Grand Theft Auto 4

GTA IV next generation, it's about time. This is one of the greatest sandbox games available, but before you start giving the review a negative score you have to ask yourself , what other game on the PC gives you the freedom to travel around a Hugh city either by Foot, Car, Bike, Train, Helicopter, that alone should be worth a 3 star rating . The problem that some people are finding is that the games mechanics are different to previous GTA's , no longer can you drive full speed and take a right hand turn without applying the brakes. You now need to drive with a little restraint. And some people don't like this new way.
GTA has also gone back to basics regarding game play, and to be honest I think they have had to, where GTA San andreas gave the player almost everything from swimming underwater for clams and base jumping of mountain tops to stealing jumbo jets and tanks.
GTA IV instead has removed or at least toned these features down, but instead we now get a viewing… more »

GTA IV next generation, it's about time. This is one of the greatest sandbox games available, but before you start giving the review a negative score you have to ask yourself , what other game on the PC gives you the freedom to travel around a Hugh city either by Foot, Car, Bike, Train, Helicopter, that alone should be worth a 3 star rating . The problem that some people are finding is that the games mechanics are different to previous GTA's , no longer can you drive full speed and take a right hand turn without applying the brakes. You now need to drive with a little restraint. And some people don't like this new way.
GTA has also gone back to basics regarding game play, and to be honest I think they have had to, where GTA San andreas gave the player almost everything from swimming underwater for clams and base jumping of mountain tops to stealing jumbo jets and tanks.
GTA IV instead has removed or at least toned these features down, but instead we now get a viewing distance that previously I didn't think was possible, and we also get what every reviewer of every previous versions of GTA has been moaning about, Multiplayer!,
Me personally I am still on the fence about the multiplayer side of it, on one side it's a interesting feature and with 16 modes of play it offers the GTA player what they wanted in a Multiplayer GTA, but on the other hand GTA has always been a single player experience and the mode doesn't really offer anything special with the exception of being able to ride around Liberty city with a few friends doing drive by shootings..
Granted GTA does have its faults, but with over 16 million units sold at time of writing this review there must be something right about this game even if you knock 3 million units off that because some gamers think it's a pile of crap, that still leaves 13million gamers who think this game Rocks.
So you can either join the GTA haters who just hate this game because their views are the minority and don't add anything constructive to their whining or you can join the rest of us and thank Rockstar games for giving us Gaming heaven.

I've had this game pre-ordered since the very first day it appeared on play, i waited and waited and finally got it, amazing!!

I started to install the game and expected it to take a long time so went off to do other things, when i came back it was all ready to go. I started it up and it required something called Social Club and Windows Live, I installed these and created accounts, but the Social club wouldn't connect to something called a gamertag which wasn't explained. After about an hour of trying options i got that working, went to start the game only to recieve an MMA10 error. After much hunting around on the net i found it won't log in with Social Club logged in, so logged out and tried again, and started the game, looked great. But now it won't save progress, and my PS2 controller with the Play USB adapter won't work.

After much searching i found an overwrite for some windows DLL's to get a few of the PS2 controls working, with a combination of keyboard and PS2… more »

I've had this game pre-ordered since the very first day it appeared on play, i waited and waited and finally got it, amazing!!

I started to install the game and expected it to take a long time so went off to do other things, when i came back it was all ready to go. I started it up and it required something called Social Club and Windows Live, I installed these and created accounts, but the Social club wouldn't connect to something called a gamertag which wasn't explained. After about an hour of trying options i got that working, went to start the game only to recieve an MMA10 error. After much hunting around on the net i found it won't log in with Social Club logged in, so logged out and tried again, and started the game, looked great. But now it won't save progress, and my PS2 controller with the Play USB adapter won't work.

After much searching i found an overwrite for some windows DLL's to get a few of the PS2 controls working, with a combination of keyboard and PS2 it's playable.

Managed to log into windows Live through the game so it now saves progress and i can finally play.

Many hours were spent sorting this. So wasn't at all happy, however the game is actually fantastic, there are so many minor touches that are superb like pushing open doors, the way Nikko runs down stairs and the gfx on the cut scenes. All brilliant, however without a monster machine it's jerky on anything more than optimum settings which on my machine (which isn't at all underpowered, 2.66 Dual Core 2, 3gig Ram, 512mb 8800GT XFX) is frankly almost at lowest.

Rockstar say that this game is future proof where you can play for years to come on the new extra powerful machines. But that's no good for the people who want to play it now!!

Game - 5/5
Install - 0/5
Ability to play smoothly 3/5