This review will contain main story spoilers

Finally after like 4 attempts I managed to fully complete GTA 4... kind of. I will properly go into it later but technically I didn't complete the final mission but I am marking it as completed as I played the entire game and was already well aware of the ending and ill be damned if after all the time it took me to complete this game to not have it marked complete.

Grand Theft Auto 4 is as much of a classic as you can get. Alongside a few other notable titles this game really encapsulates the Xbox 360/PS3 era. Like a lot of games I have played this year, this was the first time I played through this game in its entirety. I messed around with it on the 360 when I was younger and made a few attempts to get through it on PC but only got around a quarter into the main story. Comparing it to the other narratives in the GTA series, 4 leads the pack with its iconic dark and gritty mafia story, along side a bunch of great characters.

The story itself is very enjoyable. It revolves around Niko Bellic, a former soldier turned gun for hire as he tries to track down the traitor who turned on his friends and left him to die. Arriving fresh off the boat in Liberty City, Niko ends up working with all sorts of the cities criminals in order to make money in pursuit of the American dream. The main story is I believe 88 missions long which I do feel is a bit too long. There were lots of times when I felt that the game could of and should of been starting to wrap up, only for there to be another 20 missions with a whole new cast of side characters. The game can be sort of broken down by looking at the characters Niko is interacting with, Act 1 sees him working alongside the Russian Mob where he is betrayed by Dimitri Rascalov who serves as the games main antagonist. The second act sees Niko working with the McCreary family who are part of the Irish Mob. Finally the 3rd act has Niko working for the Pegarino crime family, who are part of the Italian mafia. This is quite a broad assessment and there are lots of other people who Niko also interacts with like a corrupt cop, a federal agent and many street gangs.

The characters, especially the protagonist are this games best area. Niko Bellic is by a long shot the best GTA protagonist and in my opinion the 3rd best Rockstar protagonist behind Arthur Morgan and John Marston. Niko has real motivations and genuinely seems to want to better his life in order to move on from his past. While being a cold blooded gun for hire, there are many moments when you can see Niko reflect on his past actions with clear regret. Which is a lot more than you see from any other GTA protagonist. The side characters are also a great bunch. Roman, Niko's gambling addict cousin who sold him on the American dream. Packie McCreary the 2nd youngest of the McCreary brother eager to restore his family name and my personal favourite Little Jacob who is just the best.

Most missions follow a similar format, either shoot up a large gauntlet of enemies, chase someone in a car and kill them, tail someone in a car and follow them to a gauntlet of enemies. We all know the rockstar gameplay format. While these missions are all quite fun and a lot of cool action movie set pieces are put into these somewhat repetitive missions in order to keep it fresh, as the game progresses you start to see a lot of the same. This game is often praised for its physics which were ground breaking at the time. To this day I am still very impressed with the water physics. Mantling on ledges sounds way cooler than it actually is, its only used properly in like 2 missions and normally is just quite janky. Im not a fan of the shooting mechanics, with the lock on feature either locking onto an enemy across the room instead of the guy shooting you in the face right in front of you, or aiming at a guy behind a wall. I got the hang of it eventually but I much prefer the free aim style they used in GTA 5.

The friend system is something I believe is unique to this game and i'm quite happy it never properly made the jump to 5. Certain side characters you are able to do activities with will call you randomly and ask you to hang out. This is normally fine but it gets to a point in the late game where there are too many to keep track of. On multiple occasions I was heading to meet one person when another would call me up which ends up with you loosing relationships with certain characters which sucks.

Another thing unique to this game was the strange amount of choices you were given throughtout. Obviously GTA 5 had this with its ending but throughout GTA 4 you are given choices between characters to kill. Normally there are benefits for doing either which make for an interesting spin on gameplay. What I like the most about this is that normally there wont be much of an impact outside of different dialogue so its more of a moral decision of who you would rather save (If you ignore the rewards). It's something I hope returns in GTA 6. Speaking of dialogue, I was very surprised by the sheer amount of it, during retries of missions there are sometimes 2 to 3 cycles of dialogue that can happen on the journey to an objective. It helps keep things less stale especially when having to repeat a drive.

Graphics wise this game has aged extremely well. Liberty City looks great, very dingy and run down in certain places and full of life in others. I did sometimes have a bit of trouble with the lighting as the city can get very dark and grey. The music is iconic. That main theme is one of Rockstar's best, even down to the little motives that play after completing missions.

Unfortunately I have one major complaint, the lack of checkpoints. Now this may fall under a "Get Gud" opinion but this is something that really bothered me throughout my playthrough. Now most missions are only around 5 minutes in length and that's ok to repeat but can get annoying with repeated attempts but dear God some of these missions are so long. One in particular that stood out to me was involving stealing drugs from the Triads. to start you have to drive to pick up a truck, then drive this slow ass truck half way across the map, then kill a massive gauntlet of enemies and finally escape on a boat, all without a checkpoint. This is made even more annoying by the fact that your health doesn't regenerate at all, and the medkits are so far between and more or less impossible to find that you end up running through a gauntlet with a slither of health praying you dont die. This is also made more irritating by the fact your ammo isnt reset when you die, so you end up going in with barely any ammo in your good weapons. The amount of times I got within one enemy of completing a mission only to get blasted away and have to do the entire thing again almost made me give up on a few missions lol. Something I am soooo glad they changed in GTA 5.

Now as you may have noticed at the start of this review I said that technically I haven't completed the game. That is because Grand Theft Auto 4 is more or less impossible to complete on Xbox Series X. The final mission has a segment where you need to jump from a bike onto a helicopter in order to kill the final guy. After jumping you have to spam the A button to climb up but due to the Series X running at 60 fps, this is impossible to do. I say borderline impossible as it has been done using certain methods but personally due to my previously mentioned complaint about the games checkpoints, I am not going to constantly replay the entire shooting segment before hand multiple times in order to master the technique. I'm slightly conflicted whether or not to let this effect the score I will give it as it seems more like a software problem than the game problem. As of now my score is 4/5 stars (Or an 8/10) but if anyone has any input on whether or not this issue should affect the score, feel free to leave a comment!

All in all I think GTA 4 is starting to become a bit dated. Not taking anything away from its fantastic story, great characters and genuinely fun missions, but some of its gameplay choices seem like they may make it a bit more inaccessible as the years go on. I'm thinking about grabbing The ballad of Gay Tony and The lost and the damned when they are next on sale to try them out at some point. Still a solid recommendation but look out for that game breaking bug