In part I of my GTA 4 review I focused on the in-game AI. Now I’m going to concentrate on the look and feel of GTA 4.

The graphics – Not bad, not bad:

The initial visual impressions when you first play GTA 4 are really very good. The whole Liberty City environment oozes detail, with the streets populated with lots of cars and pedestrians. The sky is alive with aircraft and helicopters, even at night. The weather can be really spectacular at times, I’m thinking of the thunderstorms here. Torrential rain with flashes of lightning accompanied with huge claps of thunder make driving a lot of fun. As the weather can affect the handling of the cars, you do start to consider the weather conditions before attempting another mission. Driving in fog, is well, like driving in fog, i.e. a real pain. When you couple this with the stupid drivers (rubbish AI) and the words automotive carnage spring to mind.

Then as you really build up the hours of game time, you begin to become less impressed (?used to) by the look of this next-gen GTA. For instance Liberty City’s trees are just terrible. They are particularly poorly drawn and rendered by the 3D engine as they frequently poke through walls and buildings when they really shouldn’t. Or they just appear out of nowhere.

Pop-up appears to be a fundamental problem with the 3D engine as it (at least on the 360 version) happens an awful lot. I can cope with pop-up when it occurs in the distance as you tend not to notice it too much, as is the case with the Burnout games. But when large chunks of the environment suddenly appear around you it looks, well, just rubbish. Certainly not next-gen graphics. A little bit more 3D engine optimisation wouldn’t have gone amiss. The pop-up becomes even worse when you steal obtain airborne transportation. It’s a mixture of awe and disgust (or should that be shock and awe?), as you marvel at the size of Liberty City as it literally pops-up in front of you! I’ve even crashed my car into thin air only for a bollard to appear before my very eyes seconds after the accident. Lovely.

Even with all its faults, glitches and sloppy AI and frequently dodgy graphics, GTA 4 is a fantastic game. It’s the best GTA game I’ve played by a long way, and a game I’ll be playing for quite some time to come. I’m still playing it now some 3 months after it’s release. It’s rare that I play a game for quite this long, so that’s really saying something. You can read some other points of view on GTA IV at TestFreaks.co.uk and other Xbox 360 game reviews too. But then again, you’ve all probably bought GTA 4 by now!

Finally, towards the end of the year we get to experience GTA 4 on the PC. I hope Rockstar take sometime to fix the awful graphics pop-up and the iffy AI. Even DS owners will be able to get in on the act with GTA: Chinatown wars. The GTA franchise is showing no sign of stopping just yet.