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GTA 4, a review of some sort.

So I finally finished GTA 4... 2 years of inconsistent playing. I decided I´d try to write a little something about my experiences in Liberty City...


Everything feels very heavy in GTA4. The vehicles handle like the 2 ton pieces of metal they are, a pedestrian that gets hit by your car flies leaves the expected dent and blood spatter on your wind shield before landing on the concrete with a heavy thud. The city in GTA4 is based upon New York city, and Rockstar have done quite a job at capturing the key locations and bringing them intact into the game, with their own humorous twist.
The "American dream" and the people living in Liberty City are not portrayed very flattering, and the city is a dangerous place, for a newly arrived immigrant like myself.


You play as Nico Bellic, arriving to Liberty City in a Russian cargo ship originating from your home country somewhere in eastern Europe. You are greeted by your cousin Roman, who have been living in Liberty City for awhile and is running a small taxi-company near the harbour. You soon enter the profitable, but dangerous world of organized crime while you have your own personal agenda to try to find "that special someone".

Just going out the door and down the street can be an adventure in this game, mostly thanks to all the civilians that mill about around you, reading newspapers, talking in their cellphones, going home with groceries and so on. But instead of listing all the neat features this game has, I´ll instead write some "in game stories" about things that happened when I was just playing around in the city.

-Shove-
I was planning on checking out the beach, since sitting in Roman's apartment was just making me sick (he probably haven't cleaned it once). I go down the stairs and out on the street. Some guy is yelling across the street, trying to sell hot-dogs. Ignoring him I start to walk down the run-down Russian neighbourhood. Walking takes forever! I start to run instead, and while doing so, try to get past all the people on the sidewalk. I fail.

A middle-aged man with a thick pair of eyebrows is standing in the corner of the street, enjoying a coffee when he is suddenly getting my running body slammed into his back. The coffee spills to the streets, and the man tries to get his balance back. Failing that, he falls over and drops his hat. I stop to look at him. He swears in Russian while getting back up. I suddenly realise that he's coming right for me, angrily looking. He starts shouting at me, wondering what kind of idiot I am. I am stunned. I stand still just watching him throwing insults at me. Some people are starting to watch us. It seems that at least some of these folks know the man. I have no idea. They get up behind the coffee-less man, and starts to stare at me, all while the shoved man seems to get more and more frustrated at me. Suddenly he looses it, and takes a swing at me. Standing just outside the range of his fist, he misses, and I quickly shove him away from me, down on the pavement again. And then all hell brakes loose, as most of the people that had stood around us, now starts to shout at me! Sensing that 1 versus 10 angry Russians are not my kind of odds I run, with a shouting mob behind me. I´ll take a cab next time.


-Yes dear. Yes dear.-
If find myself driving at high-speed in the wrong lane, over one of Liberty City's largest bridges. The police are rather reluctant to intervene in this city I have found out, as long as you are not killing anyone. There's heavy traffic in the opposite lane, and I almost make it through. Smashing into a blue car on the freeway results in that my own car is completely smashed, with glass and debris everywhere. I come to again, and try to start the engine. "Come on, come on".
My car is a wreck, but I pray for good luck, sometimes the cars actually start again after being totally mangled. While I sit there, feverishly turning the key again and again, I notice that the person in the blue car I smashed has somehow survived and have actually exited his car.
He is walking, slumped and slow, towards me on the dimly lit bridge. Seems he has some blood on his suit. He collapses about 5-6m from his own car, into a little heap.
Not long after that, I hear sirens. Sometimes, the paramedics of Liberty City are actually working. An ambulance pulls up next to the injured man, and the driver runs out to give the injured man some first aid. Apparently feeling much better, the man rises on his feet. Content, the paramedic runs back to his Ambulance, and drives away in neck-breaking speed.

The injured man is still hunched and seemingly in a lot of pain. But he doesn't walk back to his car... Instead he starts to walk to get off the bridge. He is looking like a zombie, on a very long way home. And then suddenly his cellphone rings. I can't really make it out, but it seems his wife is calling him, asking him to buy some milk on his way home. So there he goes, and old man, hunched over, injured and bleeding, talking in his cellphone, on the longest journey home he ever had. I just sit in my own mangled car, feeling a little guilty. Maybe I´ll help him out of his misery with my baseball bat? I approach the old man, but before I can do anything, I remember that we still are on the free-way. When I turn around, the headlights from a rather large truck is coming at me and old man very fast. I think the last vision I had was the old man and me plummeting several hundred feet down to the Liberty City river.

-Multiplayer-
If you can cause mayhem as just one person in GTA4, then everything goes haywire when you are a whole bunch of players trying to kill each other. Any time that Team Deathmatch is going on in Liberty City, the civilians are going to have a bad day. Almost every time.

So I find myself alone under the a large bridge where the subway shortly stops before going back into the depths of the city again. We were 2 just a minute ago, but my companion took a lethal lead-injection before I could help him. Moving hunched I can just make out two members of the opposite gang down the road, and I try to use my trusty submachine gun to take them down. I can't aim for shit, it seems. They fire back at me, and I try to advance with the little cover I can get. People all around me are screaming, running. Totally understandable. A woman is driving a rather large SUV beside me when her front window is peppered with bullets from my rival gang members. She screams, and tries to back her car. In her panic, she also tries to turn around, and I realise that she is actually backing right towards me. I try to get away, but bump into one of the supporting pillars of the railway. Before I can do anything, I get sandwiched between a hideously large car and a big steel bar. Just before I die, I can swear that I am hearing my enemies laughing at me further down the road. I´ll get them on my next respawn...

So wrapping up, just fooling around in the city is a lot of fun. Sometimes even more fun that the pretty linear story missions... The AI and physics works well at creating a very interesting setting for a game, and even if they are not very realistic, they are very fun. You should definitely try it out, and see if you have what it takes to survive this very disturbed American Dream.