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.

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I’ve had to cleave my fingers from the Xbox 360 controller in order to write this review. Yes, really. GTA 4 is one serious addictive game and a real time killer. Prior to GTA 4 the series had peaked with GTA III, as far as I was concerned. The 2 sequels that followed - Vice City and San Andreas - consisted of far too many unnecessarily difficult missions to seriously challenge GTA III’s crown of fun. Although the music was fantastic in Vice City with literally minutes of fun to be had driving along to Spandau Ballet’s Gold ringing in your ears. Oh, and the graphics looked like arse in both of them.

GTA 4 is a great game, but not the perfect game that many reviews would lead you to believe. It’s extremely playable and great fun, with multitude of different gameplay elements crammed in there. You’ll also get somewhere approaching 40+ hours of entertainment from just completing the core missions (i.e. following the main game’s plot). I haven’t even factored in the multiplayer aspect, which is another game itself and a very welcome addition too. But there are a few unsavoury bits in GTA 4, and I’m not talking about the dodgy characters! I’ll discuss these bits as part of my look into 2 of the main elements of GTA 4; in-game artificial intelligence (AI) and in my next post the in-game graphics.

The AI - A bit dim, me:

If GTA 4’s AI was asked to hand over its end of year report to its parents it would show a D+. Shows glimpses of intelligence but spends too much time asleep in the corner, dribbling.

Although to be fair, the GTA 4s AI had a mountain to climb to be anything remotely good when all the previous games were a bit thick. That’s not to say that the AI hasn’t improved. It has, but not as much as I’d expected, or even felt was needed. I can’t help but feel that Rockstar has been a bit lazy in this department. Given the ridiculous budget ($100 million depending on who you believe on the internet) that was available to develop this game we should be marvelling at the realistic, living, breathing, sprawling metropolis populated by realistic inhabitants. Instead, we get a bloody great city populated by idiots. As such I present to you 2 examples of GTA 4s rather stupid behaviour:

It wasn’t me Officer - There I was sitting in a taxi, enjoying the sights and sounds of Liberty City, when my ride came to an abrupt halt. I could see that we’d stopped because of all the traffic ahead waiting to get over the bridge. Fair enough, citizens dutifully paying their tolls. But as the minutes ticked past, and we failed to move an inch, I became just a little bit board. So I paid the nice taxi driver and decided to go jack the car at the front of this toll booth queue. It’s the done thing in GTA, trust me. However, as I got closer to the toll booth the actual cause of the gridlock became clear. A police cruiser. I stood there and watched the pathetic sight of this cruiser gently rocking back and forth stuck between a concrete wall and a toll booth. It was mildly funny until I realised that it never looked like it was ever going to escape. I hadn’t expected the games AI to trip itself up so easily. All very disappointing, even if a little funny to watch.

I seem to be missing a gear – Your character is the only person in the whole of Liberty City that is able to put any car into reverse. I’m serious. I’ve not seen a single, damn car try to reverse itself out of a tight spot/pile up/around an obstacle. Due to the AI being generally rubbish, these situations occur all the time. Also there always seems to be one of these traffic jams when you’re trying to outrun the cops or tail/chase/kill someone. Mmm, suspicious. Couldn’t Rockstar have engineered with a better way of challenging the player than using lazy AI?

Here’s a video illustrating some of the more interesting “features” of GTA 4. As you’ll see it’s not just the AI which is a little bit buggy, its affected many of the vehicles in Liberty City as well:

So that’s the AI covered; lazy and frequently buggy, but hey that’s part of the GTA charm! For my next post I’ll cast my eye over GTA 4s graphics. Next-gen lovelyness or another case of Rockstar being lazy?

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