GTA IV

[Belmit]

I don't think it's fair to judge a GTA game on just the campaign missions in terms of gaming hours; for the previous games I've spent more time getting the jumps/secret packages/emergency service/taxi achievements than playing the actual story. I'm guessing this may edge out Oblivion for me on time spent playing!

[leowyatt]

When playing saints row I almost left all the main missions to the end as I wanted to enjoy playing them not keep being distracted by all the side mission stuff. Though I think with this the first 3-4 hours will be spent just exploring and getting used to the game. Haven't really played a GTA game since no 2.

[Wossi]

I have booked the week beginning 28th off work so will have nothing else to do but play this I can't wait and hopefully gameplay will send it out a day early as normal.

[leowyatt]

Grand Theft Auto IV

More hands-on time with the one, the only, GTA IV

by: Tristan Ogilvie 07/04/2008

We’ve already given you our hands-on impressions of GTA IV once, but everyone has a different experience with this game, so we thought we’d given you a second opinion on this epic release. Read on…

There’s no denying that Grand Theft Auto IV looks the absolute business. We’ve been lucky enough to see it a number of times since its official unveiling back in the early part of 2007, and it’s only impressed us more with each glimpse. But that’s just it – up until now we’ve only been able to take it in with our eyes and ears. It’s like we’ve been stalking it, hiding in its bushes and watching it go about its business but unable to use our hands to rummage around through its garbage and uh… break into its house and smell its hairbrush…

Perhaps a better analogy would be that GTA IV has been like the classic convertible your dad keeps in the garage, consistently polishing it in front of you but never allowing you to get behind the wheel. Something within your reach that you want so badly, but you just can’t have it. Well this month dad went away for the weekend and left the keys on the kitchen counter, and we gave this beast a damn good thrashing.

Welcome home
To get us acquainted with the new controls, Rockstar handed us the controller and threw us out onto the streets of the new Liberty City. Initially everything felt very familiar as the GTA fundamentals are still in place – A sprints, X jumps and Y gets in and out of cars. But once we started beating up hapless pedestrians (as you do), the overhauled control system promised by Rockstar really became apparent.

Inspired perhaps by both The Warriors and Bully, you now have many more melee attacks at your disposal in GTA IV. By holding down the left trigger you can lock onto an enemy (or innocent), and then use the four face buttons to perform combinations of punches, kicks, counters and grabs. Niko’s moves are quick and deadly, like Jason Bourne’s, and he can even perform swift disarming manoeuvres.

A disgruntled bum emerged from a nearby alley during our bystander beat-down and came at us with a knife – but with a quick tap of A to dodge his attack and a follow-up press of X to snatch the weapon away from him, we were quickly carving him up with his own blade.

Naturally all of this excessive violence against innocents attracted the attention of the cops – who screeched onto the scene with their sirens blaring and tyres still spinning as they poured out of the cars and surrounded us with their guns levelled. Interestingly enough, Niko automatically puts his hands up when confronted at close range by the cops, and you’re then given a few seconds to decide whether you want to stay and surrender, and get ‘busted’, or make a run for it.

We chose to leg it – gaining a second star on our wanted level in the process as an instant penalty for resisting arrest – and hopped into a nearby convertible to speed off down the road.

Evading the cops in GTA IV is a matter of escaping their flashing search radius on your map and remaining out of their sight for a short period of time until your wanted level subsides. We’re not sure how intense the heat gets on the higher wanted levels, as we were only able to push it up to three stars during our hands-on. At any rate, after a heart-stopping stretch of cat-and-mouse – GTA IV generates in realtime a level of explosive car chase action that would take director Michael Bay a $300 million dollar budget to produce – our car was beaten up to the point that it broke down completely.

Note that it didn’t explode – cars can and will explode in GTA IV, but it’s also possible to wreck your transmission completely and leave you stuck on the side of the road struggling with the starter motor. Perhaps you can use your mobile phone to call for roadside assistance?

Jamaican me crazy
Targeting controls have never been GTA’s strength. While they progressed to a passable level from GTA III to San Andreas, they haven’t exactly set standards within the third-person genre. But things have most certainly changed with GTA IV, which takes the best elements of both Gears of War and Crackdown and merges them into one very fluid and versatile system.
During a mission called ‘Jamaican Heat’, we got our first taste of GTA IV’s gunplay, as we were tasked with providing cover for the spliff-smoking Little Jacob while he performed a drug deal with three gangsters in an alley. From the elevated position of a nearby rooftop we were able to pick off each of the gangsters after they tried to doublecross Little Jacob, by using the left trigger to lock-on to each enemy and affecting subtle movements of the right thumbstick to target each part of their bodies (a la Crackdown).

Headshots are instant kills, but you can also shoot the legs out from beneath opponents to make them trip and fall off ledges and so on. Big flicks of the thumbstick switches the lock-on between enemies, and depressing the left trigger only halfway down allows you to ‘free-aim’ with the right stick, in case you want to shoot a car’s tyres out, for example.

Good aim isn’t the only crucial element for shooting success, the use of cover is also massively important if you want to survive. Everything in your environment can be used as cover, whether it’s a car, a low wall, shipyard cargo container or park bench. We learnt the basics of GTA IV’s cover system in a second mission, also with Little Jacob, called ‘Concrete Jungle’, but before we get to the cover itself, we have to describe one of the most awesome moments that occurred during our time with the game.

Yet again one of Little Jacob’s deals went south, only this time the gangsters fled out the back entrance of a building – where we were parked in one of cousin Roman’s taxi cabs ready to pounce. We hit the gas and floored it towards the running goons, pinning the first two against a wall and killing them instantly, but allowing the third to make a getaway down a nearby side street.

We wheeled the car around and gave chase, tapping the Left Bumper to shatter the driver’s side window with Niko’s elbow and allowing us to use our pistol to fire a few shots (also with LB). Eventually we caught up to him, hitting him at full speed front-on with the car and causing him to roll up onto the bonnet, directly into our pistol’s sight, at which point we reflexively shot him at point blank range in the skull. SPLAT! Describing that short passage of gameplay as intense would be like saying that GTA IV is “just another GTA game”. A total understatement!

Run for cover
But back to the cover system. Later in that same mission, we drove back to drug den of the gang Little Jacob had been dealing with, in order to teach them a lesson in business etiquette. Kicking open the door of their brownstone apartment building, we then tapped RB in order to bind Niko to the cover of the doorway. From there, you have the option of either blind firing in order to remain relatively out of sight, or popping out from cover if you want to be more accurate with your shots. Moving between cover is simple; you either double tap RB at the edge of cover to skip across to an adjacent piece of cover, or just aim the targeting reticule at a piece of cover and press RB to move to it.

With the first two gangbangers down, and with Little Jacob covering us from the other side of the doorway, we quickly ducked into the apartment building and slid feet-first into cover behind a beaten up old couch. During the gunfight with the remaining goons we noticed a surprising amount of destructibility in the building’s interior, as parts of the walls fragmented from wayward shots and the garbage littering the kitchen table erupted into the air as the bullets continued to fly.

With a tap of X Niko vaulted over the couch in order to finish off the weakened enemies, once and for all, at point blank. It’s worth mentioning that when you’re out of cover and in the open, you’re not a sitting duck as you can still perform evasive rolls from side to side with a combination of X and the left thumbstick.

Get up, stand up
In the final mission of our hands-on, dubbed ‘Harbouring a Grudge’, we were exposed to both the climbing controls and a classic GTA-style getaway chase across the city. Along with a drunken wisecracking companion known as Packie McGreary, we headed down to the harbour side in order to perform the heist of a bunch of prescription drugs being offloaded at the docks. Using X to jump up and climb, and the left thumbstick to shimmy along hand-over-hand Tomb Raider-style, we followed Packie up the side of a shipyard warehouse, navigating ventilation ducts and an enormous billboard on our way to the roof.

While the climbing controls might not exactly be Assassin’s Creed-fluid, they’re definitely more realistic given that Niko isn’t a Spider-Man-esque hitman from the Third Crusades, and certainly if something looks climbable in GTA IV, you can get up on it.

From the vantage point of the warehouse roof we were able to plot our attack on the numerous goons guarding the shipment below. Thus we scrambled back down to hide behind an enormous shipping container as Packie opened fire on the enemies from his sniping position above. With Packie providing the cover, we systematically took down the 20 or so guards as their return fire thundered forcefully into the steel container covering us, almost rattling the surround sound speakers in Rockstar’s demo room right out of their wall hooks.

Wounded enemies beg for their lives, or scramble desperately to get back behind cover in order to avoid copping a finishing bullet in the back. Blasting an enemy right off a jetty and watching them splash into the harbour is also pretty damned cool.

With the goons taken care of, we jumped behind the wheel of a delivery truck laden with the prescription meds. With Packie in the passenger seat we sped out onto the streets of Liberty City, attracting the attention of the law as we steamrolled through traffic lobbing grenades out of the window in order to take out the remaining mobsters giving chase. You can change weapons while you’re in-car with a tap of the X button to cycle through the pistol, Uzi and your grenades. Like firing one of the guns, the grenades are tossed behind you with a press of the LB button in order to leave a trail of carnage in your wake.

Unfortunately for us – with all the heat on us from the cop cars and helicopters as our wanted level edged up into three stars – we exploded completely mere inches from our destination, and our hands-on was over.

Of course the good news is that we’ll all be playing the game in just over a month’s time. On April 29th the biggest game of the year/console generation/decade/EVER!!! will be upon us, and we’ll all be indulging in arguably the first example of true, high definition, next generation gameplay. Miss this and you may as well give up on videogames for good.

On the next page we’ll take you through a few of the other little titbits we noticed during our time with GTA IV.

Live and let die
A fourth mission was shown to us during our hands-on with the game, but unfortunately it was strictly eyes-on only while a Rockstar representative took the controls. Titled ‘To Live and Die in Albany’, the mission followed on from the ‘Truck Hustle’ task detailed in last month’s issue. Escaping from the feds with the truckload of stolen drugs, Niko and his two cohorts endured a lengthy chase across the city, before getting out on foot for a Heat-style shootout down an alley (complete with duffle bag hanging from Niko’s shoulders) and finally taking down a police chopper with an RPG.

We’ve witnessed few things as gloriously violent in videogames as a rocket tearing through a helicopter in GTA IV – in this case the resulting blast tore the police chopper completely in half, the broken tail rotor landing about 50 metres apart from the burnt-out fuselage on the ground below.

Break it down
While you can’t exactly raze entire buildings to the ground (that we know of), there’s nonetheless a great deal of environmental destruction in GTA IV. It’s all based on real world principals as well, so tacky wooden panelling in the low rent apartments will fragment and shatter when shot at, whereas steel containers like the one pictured are merely pockmarked by your bullets. You can even shoot the doors on cargo trucks so that they spill their contents all over the street – might come in handy if you want to create some obstacles for anyone chasing you.

Things of beauty
We really need to stress that none of the screenshots on these pages have been retouched, and none of them have been taken from cutscenes – they’re all in-game, baby. Stunning, aren’t they? Along with the high level of detail lavished on absolutely every object in the game’s environment, the lighting effects are also absolutely exquisite. Often you feel like taking in the sights from the backseat of a cab – which you can totally do if you want – cruising through the streets of Liberty City bathed in a late afternoon glow. Then of course, you can get back to the sweet, sweet lawbreaking.

[Davey_Pitch]

Isn't it the 29th yet?!

[leowyatt]

Originally Posted by Davey_Pitch

Isn't it the 29th yet?!

Nope. it's not

Just spoke to HMV and they say the game is going to retail at £49.99 so I'm stuck with that at the moment as the voucher is for there and I can't pre-order anywhere else anymore as they have stopped taking pre-orders

[Belmit]

Is that in store? It's £39.99 on their website. Sucks!

And it wants to be the 29th. It really does.

[leowyatt]

Originally Posted by Belmit

Is that in store? It's £39.99 on their website. Sucks!

And it wants to be the 29th. It really does.

Well the store price and online are different. The guy I spoke to who said my pre-order is still placed with them said the computer was telling him a launch price of £49.99 but said that could change on launch day. So I guess I'm just going to have to wait and see.

[petemc]

Multiplayer info...http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=130970

Rockstar shed a little light on the GTA Race mode as well, which simply requires you get to the finish line as fast as possible. The entire world and its contents are available for use, so you can pinch a noisy moped to distract your opponents, or just pick up a bazooka and blow them up.

Hahahaha

[petemc]

Hmmm. I haven't yet pre-ordered the game and the reports about Game not being able to cover the pre-orders is a bit worrying.