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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, Grand Theft Auto 4 is a dull and dour game, having completely lost sight of the humor and sense of fun that got the series where it is, yielding a game that pales in comparison to even the various clones the series had spawned by time of its release.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: GTA4, while not often called out for it, Grand Theft Auto 4 like its predecessors pushes the hardware a little past its limits at times, making things feel a little slower than they should.
Why I Like It Anyway: During the relatively long period of development between Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and GTA4, a parade of imitators sprang forth, grew, and evolved from cheesy knockoffs to the sort of thing that really can stand toe to toe with their peers. Most notably, a fairly large percentage of the GTA fanbase decided to jump ship for the Saint's Row games, which offered a very similar experience, with a much more whimsical (and slightly filthier) tone. GTA4 meanwhile went in a slightly different direction, refining everything the series is known for to one degree or another.
At this point, it really is required that we take a moment to discuss the GTA series as a whole. As has been mentioned here before, developer Rockstar North (then DMA) is a Scottish company, originally best known for creating various silly cartoonish games like Lemmings. The first two GTAs were fairly simple top down affairs, with maps generally based on the layouts of major American cities, where the goal was to amass enough money to be allowed to move onto the next map in fairly open ended fashion. The main hook being that any given vehicle in the game could be commandeered, and different pieces of music being played on the radio depending mainly on the sort of car driven.
The series really made it big however with the third game, which honestly didn't change much at all about the core gameplay, but made huge leaps in immersion with the presentation. A huge part of this was simply shifting to a street level camera and polygonal environments, and generally increasing the level of detail. The arcade style open ended approach to things was also given a back seat in terms of progressing through the game in favor of a sequence of plotline missions, with cinematic introductions paying homage to various famous mob movies, with rather impressive voice acting.
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Another part of the immersion though, at least as significant as the visuals, was in the little audio touches. Every single person walking by on the street had a few lines they could mutter based on their lot in life. The car radio's various stations not only took advantage of the added disc space of the PS2 to squeeze in more songs, they had ads between the songs, announcers, and station identification bumpers. A talk radio station rambled on for a shocking amount of time, with various crazy citizens of the city becoming increasingly unhinged while talking to a flabbergasted host. Eventually actual plot line characters would even join in, in one case even bringing up the main character and his odd habit of never talking. Aside from all of this being generally amusing, everything blends together to create a coherent world and style of humor, holding up a surprisingly accurate jaded and sarcastic mirror to modern America.
The numberless sequels Vice City and San Andreas focused heavily on the radio stations and the added depth they added to the game. Set in a mid-80's Miami and a huge swath of early 90's California and Nevada they each do a tremendous job of capturing their settings, connecting the world together through in-jokes about in-game companies and celebrities, revealing the makers of road straddling gas guzzlers to have been producing tiny compacts 15 years prior, establishing radio personalities as washed-up has-beens, and even confirming that the protagonist of GTA3 really was an actual mute. Not to mention providing some astoundingly good collections of period music and grabbing a staggering number of real world celebrities to essentially play themselves. They also gave the player a greater ability to interact with the game world, with San Andreas in particular featuring more RPG elements than most RPGs, allowing for huge amounts of appearance customization, improving various stats and skills over time, tracking your characters' weight and muscle tone based on his actual eating habits and level of physical activity, even changing the dialog in some cutscenes based on his physique, and including a dating minigame where various girls judged him on his appearance and the sort of car he drives.
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What people are astoundingly prone to forget however is that over the run of the series, and completely against its reputation in the mainstream media, each game has gone to greater lengths to be socially responsible to some degree. While the first thing most people think they know about GTA3 for instance is that you can "pay a hooker to sleep with you and restore your health, then kill her and take your money back" it really isn't so. As part of the game's overall open-ended approach, any NPC dying for any reason will drop a random and ultimately insignificant amount of money (roughly between $5 and $100). In comparison completing actual storyline missions pays out in the thousands, and even just dropping people off in a cab or working as a volunteer fire fighter pay an order of magnitude better. So while it is totally possible to pay a hooker and sit motionlessly in the passenger seat, will the car to bob up and down with her eery mind powers as your HP refills, and it is then possible to kill her and take the $10 of random pocket money she'd have dropped either way, to partially offset the hundreds of dollars you just paid for the healing, doing so will attract the attention of the police, and attacking them will scale the problem up, until you are eventually arrested or killed, either way a huge setback. It's hardly an instance of rewarded behavior, particularly when you can alternatively start the cab driver mini-game, give someone a lift to the hospital, get a huge lump of cash, and pick up a free healing item instead.
Aside from having more realistic consequences for your actual socially unacceptable actions than really any other game out there though, Vice City's actual storyline, largely an homage to Scarface, focuses rather heavily on the destructiveness of greed and how easily basically well-intentioned people can totally ruin their lives as they let minor compromises build up, then San Andreas upped the ante by bookending things with an absolutely grim and sobering look at the destructive effects drug dealers can have on small communities (which frankly caused some extreme mood whip-lash given the middle of the game padding things out with wacky rap feuds, hippies, street races, and a crazy James Woods).
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Of course, most people who play the GTA games generally ignore the main plotline and any actual goals of the game for the most part, preferring to just goof off and perpetuate mindless destruction. Saint's Row fully embraces that, establishing actual mini-games based on just general sociopathic destructive anarchy, but nothing about GTA4 restricts the player from the sort of hijinks possible in earlier games. Frankly, the potential for goofing off is rather remarkable, between revamping gunplay to allow for really specific targeting, introducing ragdoll physics, overturnable fruit stands, and a truly amazing revision of how cars suffer damage, allowing for realistic actual deformation of frames, bent axels, and drivers that can end up being ejected through windshields or slumping down on gas pedals.
The real focus of the game though is on that realistic immersion. A startlingly good job was done in creating an almost 100% accurate brick by brick recreation of New York. In addition to the standard radio gags, it's possible to just sit around your apartment and watch TV, with choices of historical documentaries, a Knife Collector spoof, comedy routines, and an over the top flash animated cartoon about jingoistic "Republican Space Rangers." Alternatively, you can pull out your cell phone, call a friend, or a perspective date, and take in the night life.
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Oddly enough, this is a much maligned feature despite the fact that it can be turned off and on whenever the player does and does not want to deal with it, but over the course of the game, various NPCs befriend the main character allowing them to call, or be called upon, to go out and have some fun. Staggering amount of dialog take place with them as you drive around the city, rounding them out as surprisingly three dimensional people, getting more open and philosophical the better you get to know them, and an even more impressive variety of activities are out there to enjoy. Aside from the cheap amusement of hitting a bar and watching them stagger around drunk shouting at passing cars, mini-games exist for playing a round of darts, shooting pool, or going bowling. Alternatively, there's cabaret shows with an impressive variety of acts, and a comedy club featuring unique, full performances by Kat Williams and Ricky Gervais.
Really, GTA4's content amounts to three separate games. There's the relatively serious main mission arc, depicting a shady immigrant and his attempt to secure a peaceful life for himself and his charming loser of a cousin. There's the mindless chaos of going on a destructive rampage through a major city for violence's sake. Then there's the surprisingly engrossing simulation of just spending a day or two in New York and enjoying yourself in pedestrian fashion. All work quite well, and play off each other fairly nicely.
Some credit is also due for being one of the rare few games whose DLC offerings take the form of true full blown expansions which could just as easily been released individually as outright sequels (and in fact, have been). In fact, those expansions improve on the original enough to be underrated games in their own rights to arguably merit coverage in this feature.
