I'll start with a laserlike focus on a single, almost insignificant aspect of GTA IV's driving, because things like this have a tendency to stick in my mind, and hey, details matter. Niko's, er, "ability" to fly through the window after a head-on collision is what I'm griping about. It's slick, but... well, it's like this: it’s often going to be necessary to punish me, the player, somehow. And sometimes that comes naturally: if I don’t brake properly in a turn, I lose control. If I don’t use cover in a firefight, I get perforated (GTA IV has a pretty good implementation of that, by the way). So punishment I can deal with. But frankly, I’m not jazzed about any gameplay mechanic whose only purpose is to punish me more. That’s what’s happened with the “through the windshield” thing. I was already avoiding head-on collisions, because they bring a complete stop to my motion. That was enough of a punishment. But now a head-on collision means I pretty much instantly fail any mission where time’s a factor. It's not necessary. If there were a button that made Niko put on a seatbelt, I might be more pleasantly inclined towards it.
It’s been a while since I played a GTA game, but the driving feels a bit more sensitive than I’m used to. It’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing, since it worked fine in previous incarnations. I like it, personally, for the same reason that I’m grudgingly in favor of different nuances to driving in various Mario Kart games. I got crazy good at Double Dash, and if the DS and Wii versions had played exactly the same, I would have been instantly bored by them. Changing things up is a fairly non-artificial way to inject a little additional brainwork into the new game.
More than that has changed, though: Rockstar waited quite a while to move from "GTA III" to "GTA IV," and in a way, you can see why: the technology’s been updated, rather obviously, and the setting and tone have a different feel to them. The game’s more focused, as well: gone are San Andreas’ vast expanses of empty land, and its airplanes (and its flying car cheat, for that matter). It’s all city driving now. It’s a fine thing for a game to be focused on what it does well, but I can’t help but think GTA gave up too much. The planes I can understand; San Andreas’ wide open spaces weren’t always a lot of fun to traverse, and giving them up means the whole map is choked with tall buildings. Which means flying in an airplane, or a flying car, wouldn’t be much fun. But why cut out the jetpack? San Andreas’ jetpack was a great little treat at the end of the game, giving you unlimited mobility. Yeah, it was goofy as hell, and the way you acquired it was even goofier, but who cares?
Rockstar cares. They’re taking the game in a more serious direction, so much so that its adherence to peepee humor threatens to tear the game in half. (I’m not dissing juvenile comedy, by the way, but I do think the tone of Niko’s story breaks sharply from what you see and hear on the in-game TV and radio). All the interactive portions of GTA IV, by contrast, are played relatively straight. Niko, in particular, is businesslike and occasionally mopey. This change in tone has, it seems, driven the scaling back of mission variety, which was admittedly hit-and-miss in previous games. Not everyone liked being forced to fly through rings in San Andreas, and nobody liked that one mission where you control the RC planes. But GTA IV has given up on everything but driving and shooting, which just feels like... well... giving up.
To be fair, I can say this about GTA IV: What it does, it does better than previous installments. It just does less. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not; it all depends on whether you think of GTA as a series about driving, or a series about flying and boating and jetpacking.
Finally, the more serious tone has accomplished something that, despite the series’ media reception, it hadn’t accomplished before. Namely: it feels like a murder simulator now. In the other games, I was mostly just offing caricatures, barely more human than Koopa Troopas. GTA IV has me doing things I’m actually reluctant to do, and Niko accepts these missions coldly and without reservation – in some places he’s actually eager to do what I cringe at. GTA IV puts me behind the eyes of a character I’m sometimes unnerved by, which is no small accomplishment. I’m not one hundred percent behind this change in direction, but if Rockstar is dedicated to it, they’ve made a good start.
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