GTA IV’s Protagonist, Niko Bellic

Ah, good old Grand Theft Auto. No shortage of controversy, cop-killings, mobsters, sex, drugs, and every single vice. Now in it’s sixth iteration as GTA IV, you play the role of Niko Bellic, a veteran of the Balkan Wars and new immigrant to Liberty City searching for a way to begin a new life.

Niko in game

Lured in by the fancy and lurid emails of his cousin, Roman, life in Liberty City quickly turns out to be nothing as rosy as his cousin painted it. His cousin in debt to gangsters, Niko must help his cousin, then find his way to search for someone as well as succeed in America.

Liberty City. Ingnore the nice car and suit k?

Gameplay wise, it’s similar to the older GTAIII and Vice City. The game utilizes a third person standpoint in which the player can control Niko around on his frolics throughout the city, with most controls being the standard WSAD format. Its easy to pick up if you’ve already handled a shooter game before. Combat is also in third person, and weapons have to be aimed for maximum effect.

Normal fire mode

An interesting feature of note is the cover system. While the cover system isn’t revolutionary (Gears of War), the availability of a blind fire mode allows the Niko to randomly fire from behind cover. While doing this, accuracy is reduced, but you aren’t getting hit. This turns combat into a quick duck into cover and so on. This simplifies gameplay somewhat, but those expecting to go up gung ho against legions of gangsters is going to the hospital quickly.

Blind Fire from cover

The way driving is implemented in the game is typical of the series, and not dissimilar to any other racing game out there. In order to procure a car, you either have to:
a)steal it
b)hijack it
c)kill the driver then steal it
Handling is a bit tricky at first,but as the game progresses, it becomes easier as you adapt to it.
Random fact: You gotta pay toll for the bridges.

TOLL!

While not pursuing missions, it is possible like the other GTA games to wander around the city and explore, and cause a huge ruckus if one so wanted to.

Story wise, I would say the portrayal of the city and characters has improved leaps and bounds over the previous GTAs. Liberty City was featured in GTAIII, but back then, the city had no “feel” to it. It felt like it was filled with zombies, and was no where close to a real city. The city in GTA IV, however, has markedly improved. For instance, it actually feels like a real city, with the different districts of the city having their own life to it. The immigrant areas and the downtown areas all feel different with their own personality. Fast food joints, restaurants, bars, car wash places are all over the city. As Niko, you can have access to safehouses all over the different districts of the city as the game progresses.

Liberty City map

Of course, with a city so large, it would take forever for one to travel from one end to another. Thankfully, the GPS map indicated above gives directions in game to your destination as marked by the green line. Also, there are taxis and metro trains which will bring you to your destination quickly, but at a price.

It is quite easy to sympathize with Niko. Unlike the previous one dimensional characters portrayed in the earlier games, Niko is actually a good man in search of a new life, but circumstances force him to turn back to the life of crime he tried to avoid. The other characters are portrayed convincingly for a video game, and each have their own distinct personality.

Game performance is an issue, however. The game is quite a resource hog, and chews up 1GB of RAM. In order to run the game at quite high settings, its recommended that you run a ATi Radeon 4850 or NVidia Geforce 9800GTX+/GTS 250 and a multi-core processor with 4gb of ram. In fact, the developers officially recommend having a tri-core/quad-core system to speed the game up.

Of course, for those with lower systems, it is best to start the settings high, then slowly tweak the settings down till the game becomes playable.

Settings

At the settings I played at on a AMD Athlon 5000+ @ 3.0Ghz, 6GB of ram and ATi Radeon 4850, the average frames per second (FPS) was 25. For the best experience, ensure that the FPS is above 30 at all times.

All in all, I would have to say that GTAIV is the best in the series so far, and I highly recommend new players and veterans of the series to try the game. However, the system requirements are quite high, limiting the players to those who have recent and powerful hardware.

I give it 4.5/5