GTA IV – First Impressions

Tuesday, 4/29/08, 12:01am: Suffering the cold, unforgiving air, standing in the back of the longest Gamestop line I’d ever seen, I almost contemplated going home and calling it a night. Logically, I should have, as I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, and there was still work to go to later in the day. Fortunately, I decided to defy logic and stayed in the line anyway. Three and a half hours later, I was riding on an emotional high that I haven’t experienced from playing a game in a long time. I had experienced GTA IV. Gaming will never be the same again.

Rockstar has withheld many details about the game up until the day of the release. Several trailers and commercials were released, along with a few screenshots, but nothing they’ve shown so far has hinted at quite what the game has in store. For better or worse, their marketing campaign was brilliant for not giving too much away about the game itself. Nothing could have prepared me for this game. From the moment I first took control of Niko to the moment where I shut off the Xbox, I felt like I was in a whole other world.

Much can be said about this game, and much has already said in countless reviews. I’ll mainly say this: if you have a 360 or PS3, you absolutely NEED this game. If you don’t have either system, make up your mind and buy one. This is the first true “system seller” of this generation. Missing out on GTA IV would be akin to missing out on Star Wars in 1977. The acting, the animation, the music, the sounds, the graphics, the immersion of it all… summing up the game in words is borderline futile. I’m only 3 hours into it, and yet I’m totally hooked.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the game elements I’ve experienced so far. This is all spoiler-free:

Graphics: Obviously, the first thing anyone will notice when they see the game in motion. Despite being an open city, sandbox style game, the graphics are on par with the best ever seen in a game. The attention to detail is astonishing. The vehicles are more realistic looking than ever. The weather effects are more believable now. The lighting in interiors is amazing. It’s not just the big things, either. It’s the little details that truly boggle the mind. Once, while standing out in the rain, I panned the camera down to the ground, so that I could look straight up into the sky. Rain drops fell onto the virtual camera lens and filled my tv screen with water.

Another detail in the game, one which really makes you feel like you’re there and not playing a game: when you go in or out of a building, there’s no loading screen. No fade out to black. You just simply open the door and walk through. It’s phenomenal. It’s something so basic, yet so technically impossible for almost every game that’s come before it. This little, seemingly insignificant detail is what amazed me the most.

Animation: The word “animation” really does the game a disservice. When you watch the cutscenes, you’re not just watching some animated avatars lip-sync to real voices. You’re watching people act. For the first time in any GTA game, I’ve been able to pay full attention to the cutscenes without zoning out. Even the in-car banter between the characters is fascinating. The voices and acting are so well done that other games seem infantile in comparison. The bar for acting in a game has been raised much in the way that Pixar raised the same bar for CGI movies.

Sound: There’s supposedly over 200 songs contained in the game. I did not hear a song or commercial more than once in my first session. What I did hear was very pleasing. Although I was disappointed to learn that the drum’n’bass station from GTA3 was missing, several other stations filled the void. The music ranges from Eastern European electronica to downtempo to jazz to nu metal to… let’s just say that Rockstar has filled this game with a ton of genres. It’s amazing that they managed to fit so much data onto a dvd.

Gameplay: The only real “gripe” I can give the game at this point is that the cars are tricky to drive. It’s pretty much the same experience I had with GTA III, and then Saint’s Row. You just have to learn to adapt to it. The cars have much more weight now. They won’t turn on a dime, and there’s a very noticable difference in handling from one car to the next. Motorcycles are a bit tricky as well. The on-foot controls, plus the hand to hand fighting, are very easy to control though. The fist fighting was a bit deeper than I expected, yet it wasn’t difficult at all.

Everything else: I could go on and on about everything I experienced in those first 3 hours. I did a few missions, beat someone up, went on a date, drove around the city, stole a bunch of cars, evaded a few policemen, all of the standard GTA stuff. The way I did these things though, the way it all looked, it was truly like a whole new game. Comparing GTA IV to the GTA III games would be like comparing Super Mario Galaxy to Super Mario Bros. The graphics and everything else are several worlds apart from the last game.

I can’t wait to get back to the city. Sure enough, a point will come where I’ll fail a mission 3 times in a row, or will die or get busted on my way back to a save point. I’ll curse the game and all of the developers. I’ll even get slightly jaded by the game over time. I can’t imagine ever taking the game for granted, though. It’s so deep, so complex, so real, it’s truly a remarkable achievement in gaming. Maybe the most significant achievement we’ll see in this console generation. In my mind, there are only two types of games right now: GTA IV, and Everything Else.