Grand Theft Auto IV

For years, I wondered why I could never replay this game. After my first playthrough in 2008, I was simply unable to get very far in. I did another full playthrough around 2013, but I wouldn't figure out the problem I had until my third full playthrough in June of 2018.
The beginning of this game is terrible. Everything on Hove Beach with the Russians is bad. Niko's work for Elizabeta and friends is awful. Characters like Vlad and Elizabeta are simply annoying more than anything else. The game is simply a bore at best until you meet Playboy X and unlock the middle island.

Once you unlock that island, though, ho boy. There is no other GTA game that leaves the door so open for you for so long. Are you mad at Michelle for being a spy? You can save the ULP missions for the very end of the game. From Playboy X's missions onward, you just keep unlocking more and more contacts to give you missions, and you have way more freedom in what missions you choose to do at any particular time than in any other GTA game.
The missions themselves offer way more freedom, too. Using a Playboy X mission as an example: the game tells you to use a slow lift platform to get to a rooftop to snipe mob goons off of cranes. Any other GTA game would force you to use the lift, and provide some lame excuse why you can't just do it from the ground. GTA IV doesn't care. It's perfectly possible and allowed to snipe the goons from the ground, saving a LOT of time, especially if you fail the mission a few times.
Speaking of failing missions, Rockstar has finally realised that this happens to people. In previous GTA games, you'd hear the same exact dialogues over and over and over every time you had to retry a mission. In GTA IV, each mission with a companion character has two different dialogue chains that you can hear, and if you fail the mission twice, the companion will just tell you to listen to the radio. It's such an improvement.

The driving physics are terrible, and Niko's customisation options are incredibly limited. There's nothing to spend your money on after a little while, and I mean a little while.
I also don't particularly like how the city is put together. San Andreas managed to feel huge without actually being huge, thanks to a large diversity in the themes of the areas, from the ghetto to the upscale Beverly Hills knock-off, from the podunk towns to the massive hills of San Fierro, and from the desert to the Las Venturas strip. San Andreas felt huge simply because there was so many different locations and areas that stick out in your mind. I have learned how to get around the PS2 games' maps pretty easily, but I will never learn how to get around GTA IV's map without the GPS. The modern GTA games are set in cities with actual city layouts, meaning everything looks the same, there are way too many roads, and nothing stands out besides the obvious areas like Central Park. There are so many squares of road on the map, and nothing stands out. It might be a great representation of a city, but that's not really what a game world needs to be.

The game has a lot of issues if you read deeply into it, but when the game gets going, it really gets going. GTA IV is a game of major strengths and weaknesses, and it's definitely not for everyone.