Grand Theft Auto IV

Don't believe the fans and critics, Rockstar peaked with GTA 4 (their best game) and have gone downhill ever since.

This is a beautiful, human piece of art. This game moved me. Each character felt real, you have to give yourself into the game. Go bowling with Dwayne, hit up the strip club with Roman, go on some internet dates, listen to Kate talk about the generational trauma. I played for 161 hours before I beat the last mission. I didn't want it to end. I didn't want to stop connecting with all of the people that Niko was connecting with. I wanted to know more about his past.

This is a tragedy. There is no victory lap. No fast cars. No riding off into the sunset.

Highest Recommendation. Top 5 of all time.

Right from the trailers you could tell they were going for something more serious, and the loading music confirms it. Violence has consequences, unlike the cynical GTA5 that shows a character nazi-murdering some poor bastard and you could almost expect a laugh track. You're going to run over passers-by all the same.

The inmigrant point of view is ideal to reflect on USA, as shown in The Godfather. Nico's unamused takes on american life work everytime. The story is good, that last choice hits hard. I like the sound as well, there's a mission that could have been taken right from Michael Mann's Heat. Guns sound amazing. I happen to like the driving. It just asks you to take it easy and, once you adjust, drifting is very satisfying, I can't get enough of that suspension.

My main complaint is the colour palette. You get used to it, but it still does look like shit. Except sunsets, they nailed those. Also, I'm not a fan of the three island map. There's a lack of memorable missions and some lame characters but, somehow, the game compensates for it. The "random encounters" were a genius idea and some of them were really good.

Maybe the best GTA, it's different from the rest, so if you like it you got to love it. I understand the frustration with this one but I think it holds up as a special videogame. It's definitely been made with far more attention to detail than GTAV. It set the foundation for what Red Dead Redemption would be, that game better at balancing the serious and the goofy.

I'm going to have to forego a substantial review of the gameplay at hand here because you are mostly subjected to similar go-here-and-shoot-all-the-guys errand running, and the mission design is greatly outmatched by games made both before and after this installment of the same franchise.

My main concern with this game and a reason I have great admiration for it is the narrative, mainly viewed from my perspective and context as a resident of the same banished part of the world as our Hero here, Niko. The brilliance of the writing of this game are exasperated by (to the outsider) seemingly absurd hopelessness of Niko and his more settled in counterpart, Roman. Such an inexplicable and constant sense of it may seem as a device used to stretch the edginess of the story, but is an all too familiar disease, hardwired into the mindset of a group of peoples that have been displaced, raped, bombed and torn apart from the direction of all 4 axis of the compass (look up the word Balkanization), for centuries, whos own family relations are based on sickly manipulation based on codependency, and conditioned selfishness (watch: The Marathon Family) which ultimately led to depravities unbeknownst to all of them committed to their very own siblings, who have suffered the same fate as them perpetually.

Niko and Roman were born out of this depravity. Many in the same boat as him have witnessed horrors best left unannounced happen to their very dearest. A human left to exist in such circumstances are only left to be conditioned by them, to be chopped into a disfiguration of a human being that, in a video game context, can easily be interpreted as another edgy male protagonist with a dark past that is a trope you all know has been tried ad nauseam. But Niko is much more than that, and the mirror of his being beaming into our own world is a projection so strong that this might as well be mine, or my friends, or my cousin's father for all I know. Niko is real, and there are many Nikos living on this Earth right now, with the details swapped out.

Niko and Roman are situated in a Point Nemo, so impossibly far away from content or joy, but have both found some sort of depraved goal within the chaos. Roman, settled into American society, has bought into the usual trite vices of an average New Yorkian: women, money, the American Dream which is, of course, refuted in a very Balkan way by Niko in casual dialogue (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HthXI7B4NW8). Niko is of course, driven by revenge; but this revenge is not any sort of avenue for solace or joy: neither the journey nor the destination bring any happiness to Niko, the 'goal' serving only as a driving force to even keep living at all, a desperate reach into giving everything meaning and conclusiveness which is never given to him.

The biggest curveball of the writing and the most impressive from an objective standpoint is the inverse revenge story. From the beginning up until this point the entire narrative focused on pushing towards this goal that Niko is seeking to attain, and when the payoff is finally offered to him... He can't do it. You're not supposed to kill Darko of course, which is exemplified by the game having Niko and Roman be in a slightly better mood if you decide to go for the de facto canon decision here. Everyone knows, as does Niko himself, that nothing would change if he killed Darko. "Only those who die get closure, the living do not." Indeed. No matter how much you get fucked over, at least in these parts you know that there was at least some, if ever so miniscule, reason for them doing it while in search of a way out, and there is always the thought that some twisted aspect of your own being would've done the same if given the right circumstances. This feeling is further exasperated by Darko himself, with the questions posed by Darko as to how much of a hypocrite Niko is. "How much do you charge for a life?". Niko is then awash with questions of his own corruption, and how much it was affected by the things he had seen and lived through.

In midst of all the hopelessness, the only joy Niko and Roman find is momentary respite from tragedy. No matter if he chooses to forego his morals or not, Niko is once again given a harsh reminder of the curse laid upon him since birth and the knowledge of the possibility of anything going wrong at any moment. The ending is victorious; yet bitter, a fleetingly pretty concept used by none other than Šijan himself.

Jesus. The way I've written this all up this seems like the bleakest fucking game of all time. But you must remember that this is only one dimension of the writing here, this is only the Black without the Comedy. Like Šijan's opuses, GTA IV is a black comedy. A hilarious and gritty universe, that features a hysterically tragic story - once you decide to unwrap it from the veil of comedy.

If this game isn't my favorite,then is at least top 3 and i am pretty sure that this isn't gonna change in a long time.

I adore this game because is not only the best gta in terms of gameplay and graphics,it is by far the best gta history and characters.

basically,is the best game of the best franchise of videogames ever.

Hands down the greatest GTA and the only one that hasn't aged poorly. Gone is the obtuse, rough around the edges game design of the previous entries. Nearly every possible QOL fix you had wished were in the previous games is here. Never had there been a city as well designed as this one, and to this day it holds up better than the majority of western/sandbox games thanks to its excellent physics which add a dynamic sense of weight, and a focus on immersion with social/life sim aspects that were sorely missed in its milked to death successor.
The characters are the most loveable, and realised out of the series. The writing as a whole, while not perfect, balances seriousness and humour perfectly in a way that San Andreas came close to, and which "V" abandoned with its lack of focus and try hard approach.
I'll admit I'm a little biased as I grew up playing this game, but I never have any less of a good time returning to this game unlike every other GTA.