A month ago now I wrote an editorial about going back to Liberty City after ten years. In all honesty, it wasn’t the first time I’d come back to Liberty City in those ten or so years. I’ve kept up with my pocket-sized empire in Chinatown Wars, making a couple of bucks with scratch-offs, and selling an amount of Weed that only Walter White could imagine. Nonetheless, I’ve let Niko, Luis, and Johnny stay where they belong, the bottom of the East River.

Amid my rants, and my verbose run-through of the most depressing game aside from This War of Mine (which only took a few days,) I thought I’d write a proper review. Possibly something with fewer jokes and more genuine criticism, through the looking glass of cynicism on top of cynicism. For you see, Grand Theft Auto has never been a feel-good story. It is meant to be a very serious story about gangsters. While it is very serious, it has previously allowed you to dress in all black leather, running down the street with a ball gag in your mouth, and shooting old women, prostitutes, or both.

Grand Theft Auto IV, however, took a turn down (as I’ve previously called it) suicide lane. All of Grand Theft Auto 4‘s cells bled depression onto my metaphorical gaming rug, while I wore a dressing gown and sunglasses at night. GTA 4 had become a symptom of its time: the early PS3 and Xbox 360 era of gaming could only render grey or brown, exhibiting characters you don’t particularly like, with generally boring plots that had nothing going on. In the writer’s handbook, it says to make this a turning point, telling you how great everything is, but it’s not.

I’ll explain why by simply stating the jump between Grand Theft Auto IV and V is five years. Meanwhile, the closest comparison between these two requires you to also pull in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which is considered one of the greatest games of all time. Graphically, there is a significant jump on each. In the gameplay, there is also a jump. However, to quote a song from San Andreas‘ country station, “It’s one step forward and two steps back.” It appears you don’t get very far when you push for realism, instead, they wound up regressing for innovation’s sake.

If GTA 4 was the waiter bringing over a wedding table’s worth of crystal glasses for champagne, following the waiter holding the very expensive champagne; GTA 4 stubbed its toe, went hurtling over the glasses smashing every one of them, bumped the first waiter, popping bottle tops off spilling the alcohol down a woman’s breasts, and GTA 4 landing face first in her crotch. This is the level of complete and utter nonsense it took to go from fun and enjoyable to misery guts himself, Niko.

Comparing the characters of CJ and Niko is like comparing the tastes of coffee and the blood from a gunshot wound of a recently murdered dictator. Yes, you could probably do it and enjoy one of them, but you’ll be seen as a creepy person for enjoying Colonel Qaddafi’s still warm blood. Even when you are having sex with women every other day, Niko is looking down the barrel of a gun, aiming it at anyone that coughs near him. At the very least he does in cutscenes, as well as those godforsaken driving scenes where others are around. He could be humanized, however, he is not.

To humanize a character you have to give them a goal. In San Andreas, it is initially for CJ to leave his old life of gangs behind, though he is pulled back along the way. Niko’s goal from the get-go is hidden from the player, pretending it is a mystery, in an enigma, wrapped in a sausage roll, while only drip-feeding the idea of killing someone. One is straight to the point and goes to interesting areas. The other is walking down a straight one-way road that goes on for miles, then you realize the end of that road is a T-junction giving you option A or B, neither of which are interesting or fun.

If you don’t want spoilers, I’d suggest putting your fingers in your ears and making childish noises. That doesn’t stop you from reading, but it will be more entertaining than yet another revenge plot that goes on for far too long. On a personal note, I’d have written that Niko would cap everyone he wanted to halfway through, live out a happy life doing taxi missions again for a moment, and then get pulled back in by the Italians. You’d be repeating the pulling method, but if it is good enough for horny teenagers, then it is good enough for you. That and the same “pulled back in” thing is done twice in Grand Theft Auto 5.

You see, from the moment Niko is on the boat in the port of Liberty City, Niko is yelling from the rooftops that he’s here for someone. With a none to subtle wink, a dirty look, and an eastern European accent he might as well deadpan turn to the camera and say, “I’m here to kill several people I don’t know are here or haven’t met, and one I do.” At least if we injected some Deadpool into the game it would be trying to be a barrel of laughs. Instead, it is a barrel of dead fish that several men have urinated in; and has been left to ferment for several months.

Yes, Grand Theft Auto is mindless violence, but that’s kind of the point. It is meant to be a blockbuster action video game of mindless violence, focusing on a rift between the moral ambiguity of the player, and the grim reality of the world we live in. Yet Rockstar sought to make Liz Bourke’s interpretation of grim-dark for their contemporary satire (for 2008) of American life. The issue they had with doing so was hampered by the player wanting to run down the street naked, as a blue woman, and slapping old women with a comically large penis.

At one point you’re told that Niko is in Liberty City to kill his fellow military man, Florijan, who’s since turned into a backing dancer for the Village People. I’ve previously stated that he’s gay for the sake of being gay, though this was before I’d played the mission where you go on to kill the Russian blackmailers. This is where the game plays with its “political themes” to teach a lesson, though it probably did more harm than good. With only one openly gay character running through the entire story, one has to question the preachy talk Niko gives on this mission. A set of well-rounded gay characters, closeted or not, doesn’t require Niko to declare: “gay is OK.”

This is just a symptom of the larger issue of none of the characters being comparatively well-rounded. In the entire game, there is maybe one strong woman standing above subservient sex objects and literal sex objects to be desired by the player. While Karen is powerful to the story through gameplay, she’s nothing more than a tool to observe the player and is instantly dropped after her use is done. The only two that are overarching in the story are fairly similar.

Roman’s other half, Mallorie, connects Niko with several integral characters, though she otherwise does very little than know a few people. The strongest woman is Elizabeta Torres, who connects Niko with the driving focus leading to the end and can actually hold her own. Sadly, she gets arrested soon after her use is done. They are both women of color, expected to know everyone, and don’t do much than push the lead towards their goal through contacts. They could have done more, there could have been stronger women throughout the story, but there just isn’t.

Elizabeta is the link, glue, or the whatever of the entire story leading to the end. Yet, her only contribution outside of this was forcing me to drive halfway across town with literal dead weight in the trunk. There’s never really a point where any character does more than her for the story, yet her story is immediately stopped once her use is done. Oh, how I wish that were the case with Patrick and the majority of his family, Bruce, Florijan/Bernie, and Manny.

Moving forward to the gameplay for a moment, I’ve previously said the driving is like two hippos doing missionary on a thin bit of ice. I don’t know how to explain it better than this, every car weighs more than a small exoplanet exclusively inhabited by elephants. Given I’ve come from the Burnout 3 school of, “What’s a brake? Is it this thing?” It is strange to immediately pull the handbrake causing centrifugal forces around the front left or right tire.

Bikes are worse, as any sports bike is completely useless. In the few missions that you are required to drive these messy little balls of overpowered fury, it is hell. There’s a reason the real-world equivalent of them have more power than a Harley Davidson. The reason is to pretend they are somehow better, but they are just faster, and ultimately they are boring. The point of a classic American Harley is to sit back and take in the world around you, these superbikes are for people who are impatient and have a death wish. I’d rather have flung myself in the east river than drive one of them, and given their characteristics, they will do it for me.

I’ve also said that gunplay is like flicking mints out your genitals during sex, and they are as effective as flicking paperclips from the opposite side of the room at your colleagues. This is where I’ll state, I used cheats because I’d already played several hours of this nightmarish hell before, this time I didn’t care. With that, I’d been using the grenades, a rocket launcher, and the semi-automatic weapons as they are the most effective at poking people in the eyes with small bits of metal.

Doing this resulted in the gunshops becoming useless, which made money useless as well. You can’t buy cars, bikes (I don’t know why you would), or anything of use. The only things to use your money on is cheap sex and a hotdog. Does this make me regret using cheats? No. It meant I didn’t have to spend time with Niko.

There could be an argument that I could have bought Niko some clothes. Yes, I could have bought him several brown jumpers (what Americans will call “Sweaters“), running shoes, or a little Russian cap held perfectly straight on his head. My point is, there’s was nothing to give him character. GTA IV‘s sandbox counterpart, Saints Row 2, let you be a fat blue woman, have a cockney bloke’s accent; dress as a Japanese schoolgirl or run around naked. Out of the two I want to be a blue woman with a jaunty walk, and call everyone a “plonker.”

It is at this point I want to drive home what’s important. Grand Theft Auto IV is one of the worst Grand Theft Auto games; this isn’t to say it is mechanically a bad game though. In fact, it was anything but bad when it came to mechanics. However, looking back 11-years it is surprising to see how it was liked at all. Yes, the world of Liberty City feels big when you walk around it, but once you are in a car it feels small again. I want to jump into Liberty City and do unimaginable things that I would never actually do, such as ramp off several corpses in Times Square.

However, Grand Theft Auto IV wants me to sit down and watch TV, go bowling, sit in an internet cafe, and go watch Kat Williams or Ricky Gervais. Now that those ideas have been expanded in GTA V and elsewhere, it is less impressive in retrospect and creates more wonder to why it is defended. To return to my point several paragraphs ago, it has taken four years between San Andreas and IV, with a further five between IV and V. IV feels like a stepping stone between islands or planets of difference.

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Grand Theft Auto IV

$19.99 USD

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• A Great World
• Great Radio Station

Cons

• Awful Lead Character
• Horribly Dated Gameplay