would it live up to all of the expectations that I had accumulated over the last... three days or so? Simply put: hell yes.

A number of reviews have commended the game’s protagonist for his complexity and difference from other characters in the series, and I for one think the praise is well-deserved. A Serbian immigrant to Liberty City and veteran of one of the Yugoslav Wars (going off the dates, I’m assuming the 1999 Kosovo War, though it’s never confirmed), Niko Bellic is a radical departure from previous player-controlled characters. While he is definitely fallible, and has done a number of bad things in his life (both during and before the events of the game), he hasn’t done those things because he wants to become a crime lord, or because he’s a sociopath, or for any other perverted reason. He really does want to do what’s right, and gets no pleasure out of the crimes that he’s committed. He’s just unfortunately been sucked into a bad world and is having a very hard time getting out of it. He’s fiercely loyal to his friends and family, and is more than willing to put himself into an even worse position than he is already in if that means defending someone he cares about. Yes, he carries out hits, blows stuff up, and commits other crimes over the course of the game, but unlike the past titles, I don’t feel like my character is a psychotic or soulless person after doing them. This, along with what comes off as a deeper and more complex storyline overall, has not only allowed me to tolerate the missions but completely suck me in. Amazingly, I haven’t gone on one single rampage yet; the story is keeping my undivided attention.

Multiplayer is another new addition to GTAIV that has been absent from the previous console games. I’ve only played a few of the objective gametypes, and I’m not sure how I feel about them at this point. They’re not bad, but they aren’t the high point of the game either. GTA just doesn’t seem like the kind of game that is built for player vs. player combat, which should be unsurprising. The free roam gametype, on the other hand, is absolutely amazing for such a simple concept. Basically, it’s the entire city, cops and all, minus the story missions, and the players are free to do whatever they want. I played it for probably six or seven hours tonight (out of a 13 hour session- no, I’m not addicted at all) with a few friends, and never got bored of it even for a second. We flew helicopters around, hijacked busses and armored cars in an attempt to get six stars, and blew up Times Square (or Star Junction, if you want to use the Rockstar-imposed name), with most of the map still unexplored and an infinite number of activities left untried. The only disappointment is that it seems achievements cannot be earned in multiplayer free mode, since there are several that a few of us should have unlocked if they were.

Now, I could go into specifics on so many things here, from graphics to gameplay to story to whatever, but the simple fact is that there is too much to talk about, and I don’t want to get into it. Grand Theft Auto IV is just an incredible game. Even if you don’t like GTA or sandbox games, or are of the persuasion that Grand Theft Auto is the gaming equivilant of satan (something I won't get into now, maybe another time) give it a try. I think you'll be surprised.