Well I bought the damn thing on Steam on day 1. Vice City is one of my favorite games ever and I figured this one should be just as good. Anyway, I start the download and realize it’s 16gbs. With my connection at the time, that would have taken 4.5 days. So I had to wait a good while before I got a fast enough connection to make downloading it bearable. With the new connection, the download finishes in no time. Unfortunately, I realize my computer is in no way capable of handling this monster of a game. If you think a third world dictator makes some big demands, you should see the type of stuff this game requires. So up until two days ago, this game had been sitting in Steam laughing at me. I finally got a new computer, fixed it up, re downloaded the game and started the installation process. Well, the installation itself took a whole day. Mainly because of all the invasive crap I had to deal with. Screw Microsoft Live and the Rockstar Social Club. I knew about it already but never imagined it was THAT bad. Gamers are a bitchy group and I figured they were over reacting. Apparently, I was wrong. The shit I had to do to get that phase of the installation complete made me a little sick. So I installed it, made sure it worked, then had to sleep.
After coming back from work yesterday, I got back on the computer and started the game. The game looks absolutely stunning. The graphics are amazing and the way the characters behave are just as good too. However, it has nowhere near the playability that Vice City did. The keyboard controls are awkward at best. And the cars are really hard to drive.
The driving has to be my biggest gripe about the whole thing. It’s incredibly realistic. A little too realistic probably. While the acceleration looks great, the handling, at least for me, is next to impossible. I can’t make 80% of the turns I was able to do in Vice City.
Also, the story hasn’t really interested me so far although, I imagine it will get better as I spend more time playing as the main character (whatever his name is). That wont be happening though. The playability is just not there and, till this day, Vice City is way more entertaining.
So that has been the worst $49.99 I’ve spent in a while. Oh well…
And also, the soundtrack was pretty good.
All vehicles handling like they’re on ice skates. It’s so bad that I actually thought they’d release a patch for it. There’s “realistic,” and then there’s slipping and sliding all over the road when you’re going the equivalent of 10 mph. Ridiculous.
First and foremost for my GTA IV annoyances is the control scheme. I don’t care if I can now blind fire, slide to cover, etc, etc. Give me mouselook and let me map walk to a friggin’ mouse key and I will ninja any mofo who navigates by WASD. People say “but you can shoot one way and walk the other!” Great except for you have to spend so much time screwing around to be able to do this that you’re dead by the time you get set up. There was a patch released that was supposed to allow you to map any key but mouse 2 is permanently bound to something (either attack or aim) and I just want it to be walk. The controls are easily the worst feature.
The police presence in the game is just stupid. It seems like if you fart there’s cops on you.
The missions are very repetitive and have nowhere near the variation to them of Vice City or San Andreas. GTA IV is "go here, kill someone. Go there, kill someone. Go to a warehouse and kill a bunch of people. Go to another warehouse and kill a bunch more people. Kill a bunch of gangsters. Kill a bunch of cops. Etc etc etc.
The constant phone calls from your contacts are annoying as hell too.
Agreed about the driving. Why have so many fast cars in the game if going fast guarantees your speedy, messy death?
But it’s not realistic, unless you intermittently hit the brake pedal during ever turn in real-life too? Instead, it was its own brand of wonky-ass car physics that was was simply a chore to use.
As for other problems: the terrible first few hours, where you’re running lame errands, going on dates, all the while with no weaponry.
The cellphone. Ugh.
And the story, nor script, were anything stellar–certainly not the “oscar worthy” claims that some reviewers were throwing around.
GTA3 is still the best game in the series, before it turned into a convoluted, pretentious mess.
I didn’t play it on the PC. Maybe you should look into getting a controller for the PC? Perhaps that’d fix your button problem.
The driving took some getting used to, but it was pretty easy to get the hang of it. It wasn’t anything too crazy or mind-blowing to figure out.
I loved the game. Ranking a Grand Theft Auto game after GTA III is like trying to pick out your favorite child. The targeting problems seemed to improve over time and the graphics steadily improved. I have a really hard time knocking Grand Theft Auto’s single player.
Just started playing 4 myself, and first off, it was 21$ at game stop.
the cars are hard to control…until you find a nice car. the turismo handles like a dream and I think thats what they were really after, the sports car actually drives better than anything else on the road. what they really should have done was include a friggin speedometer if they were going to go with this level of realism. I think the issue is while you feel that you are driving slow you are really moving way to fast to take a 90 degree turn. that and the e brake is a bitch to learn at first, cars do a full 180 almost every time you touch that thing just like they would in rl at those kinds of speeds.
wtf do you need a weapon for in the first little bit of the game? and why dont you get one if you need one so bad?
get a car
find a cop on foot
run his ass down at high speed
get out and grab his gun
now just lose you wanted level and you have a gun, if you want more then do some police missions the bad guys usually have smgs
I should clarify: my issue wasn’t specifically that you didn’t have a weapon for the first few hours, but instead that the game’s intro is a complete bore. Going on a date? Please.
I agree that the car handling took me a while to get the hang of, but you do eventually get to be a pro at it if you keep playing. I’ll agree that while visually stunning, the game has no replay value and a lot of the side missions are just flat-out boring. I also recommend Saint’s Row 2 as that game has much easier car handling and a lot of fun side-missions to do (no bowling or going on dates!).
The games you could play, to me, were just meh. It’s like, here I am playing on a ridiculously powerful console, in the most detailed and visually stunning city ever created for a game, and I’m bowling?! It’s almost like they spent most of their budget and time creating the city and just crammed everything else in last minute. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the game, but it just seems like they could have let you do so much more in the city than what it ended up being.
You may as well have typed this post in Russian, because I just don’t understand it. Yeah. You’re bowling. I don’t see what the existence of a bowling mini-game has to do with anything else. Hell, You only have to bowl maybe twice in the entire game, and that’s if you care about the friendship reputation stuff.
My point was that the mini-games were just plain boring and weird in a game like GTA, whose reputation is fast cars, guns, explosions, and running from the police. I can go to Pogo.com and bowl with other casual gamers, but it’s not what one would expect in a game like GTA. You’d expect the mini-games to take more advantage of the incredibly city and its surroundings.
Yes and no. A city isn’t just its surroundings. It’s pretty obvious that I didn’t mind the mini-games as much as you did. If they forced more of them upon the player, then yeah, I can see more of a beef with them. As it is, it’s not too bad.
Huh. I loved the driving - it reminded me of the first Need For Speed. The cars felts like they really had some *weight *to them, and handled like cars rather than RC models of cars.
However, yeah, “Heey Niko ! I know you’re busy shooting cops, but I wanna go get drunk ! Come and get me now !” every 6 seconds was irritating to the extreme. I did enjoy the stand-up acts though. Great idea.
The TV shows, the cabaret, just all the little things were nice. I think the friend system was one of the lesser things thrown in, but after a while, it started to get bigger and unwieldy and was shrunk to the size it’s there now, which is still a little too much, but it’s fine.
I love the game. I still play it pretty much every day, multiplayer racing, PC w/ Xbox360 controller. The driving is definitely touchy, but you can get the hang of it. The precision of it is what makes it fun to me. It’s not quite “realistic” but it is finely tuned in it’s own way. Other driving games feel boring and lack nuance.
Don’t be afraid to brake, and the e-brake should only be used rarely. If you’re sliding into everything and flipping over all the time, slow down before turns. Lose speed while still going straight. If you are going to bump anything, or jump a curb, let off the gas before you lose contact with the road. Focus on keeping good contact with the road. You can turn your car in midair by holding the gas and brake at the same time. That seems to also help control your spin while sliding. You’d be pretty shocked at how fast some people can drive in this game.
As for flaws, I agree with complaints about the minigames, but only cuz I tried for 100% and I think I missed due to the friends/dates, but I can’t bring myself to go back and do nothing but minigames for days to see if that finishes my game. I just race instead.
You can set your phone to “do not disturb” and avoid the harassment about dates.