Grand Theft Auto IV Review

Grand Theft Auto IV

Completed.

Now that GTA4 is completed, I thought I'd little review on what I thought about the game.  Now I know that it's a bit old, but I was a bit slow to jump on the XBOX 360 bandwagon, so I'm a little behind on some of my gaming.

I've been playing GTA ever since the Playstation 2, but never having the console for myself it was hard for me to really play the game.  However, when I did some commercial and stage work for Sony they took care of me buy giving me a PSP and a half-dozen games along with a large sum of cash, so I ended up purchasing Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, both of which were great games in my opinion.

I'm not going to go into the story of the game, if you've played it you know it all ready so I'll save my breath. When I first put in the game I felt a little disorientated due to the many changes they did to the game, driving was VERY strange at first but the uncomfortable feeling went away soon after a few hours of driving, but luckily the game added difficulty gradually so I wasn't expected to do any crazy driving until later in the game when car chases and racing were required.  The amount of guns were limited in my opinion, and I was sort of hoping for a better way to categorize them, it felt a little clunky to change weapons mid-battle.

Not even midway through the game I noticed the flaw that irritated me most, which was the radio.  It's really fun to listen to the radio sometimes, but when it comes to having to hear a conversation on-top of it, it is almost impossible.  Such as when you receive a phone call, it's impossible to turn off the radio while the cell phone is displayed, it would be great to have the ability to shut off the radio during a phone call but that isn't a possibility.  The other flaw about the radio I discovered was the fact that you have to turn it off by holding the D-Pad Left or Right for a few seconds.  Now I'm sure that it doesn't sound that bad at first, but when you're trying to chase someone down you want that shit off quick, so having to take your thumb off of the L-Stick which steers your vehicle to get rid of the radio, it is extremely annoying; not sure why they didn't use the Back Button for this function.

All in all, I really enjoyed the game, it was a fun experience and I really liked the ability to interact with friends and having the ability to control your relationships with people.  The characters in the game were great, even those I didn't think I'd like at first such as Dwayne or Packie, but GTA always has a way to make characters unique in their own ways to make them fun to be around.

I have yet to play the two DLCs in order to complete the entire game, but The Lost and the Damned is my next game to play.