There were a number of sites declaring Grand Theft Auto IV to be a 10/10 game. It's good, I'll agree. I would not rate it quite that high though. (And keep in mind, I played it on the PC.)

So how does GTA4 differ from previous iterations of the series?

We'll start with driving. There's no mouse control of the cars, which sucks. It takes some getting used to, controlling only with the keyboard. The reason you can't drive with the mouse is they added the ability to aim fire while driving. I know that in Vice City you could only shoot directly left or right and I can't remember now how San Andreas did it. The shooting is definitely much more convenient, with almost 360 degrees of aiming. Of course, your choice of weapons is limited (no assault rifles or rocket launchers from the driver's seat).

Cars in GTA4 have far too little traction, and the real beaters and crappy cars can drive as if their tires are made from congealed cooking fat. High-end cars are much better at gripping the road. The emergency brake, necessary to get some good sideways slides and fast turns, will temporarily disable both your ability to steer (to some degree) and to accelerate. While in a sideways slide, your spinning drive wheels won't give any traction at all until you slow down. Kind of annoying, I wish it felt more authentic.

Combat and weapons work pretty well. Right mouse button puts you into aim mode, left button shoots. Melee weapons and hand-to-hand combat use a lock-on system, where your right mouse button locks onto a particular target and then when you move, it's in relation to your target, and when you swing, stab, or punch, it's at that target only. The mouse controls here were a bit twitchy. The game (a console port) did not quite recognize very very minute mouse movements, so if you try to aim too precisely, your mouse won't move at all. GTA4 also has a cover system, whereby you hit a key to take cover behind a wall or barrier, then you can pop out and fire or shoot blindly. It's pretty useful, especially the blind-fire. I just wish it was more reliable. Sometimes you'll be rapidly sliding the mouse to move your crosshairs and it just won't react. This only happened with using cover. So other than the flakiness with the cover system, combat in GTA4 (at least on the PC) is pretty solid.

Ever since GTA3 came out, Rockstar has been trying to incorporate more of a story into the GTA games. And they've all, more or less, revolved around organized crime. This seems to be the easiest way to weave a narrative around a sandbox game where you can run people over without a second look from the cops. The character's personality is far more defined here than in GTA3, where your silent protagonist was a blank slate for whatever the player wanted to bring. In GTA4, the problems arise when the actions of your main character (Niko) are completely at odds with what he says.

GTA4 is two games at war. One, a sandbox game where the player can wreck havoc on an unsuspecting metropolis, go on grand crime sprees, and indulge in epic shootouts with police. The other game is a wannabe-Scorsese mafia drama told through cut scenes, with nearly as many betrayals as it has characters. It's a bit self-indulgent and long-winded and takes itself far more seriously than it should. And when the two games interact, problems arise. The cut scenes and dialog are all laid out in advance, with little flexibility or openness to player choice. Thus the game easily presents situations where Niko in a cut scene expresses reluctance to perform violence, just after finishing up a mass murder spree. Or if you don't make the choice to hang out with certain characters outside of the story missions, you'll be left wondering scratching your head at some of the character dynamics in cut scenes.

What most impresses people is the realizing of the city. The game's setting of Liberty City is a scaled down rendition of New York City with a bit of Jersey City. The illusion is very impressive. You can get around by car, taxi, subway, and there are bridges and tunnels connecting the islands. The architecture of the buildings reflect their location (skyscrapers in their version of Manhattan, industrial buildings along the harbors). The smallest prying reveals the illusion right away, of course. While many of the buildings will have stairs or ladders that let you access the roof, the insides can't be reached because the majority of the doors are fake. There are a few stores that can be entered (clothing only), some bars, a few restaurants, a couple of strip clubs. Everything else is a mirage. Now I'm not saying that Rockstar should have created a fully interactive model of New York City! That would be a ridiculous task, at least for a game like this. It's just that people need to realize what you can and can't do before jumping into the game with false impressions. Liberty City can give you a great sense of immersion, but as soon as you try to do anything, you're reminded of the fact that it's just window dressing.

As you encounter more and more characters in the progressing storyline, many of them will go into your phone as contacts. Some of them you'll be able to call up and go do social activies with, like bowling, darts, drinking, that kind of thing. These are your friends. The game tracks how much they like you and for some of them if their appreciation gets high enough, they'll offer to do special favors for you. One girl had the ability to give me health over the phone if I called her. Another was able to get police to stop chasing me (as long as my offenses weren't too egregious). The irritating side to friends is that you have to keep doing crap with them or you'll lose their approval. Then the favors stop. Sometimes they'll call you in the middle of some goings-on and nag about how you never hang out anymore. Turn them down and their approval drops. A nice idea, but poorly implemented.

Grand Theft Auto games are famous for having sandbox environments, with near total freedom to go and do as you please. GTA4 is no different, with an even bigger city than ever before. And without the need to drive through along boring country roads to get from one area to another, as they did with San Andreas. Some aspects of the sandbox will only get unlocked as you progress through the story missions, however. There are locations around the city where you can find weapons; except these only start appearing after certain missions make them available. So you cannot ignore the missions and expect to get the full experience of the sandbox (especially since the other islands are closed to you initially).

With all the moves forward with GTA4, what were the steps back? In their drive to make a more serious story-based experience, Rockstar tossed out a number of game aspects that I really enjoyed. There's no buying or controlling property now. You get a few safehouses as you progress through the missions; they're just places to safe your game and change your clothes. (You can also watch TV there, if you're so inclined.) A safehouse has a parking area out front where you can stash cars so that they'll persist if you leave or load a game. This area's pretty small though: you can only park 2 large cars in it. It's not as nice or reliable as the garages you'd get in Vice City though. And the safehouses are far apart, so if you find your have no room to park, it's a hell of a drive to get to the next one.

So there's no owning property the brings you income or gives you access to cars. The money thing doesn't bother me. I do hate having to hunt around for nice cars though. (As I said before, the crappier cars can't drive worth shit.) Your properties won't have weapons readily available at them either. It used to be that you'd find "packages" around the city and as you grabbed them, you'd unlock various stuff at your safehouses. Not in GTA4. Instead, you hunt pigeons (flying rats) and you have to exterminate all 200 of them before you get anything. And even then, it's 1 thing: a military helicopter placed the top of a single building (I have not yet unlocked this).

They dropped the chop shop part of San Andreas. No more customizing a car you're really fond of (with the tiny parking spots, you probably wouldn't have anywhere to put it anyway.) GTA4 has nicer 60s American muscle cars than San Andreas did; a shame the most common ones -- the Dukes (a '69 Charger) and the Stallion ('68 Cutlass) -- are two of the worst handling cars in the game. The Sabre GT is a blast to drive though and looks great, much like the Sabre Turbo in Vice City (my favorite of that game). There are a few specialized vehicles in the game that have parts that look like they should function (forklift, car-carrier with ramp) except that there's no apparent way to work them.

They did away with some staples of the series: while you can still hunt criminals from a cop car with the help of the police computer, there are no taxi missions, no ambulance missions, no firetruck missions. This is the biggest deficiency of the game. The sandbox nature of GTA is really crippled when you take away the most popular alternatives to the main missions. So what do you do in the game without them? Drive and cause mayhem. There's side mission to collect cars for a shadowy Stevie character. Go bowling? Play darts? They're fairly shallow mini-games with (IMO) poorly implemented controls. And I still haven't gotten the handling of putting spin on my ball when I bowl.

I'm kind of frustrated that Rockstar seems to have a habit of taking one step back for every two steps forward when it comes to the GTA games. Somewhere there has a vision of what the games should be and it just doesn't seem to match mine. They want to turn it into a serious vehicle for crime dramas, no matter how at odds that may be with the gameplay mechanics. Even so, it's a really good game, especially for a console port. And it didn't hurt that I only paid $7 during the Steam holiday sale for it.