Grand Theft Auto4 from a different angle.

Who-ever has played the "GTA (insert title here) stories" games and even San Andreas knows Rockstar has alot to redeem itself for.

And, in a sense, it has. Firstly, its not a sequel to a once fun game like the "GTA whatever stories" titles. It did not insist you go to the gym or eat food to become fit/unfit (my dude in GTA4 was as dorky and fat as I could make him). And lastly it added in actual interesting new features.

What I found most annoying about this game though was that randomly while between missions or even on missions, some person I don't like would call me up and go to some place I don't want to go to. If I decline my "likeness" and "respect" from that person decreases. You can ignore that, I don't mind. Its optional. Unless... you want to get 100%. Plus each character you "grind" reputation for gives you a boring and equally useless gimmick for you to use.

Another thing which gets annoying is that Niko, the questionable protagonist, never uses a bloody seatbelt. But lets add to this problem. The games assortment of items that protrude from the ground do not seem to be consistent in their strength. You have light posts which fall over when you ever so much as look at them while other post.... things.... half the size of the light posts are absolutely indestructible. Much the same as trees. So you will be in a mission where you are in a high speed chase, nearly caught up to the generic bad guy, when you hit some unidentified post in the ground which sends you flying out the front windscreen taking away a major portion of your life and by the time you get in the car, the bad guy got away.

The bad guys come in 2 flavors. Guys who want to run away in crappy slow cars and keep driving straight which you make swiss cheese of their car and guys who don't run away because they have a billion guys around him. Sometimes the game mixes them up where you have to run away or chase something and there are a million guys to kill anyway.

Combat generally is easy. But there is a new feature by where you can have your back to something and do the quick pop out, shoot and return to safety kind of moves. This "cover" system can be extremely useful to the point you can mow down 100+ guys without being hit, or it can be a bloody pain. Upon pressing the cover button, Niko tries to take cover at the nearest wall. Many times, this is not the wall you intended leaving niko an open target for the hundreds of bad guys to bullet rape you. Shooting back isn't hard though.

A good thing that they added in was the ability to take aim at different body parts while on auto-aim. While this freedom should be long taken for granted, it adds a certain amount of ease tot he game. In fact it makes it bloody easy. You are able to get head shots from miles away due to this making combat occasionally a monotony of pressing autoaim and holding your analogue stick slightly down (or up for the people using normal look).

And each bad guy has 2 lives. Much like the vampires off a lame horror movie the only way to kill them for sure is to hit them in the head. If you don't do this you will find yourself walking down some projects hallway with a presumed dead guy at the end of it with at least 50 bullets in him when he will suddenly get up healthy as Harry and completely annihilate you with a shotgun.

Well what about the cars. Grand Theft Auto is really about the cars some people say. Well the selection of cars for me to steal is rather small. With the second island dominated by taxis... and..... bigger taxis.... You find most of the games cars on the first island bar 1 or 2 but really shouldn't this be my motivation for unlocking the other islands? The first island is big enough to drive around in the corvette for at least a few hours. With that being said, the third island offers absolutely nothing. Everything on the third island can be found on the second if you look hard enough.

But I must say I am happy the the new damage models on the cars. Cars will realistically crunch up and jam the wheel preventing it from skidding. Constant burnouts will pop your tyres. And your car gets dirty. I know its a small thing but I get no greater satisfaction then stealing a Turismo and seeing how crap I can make it look by ramming into the super strong trees and doing dough nuts in dirt.

Lastly Police. The new police system is one where you have to drive out of a brightly flashing circle on your mini map. This circle is based off your last known location. If you lose the police driving down a road and then quickly turn into a side road they will continue down the main road. You can also try switching cars while no-ones looking. But all this police realism is lost when all the police really want to do is try and crash into you and their friends as fast as possible. Tanks are now extinct, as are spike strips. This somewhat reduces the difficulty and degrades my dreams of epic police chases like I had in the previous GTA games. Sure they set up road blocks but they really don't matter since all cars seem to have bullet proof metal and are able to take a billion bullets.

But yes, this is a good game, Its genuinely fun. I had a good time playing it. I enjoyed taking my virtual crime to a new level of high definition and where you can mug people who have just used an ATM. I would not say that it is greater then previous GTAs but it is surely something new, and shiny and that may be all but at least it didn't fall into the hole of remaking GTA with exactly the same content as the last 3 games did.

- Lazyfire