Introduction
Everyone should know about the Grand Theft Auto series by now, even people who don't play video games. Rockstar have carved themselves a good niche with the GTA games and have, effectively, created a genre of third person, free roaming games that has been much imitated since the massive success of GTA3 back on the PS2. GTA4 then is another step in the franchise with a fresh character, an old city and updated technology for the next generation consoles. The version I played was for the Xbox360.

Everyone should know what you get with a GTA game by now, in case you don't they're basically crime fables, you playing the part of a criminal within a sprawling, open-play city area, doing jobs and running errands for the criminal powers that be in the city and usually ascending in power and prestige as you do so. In a departure from that model Niko pretty much stays an errand boy from start to end and never really 'makes it' as such.

Story
The new story follows the life of illegal immigrant Niko Belic, coming to Liberty City to seek his fortune, a new start in life and a chance at revenge. He's fleeing memories of an unnamed war and the tragedies that occurred in it, and problems with a crime boss he used to work for. Head swelled with the lies of his cousin Roman he comes to America to grab himself a piece of the American dream and finds out that it's not quite what he'd been lead to expect.

The storyline follows Niko as he makes his new life in the city and gets entangled in the various criminal and political factions vying for the city, a down-and-out Irish crime family, an old guard mafia dynasty, a smaller, more ambitious but also incompetent mafia family and, of course, the Russian maffiya. He also gets involved with oblique government agencies, spoofing Homeland Security somewhat. There's also the opportunity to make friends and wine and dine on the town, accruing influence that lets you call in favours from these friends.

Gameplay
There's a lot of gameplay to GTA4 but I felt it was something of a step backwards in complexity from the last few console GTA offerings. Vice City had you building  up and running your own criminal operation, running businesses, buying up buildings and becoming a force to be reckoned with. San Andreas had a huge playing area beyond anything seen in the series before and threw you head first into gang culture, building it up, taking and holding turf and again gaining influence. GTA4 strips that element right back to nothing, you don't accrue power or influence in that way in this game, rather any favours you can call down are down to your friendships and these are improved by doing missions for the contacts and by taking them out on the town and watching shows, getting drunk, eating or playing mini games like bowling, darts and pool. Even so, with these systems in, I felt there wasn't as much depth of gameplay as there had been in previous offerings and while this made the game simpler it also decreased the depth and the involvement in the game, you didn't feel like you were making as much of an impact on the city and there was less sense of 'ownership'.

Difficulty-wise the game has been made easier to play. At no point did I feel frustrated by the missions, unlike in San Andreas where I never got past the remote control planes mission and couldn't get into the whole 'gangsta' thing. This is good in some ways as you lose the frustration but there are only a very few missions that are genuinely challenging because of it. Something that may turn off more hardcore gamers. One thing I was very glad to see was that only one race mission was compulsory and that was easy to win!

The driving, conversely,  is a little more difficult. Compared to both imitators and previous entries in the genre the cars in GTA4 are much harder to control, the handbrake seems to almost always spin you out of control and cornering feels much stiffer and the cars 'wallow' much more than in previous incarnations.

Combat is much the same as before with a few options for hiding in cover and 'popping out'. It was involving and exciting and felt fairly controllable despite the clumsiness that using the waggly sticks on console controllers tends to cause.

Atmosphere
The city is wonderfully atmospheric with excellent weather and day and night effects. More than any previous iteration GTA4 really brings the feel of the city to life right down to garbage collectors and people raking leaves. The radio stations, as ever, are brilliant and retain the irreverent humour and digs at modern America familiar from the others in the series. There was a dissonance however between the more seriously handled plotline and the humour of the adverts and radio stations, they didn't quite seem to marry up the same way they have in, say, Vice City which was much camper and more humorous. GTA4 is much grittier as a whole and the humour side of things - despite the inclusion of TV programs as well, which were great, just didn't seem to hold together as well in that context.

One thing that felt stripped back was character customisation, the amount of outfits available seemed quite limited compared to, say, San Andreas and there was no ability to get tattooed or to buff up, or get fat, due to what you did or did not do. Spoiled by MMORPGs I like to be able to get my character to look at least something like I want to look and the problem was made worse by being unable to tell some sets of shoes from others, an important thing if you're trying to wear a suit (as some missions require).

The voice acting is top notch, as usual, and the storyline very engaging, you really do connect with and care for the characters in the story, there's just some rough edges that prevent you really getting involved in them.

Graphics
The city, the cars and the atmospherics are all very good but the character design an animation still had a PS2ish 'tinge' to them. The motion capture felt a little rough compared to other next-gen outings and the characters were neither quite believable, nor obvious, cartoonish caricatures, either of which would have been more successful as a graphical approach. It felt to me that, other than the special effects, the power of the next-gen console just wasn't being leveraged.

Conclusion
GTA4 is a solid free-roaming game from the masters of the genre with an engaging storyline and great gameplay. As a sort of 'reboot' of the franchise it strips things back to basics, tearing away a lot of the complexity and extra options that had built up in the PS2 series. On the one hand this gives you a cleaner and more focussed play experience, but on the other hand it feels like the console power isn't being used to its full potential and you're being kept from the fuller experience available in the previous games. In many ways it feels like GTA has been surpassed, in some regards, by its imitators, if Rockstar isn't careful then Saint's Row could steal its thunder, despite being so obviously an imitator.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Overall: 4