Text — I waited in the rain for GTA IV…

… and it feels like I got a different game than everyone else. 99 out of 100, seriously? Granted, I’m only maybe four hours into the game, and I suppose a lot can change, but I’ve got gripes galore that progress won’t address. 

I’ve never seen such a bizarre amount of depth-of-field blur, which I assume is there to hide the poor draw distance and object pop-in. Humans don’t see like this. It’s the modern-day equivalent of the old fog trick, Cf. Superman (N64) and Turok (first one), off the top of my head.

There is visibility of maybe 60 feet in the game world. Beyond that, everything turns into this fuzzy mud. Oftentimes, the engine doesn’t even bother to draw the buildings or cars past this point, objects that take less than 15 seconds to run to, and less than 5 to drive to. 

There are the same glitches that have plagued what is, I assume, the same engine used since GTA III. Such as, cars that magically drop from the sky when you turn around, and cars that pile up because too many were spawned at once. My favorite is walking out into an empty street, looking left, seeing no cars, looking right, seeing no cars, then looking left again to find traffic has backed up. Just like Looney Tunes.  

Get chased by, say, three cop cars. The framerate nosedives and makes it hard to actually play the game. How are you supposed to evade the law when faced with the game-world equivalent of blinking your eyes repeatedly?  

I like the ability to be killed by a cardboard box that was resting on my leg when I hopped out of a car. Good times.

The camera is lousy. The auto-snap back to center is way too… something. Fast? Snappy? The rubber-banding is crazy. On foot, or in a vehicle. Trying to rotate the camera while moving feels like you’ve taken a cameraman hostage and need to force him into pointing the damn thing where you want it to go.

And when in a vehicle, the camera isn’t high enough, resulting in plenty of crashes purely because your vehicle obscures objects directly in front. Like, other cars. It also tends to drag behind your car when turning, only catching up centering the view after you continue moving straight, resulting in limited visibility of what is around the corner and severely limited time to change your course.

There’s a “mobile phone” sub-interface, with about as many controls and options as a real mobile phone. That’s a bad thing. Rockstar spent so much time making it similar to the real world, your own mobile phone and all, yet someone there must have lost the list of details to include; I can’t run while on the phone, something I can do in real life.

Speaking of running, paint dries faster than your character moves. Controllers have analog sticks for very good reasons. I shouldn’t have to press a modifier button to make the characterwalk at a productive pace. 

And hey, speaking of the imitation of real life, if you get clipped by a car it can knock your hat off your head and onto the ground. There’s a control to pick things up - cans, bricks, whatever - but I can’t pick up my hat. To put my hat back on, I need to go back to my safehouse, and go through a very slow clothing-change process to put my hat back on. The same hat that I dropped and couldn’t pick.

Oh no, and speaking of slow, everything takes forever to do. Go shopping? Takes forever. Change clothes? Takes forever. Buy a gun? Takes forever.  

Almost every button has two, three or more actions attached to it. My phone rang a second before I hit the button to jack a car. This somehow cancelled the call altogether. Why not just let it ring? If you’re giving me a control to forward calls (according to the manual), at least let the phone keep ringing until I decide what to do about it, or the calling party hangs up. Or better yet, fewer controls.

What’s the story with enemy damage? I have to run over a bad guy’s skull three or more times before they go down. 

The cover system must have been tacked on at the last minute. While it does the job alright, firing while exposed is somewhat of a joke. One shot at a time before popping back behind cover.

Melee combat is terrible. As soon as the first one started, I was aching for a gun. Hit detection is lousy, enemies have more dynamic moves than you (Cf. the “shove”), and the controls are completely unresponsive. 

And I haven’t even gotten to the driving, a key part of a title with a name like  Grand Theft Auto. All the cars (so far) drive like boats, even the supercar that was parked at mansion. They capsize if you so much as cough. Cornering is nonexistent. The game recommends you use the (standard) brake for making plain old turns, but I have yet to see the brakes actually do much of anything.

Cornering while braking is something that has been done in driving games - whether a dedicated racing title or just a part of an open world game - for years, and the implementation here is nothing like I’ve ever experienced. It just doesn’t act like expected - when you’re on the throttle and you brake simultaneously, the game shouldn’t bounce back and forth between braking behavior and acceleration, as seems to happen here.

The minigames, such as pool and bowling, are horrid. A copious amount of controls and time involved for what should be something simple and fun.

There are no onscreen navigation aids besides the little map in the corner. Saint’s Row pulled this off beautifully, with onscreen “GPS” arrows on top of the screen  that helped you navigate without having to take your eyes off the road to refer to the mini-map. Maybe adding arrows like that would have meant even less draw distance. Ha!

Speaking of which, in a game world this size, why isn’t there one-button access to the large fullscreen map? 

Let me tell you something, over a year ago I said Saint’s Row was a better GTA that GTA ever was, and I stand by that with the release of GTA IV. This is the same old game that GTA III and GTA:VC were - it’s all here, down to the same glitches. But in pulling the series into this next generation of hardware, it feels like Rockstar didn’t do anything to improve the game. The few hours I’ve been playing have felt like a chore - moving from cutscene to cutscene, occasionally stealing a car, getting into a fistfight… going on a date? Dating is the big change?

Maybe I just don’t see what is impressing people. I played GTA III, and loved GTA:VC to death. That was my go-to game when I was bored. For its time and hardware, it looked good enough, and played great. Plenty of people said that its lack of graphical prowess was made up for with the gameplay, the fun of the game, and I agree. But GTA IV is the same game - same in the goddam world - with a new coat of paint on it. It’s not new, it’s regurgitated. 

$100 million was spent, 1000 people involved, and it took around four years to make. But I’m having a really hard time wondering what all that time and money was spent on. Voice acting, cutscene direction and textures? Surely it couldn’t have been on Euphoria, because I haven’t seen anything that didn’t look like plain ol’ ragdoll yet. They sure didn’t spend it on a brand new engine, I don’t think.

Yes, I’m really really oversimplifying, but my point stands - there are other games with parallel features that have pulled off what I expect from the “next generation.” This game doesn’t cut it. 

Other open world games have managed to really knock my socks off: the previously cited Saint’s Row, Assassin’s Creed, Crackdown. None of these games had the technical issues cited above, so obviously it can be done on this generation of hardware. And it’s been done very well. I will concede that Saint’s Row did have a lot of glitches at first, though there wasn’t one I ran into that affected my enjoyment of the game. 

Having said all of the above, I’m definitely going to continue playing. While it’s not blowing me away, it does feel like an old friend, and I’m hoping it has learnt a few new tricks.

For now: 5/10. Blaow!