The “Break it Down” Blog

Ok, this is a mini-mini-review of GTA4 for the folks that haven’t played it yet:

5min Impressions:

• This is totally GTA3/VC/SA + more complex city, better graphics (not amazing).
• Controls and movement feel sluggish, I think it has to do with the animation blending
• Performance is on par with other GTAs… 20-30fps range, not smooth as butter, but so pretty and usually enthralled in city so you don’t really notice
• The multiplayer isn’t as fun as I thought it would be. I’m not sure why I thought it would be amazing… it’s sorta cool and goofy at times, but it’s such a cluster-fuck of people running around I don’t know how it’s suppose to be fun-fun… it’s just sort of… “oh cool that guy drove a car into a dude and I watched it… lol”. It’s even less engrossing than co-op was in Crackdown.
• Characters/Voice Acting/etc. is *awesome*… like “I’m watching a movie like Goodfellas”
• I already like the Niko character a lot, you are rooting for him right away
• Music is awesome, I already heard a few radio stations and all of them were really rocking.
• New wanted/police dynamic of needing to “Escape the search radius” is brilliant. It makes getting away fun without having cops ruin the game for you by becomming insanely powerful like in GTA3.
• Driving is super physics-ey… like shocks compressing, taking a corner too fast in a minivan and rolling the damn thing, I love it.
• Particle effects look great, smashing into light polls and stuff.
• Driving around the city is awesome, forget mangling people with your car, it’s just fun to drive around.
• Hand-to-hand fighting is more scientific. Randomly punching people to death is a lot harder, but you can lock on and chain some combos. It’s not quite as haplessly fun as it used to be, and other pedestrians will hop in it seems. You can’t just mess-scrap any random person to death, to kill them seriously takes like 15 punches and you punch a lot slower… so if you LOVED the fighting in Saints Row or GTA3, you might miss that.
• Cell phone interface is teh awesome, surprisngly functional for
  managing stuff.
• Story progresses quickly and so far is great.

Ok after a bit more time… this is totally GTA… there is nothing
mind-numbing in here.

It’s a really high quality game, and yes it’s fun, but it is seriously
so much like GTA it’s hard to say that it’s revolutionary in any way.
This “omgz 11 out of 10!” stuff is rediculous…

Don’t mean to be a negative nancy, but jeez… these reviewers might as well get marketing jobs for Rockstar the way they are shitting salmon over it.

So anyone that was dying for more GTA, here it is. For anyone that
didn’t love GTA that much and thought this would be totally different,
it’s not.

NOTE: I have the 360 version