Please be warned, this may not be a 100% positive review of GTA IV.
War crimes? Ethnic Cleansing? Suspicious deaths of leaders during their trial? Michael Palin shows that show it to be a country of very normal people who just want to move on? (which, by a conspiracy theory friendly coincident was restarted on BBC 2 tonight) Serbia is a country that has had a lot of bad publicity in the 90s, and now in the whatever-we're-meant-to-call-thems we're looking at again, the latest view being presented by GTA IV, the game where the hero is the product of the war and really wants revenge over being sold out.
You know what? In a rare moment in a computer game I actually felt something for the hero. His character feels rounded out and has enough charisma to create some empathy. Be honest, you don't really care about Master Chief, and you don't give a toss about Gordon Freeman which is why you're meant to care about Alyx. I take great pleasure in throwing Lara Croft off high places, and I'm taking a break from Drake's Progress for similar reasons (that and the awful combat/cover system). And don't get me started on Mario...
Anyway... The game. There is an, I believe, badly designed achievement on the 360 version (and probably associated PS3 trophy for doing a similar e-peen action of preparing for showing off in Home when it's released) for completing the game in 30 hours. Yes you can rush the plot in way less than that (20 hours or so probably) but encouraging people to charge through it is bad. I forget the last time I played a single player game that took me more than 30 hours (OK, Mass Effect) and it's really refreshing to have been entertained for that long so much that I was skipping sleep for a few more hours play. OK, so I have an addictive personality. Since my friends aren't going to do the intervention hopefully the internet will.
So... Writing and plot is good. What else? Radio stations are as brilliant as ever and include an ambient station this time, which was more than enough to win me over way before we even get to Iggy Pop being the DJ on the rock station. Gervais is as annoying as ever and can't be shot, boo hiss.
Oh, negatives? NASA are using the driving physics for training their next moon mission. To be a bit fair it's the crappy cars that don't conform to conventional newtonian physics and the better cars feel a lot better. The cover system is just as bad as most other games, although better than Drake's Progress. Gears of War is a still a higher point on that aspect. Targetting is just as bad as you always seem to lock on to the wrong person, and when you do lock on headshots are a certainty after you figure out you just need to push up.
Oh, and if you fail a mission there are more than a few where you have to repeat loads of boring stages, including driving across the map far too far.
And then there's the graphics. There's a shimmery low res look on both the 360 and the PS3 that I'm sure is down to the fact that both of the consoles don't have enough memory in various places to actually do HD graphics that well. The soft shadow kludge is the same one that Mass Effect used and looks just as bad, especially when you're standing under the elevated train track wotsits and everything in the distant looks very
MCGA as that's rendered in low res and anti-aliasing makes oversized pixels pop in and out of view. Saying that I think that the distance rendering is excellent when you can see a long way and it's a graphical highpoint for consoles. It may lack defined edges on the polygons, but it makes up for them in quantity.
I don't think I can deny that it's the best game I've ever played. 9.995/10 I think, but lets fix targetting, cover and the graphics in 5 please. If they do that then we'll have to start rating things out of 11.
One more downside. I may have to buy the PS3 version as well so I can play with all my friends (although the 360 version is still recommended over the PS3 for the DLC that's coming). Cross platform multiplayer please Microsoft and Sony, you know it's more code to stop it than to enable it.
posted @ Wednesday, May 07, 2008 1:27 AM