Hands on with Grand Theft Auto IV
Monday, April 28, 2008
Grand Theft Auto IV, the year's most highly anticipated game, goes on sale at midnight tonight and looks likely to smash Halo 3's record ($300 million in a week) as the biggest video game launch ever. If you're a boss, expect many of your employees to mysteriously call in sick tomorrow.
Gamesmaster spent a day at Rockstar's Sydney offices in order to get hands-on with the Xbox 360 and PS3 game ahead of its release. Here's what we found...
In GTA IV, players step into the unfamiliar shoes of Niko Bellic, the most fully realised protagonist Rockstar has ever produced. As an immigrant from Eastern Europe, Niko is a radical choice for a central character: far more daring than San Andreas' black anti-hero Carl "CJ" Johnson, and certainly a massive leap from GTA III, which featured a nameless cipher that never spoke.
Niko is lured to Liberty City (an astonishingly huge and convincing virtual environment based on New York) by his cousin Roman who promises a lavish lifestyle and women on tap, but Roman is actually in serious trouble and far from the success he'd led his family to believe.
Niko provides the interesting perspective of an outsider coming to one of the world's biggest cities for the first time, but it is not a fresh start - he brings plenty of baggage with him. The second major plotline is that Niko is also coming to Liberty City to find someone from his dark past and get his revenge.
Niko soon gets dragged into a world of corrupt cops, Russian crime lords, Italian mafia, and just about every other type of hustler from Liberty City's criminal underworld. Before he knows it, Niko is drawn back into a world of criminality and finds himself relying upon old skills and bad habits once more.
Over the years Rockstar has cleverly packaged Grand Theft Auto missions in varied disguises, but they often boil down to assassination duties, fetch quests, chases and protection missions. GTA IV is not a radical departure from this template, but some of the more interesting tools at your disposal, such as the mobile phone, internet and police computers, facilitate depth and variety to your assignments.
For example, one mission sees players needing to take out a lawyer, but the only way to get to him is to infiltrate his firm. Players can use the internet to discover there is a job vacancy with the firm, score an interview and impress the boss with a shiny new suit, then finally take out the quarry.
Rockstar also assures that players will be faced with significant choices during the course of the story, and your actions do have consequences.
My time with the game started with "Search and Delete", a mission in which an over-the-top 'roid monkey called Brucie asks Niko to take out a police informant currently in hiding. One way to sniff out his whereabouts is to use a police computer. All cop cars have an on-board computer, which you can use to access police records, searching for any character you're interested in finding.
Once you’ve found your mark, the computer will mark the location on the on-board GPS and you can head over there at your leisure. To get a cop car, you can try scouring the streets, or zero in on a police station where there is bound to be one in the carpark. Or you can just dial 911 and report an emergency, taking care of the officer when he arrives to investigate, or just quickly grabbing the car and taking off when he jumps out to ask "what's up?"
Naturally when we arrive at the informant's location, he flees, triggering a thrilling high-speed chase. As our bullets eventually look likely to cause his car to explode, the informant daringly leaps from moving vehicle while on an overpass, but unluckily gets run over by another car, and Niko promptly calls Brucie with the good news that his target is dead.
It seems these unique emergent moments like the informant leaping to his death will be far more frequent in the game compared to its predecessors, creating a unique experience for every player. Thanks to the more realistic world and tools, players also have a lot more freedom to complete missions in different ways.
The next step in our tour is a mission in which Niko and Roman celebrate some recent success by getting plastered. It serves as an excellent demonstration of the game's "Euphoria" procedural animation technology, as well as a right laugh. You have to cling onto people or objects, anything to help keep Niko on his feet, while also guiding Roman well away from trouble.
Our next task is for Playboy X, taking out some Mafia goons who are holding up work on a construction site. It's another carefully-chosen example of the benefits of Euphoria - every victim we snipe from afar falls different and according to where he is hit. Once all the snipers are felled, it's time to leg it, carefully using any nearby cover to take out the remaining goons, priming grenades before they are thrown to make sure they explode on impact.
Our next sample mission sees Niko forced to take out a small group of Triads in Alderney (New Jersey). A rocket launcher is certainly up to the task, then it's time to leap onto the back of a moving truck (sprinting after it by mashing the Xbox 360's A button) filled with Triad-owned Heroin, making your way to the cab, taking out the driver, then nicking off with the horse.
Success leads onto a protection-style driving mission with the Feds in tow, who have been carefully watching the stash all along. You have to protect your precious cargo and colleagues while ditching the cops, switching vehicles along the way.
When we were playing the mission, one of the characters (Frankie) died, which affected the dialogue and slightly altered our task, but did not result in mission failure.
The next stop in our magical mystery tour was an early mission protecting Jacob while he runs around town completing some deals. He gets double-crossed in an alley, requiring Niko to dispense some justice.
Another similar mission followed where we had to take out some of Jacob's business associates, but this time we were driving. The mission is obviously designed to help players get the hang of driving and shooting at the same time, but running over the fiends is equally effective. I ended up having to make several trips around the block to find the last assailant, with the cops right on my tail.
Our final mission, Harbouring a Grudge, is the best so far. It involves some climbing and shimmying, an exciting cover-based shoot-out, and then a truck-based getaway drive in which you can drop grenades from behind the wheel to dissuade pursuing foes. Gamesmaster fails the mission, with the truck exploding spectacularly, after taking a wrong turn with our destination tantalisingly close.
Fortunately, if you fail a mission you receive a text message inviting you to restart it instantly - there is no more trudging back across the map. The penalty for death or getting caught by the cops is the same as earlier games - losing your weapons and ending up outside a hospital or police station. Players are advised to chomp on a hot dog or some other food from Liberty City vendors to keep Niko fit and healthy.
One of the most common complaints directed at the Grand Theft Auto series over the years is that the targeting systems made life unnecessarily difficult for players. It was obviously a priority for Rockstar to craft a system for GTA IV that would provide players the precision of a first-person shooter while remaining accessible and intuitive for the game's incredibly wide audience. From my time with the game, Rockstar has nailed it, improving the controls beyond recognition.
Hardcore shooting fans now have the option to freely aim at their targets, but being able to snap between targets with a push of the shoulder button is simple. I suspect most players will find themselves using automatic targeting most of the time to find or "snap" between targets, then changing to free aim to pinpoint a headshot.
The improvements to targeting, plus the new cover system that lets you duck behind any object (often with a spectacular dive or slide) facilitate much more tactical combat.
Excitingly, you can come up with strategies to dispatch your enemies on the fly. For example, you might dive behind a car that has just pulled out in front of you to use as crucial cover.
Another big improvement is the wanted system. The star-based wanted system so familiar from previous games in the Grand Theft Auto series has now been replaced by a radius of police attention on your mini-map. The bigger the radius, the more trouble you are in, and the harder it is to escape.
When a crime is committed, police dispatch will notify officers in the given area as to who they are looking for, the last known location and detail like the car the player was last seen in.
The wanted radius is based on line of sight, so escaping the police is now pleasingly more about cat-and-mouse hijinx rather than just surviving a specified time.
Wisely, cops are not so sensitive that they will chase you for minor traffic infringements, but they are smart enough to give you a warning if you look like you're being anti-social.
But it is much harder being a criminal in GTA IV. Everyone is paranoid, and the police are never far away.
- Currently 5/5 Stars.
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