I’m probably leaving it a bit late to start talking about GTA 4, it’s already been written about hundreds and thousands of times, but anyway…

I was looking forward to this game more than any other release this year, I’d had it on pre-order from before the orginal 2007 launch date that was delayed. The day it turned up I even took the afternoon off of work as I knew having it sitting on my desk staring at me would be too much to take.

GTA 4 definitly didn’t disapoint, I love free roaming sand box games, especially ones with detailed environments and GTA 4 has the most detailed environment I’ve seen yet, which is all the more amazing when you see exactly how big the entire city is.

The entire environment isn’t on the same scale as the state sized GTA: San Andreas, however the detail is far greater, as are the number of building interiors etc. Just taking a cab ride and looking out the windows is great, watching the NPCs going about their daily routines.

Physics

One of the first things  to strike me was the change in the phsyics engine, overall everythign feels like it has an actual weight to it, and therefore has a knock on effect on the other objects it touches in the game world. The game utilises the Euphoria Phyics Engine this is a massive improvement ove the normal “rag doll” type effect seen in a lot of games at the moment.

Overall the engine is extermely realistic as shown in the example below:

An example of the engine within GTA 4

Vehicles

Although GTA 4 has a slightly smaller set of vehicle type (e.g. no push bikes, jet packs or planes) the array of cars available is pretty good. Each car is incredibly detailed and you’ll notice various versions of each of the cars around, e.g. different colours, slight modifications etc. sometimes you’ll even see really rusty beat-up cars driving around with black smoke coming from the exhausts!

Vehicle damage is massively improved over the previous GTA installments, not longer is damage just limited to panel interating through various fixed damage patterns, the cars overall body work can be twisted and crushed in any way and corresponds nicely to the accidents you have. Also gone is the annoying “car must catch fire when on roof” feature. That always got on my nerves in previous versions.

Story Mode

The story mode itself is fun, it;s not by any means perfect, the script is brilliantly written and could easily be from a big budget movie. The actual story mode gameplay does get slightly repetitive, it;s mainly go somewhere, watch a cut scene, go somewhere and shoot a bunch of guys, however it’s still fun and the great story line keeps you hooked to playing. The additon of the txt message service that allows you to retry missions is also great as it allows you to skip some of the longer boring driving parts. The taxi service is also brilliant as it allows you to travel around the city quickly.

Side Missions

There are various types of side missions, however probably not as many as in previous versions of the game, for example you can’t do ambulance or taxi missions, but you can do two types of police mission and some “random character” missions where you just bump into random characters who give you missions to do.

Read more GTA 4 Reviews here