Grand Theft Auto IV was a game changer when it first released for so many reasons - Their characters, the world, the gameplay, the story... I could go on all day talking about how good GTA IV is. It's just that good. Rockstar created something truly amazing here that will stick with us for generations. The game has indeed aged and not entirely good sadly. Below I will state my opinion, any issues I had playing the game and the pros, so let's get to it shall we!

I have included 2 MICRO reviews about the 2 DLC's TLAD and TBoGT. Please skip down the review if you only want to see my DLC opinions otherwise, please enjoy the review!

⚫I had 3 main issues the entire game, the first being - textures and graphical issues. Not matter where I went or what I done, from the very beginning of the game I had issues with the map disappearing, buildings disappearing, AI's disappearing and textures stretching like crazy. I just put up with it in the end and no matter what I did, it just kept happening.
⚫Second main issue - A weird speed increase to EVERYTHING. What I mean by this is sometimes I can run VERY, VERY fast, finish dialogue VERY fast, shoot very fast, cutscenes were sped up and so were phone calls. I do not know what caused ANY of this but I can't lie, sometimes it was helpful, especially when I had to go up or down several flights of stairs.
⚫Third main issue - In almost every single cutscene my camera angle was off. It would zoom either all the way in were I couldn't see anything or it would be stuck in one place and I would not know what is going on (of course I knew what was going on, I played this game day 1 haha)
⚫I had several audio issues (think my headset might be on it's way out but I am unsure as of the moment)
⚫One mission broke me - UNION DUES. It is one of Bernies missions. I could not LOAD into the game at all. I spent almost an hour just waiting to then look online for help. Turns out if you put your game on 60Hz and turn Vsync on, it loads you in.
⚫AI in this game get stuck on EVERYTHING. Countless times, from the beginning of the game to the end of the game I had to go and push friendly AI out of the way, through doors, into my car e.t.c just to progress the mission.
⚫The collectables are almost pointless to collect unless you are a "completionist" like me. They give you no reward. Killing 200 pigeons gives you nothing. Doing 50 stunt jumps gives you nothing. The only reward you get is when you 100% the game and you are able to buy 9999 ammo and this is where GTA V picks up the slack.

⚫GTA IV has probably one of the best if not THE BEST story out of all the GTA games. Its dark, dramatic and very well thought through. To help that out, your choice at the end of the game actually IMPACTS the ending that you get.
⚫The characters are unforgettable. Niko bellic - who is haunted/traumatised by his past memories of hundreds of women and children being brutally killed in a war and a revenge story so twisted it will have you wanting that sweet taste of revenge also. Roman bellic - I am sure we have all heard this line - "Cousin, you want to go bowling" - and the memes that followed. To so many more well written and designed characters.
⚫The streets feel so alive, especially for a game this old... it's mind-blowing even in this day of age. The roads had so many cars on them it felt like an actual alive NYC.
⚫The vehicle crashing and damage is so much better than GTA V in my honest opinion. You can see each dent on the car, the damage you deal to the front left of the car makes the car pull left and vice versa to the right. If you crash head on you have a chance to go FLYING through your front window. The same goes for the AI in the other car. GTA V does NOT do this as well as GTA IV.

To this day, it's honestly mind blowing to see GTA IV still pull it's own weight. To think that the game came out in 2008 and I bought it day 1... and I am still coming back to it all these years later... yeah, it's that good. The game has aged, not particularly for the best, especially with its graphical bugs and issues but it still, has to be one of the best games of all time to exist.

Grand Theft Auto: IV is easily the one of the best GTA games of all time and, one of the best games of all time. I would recommend GTA IV to everyone, even with its age.

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GTA IV also comes with 2 DLC's. Episodes, if you will. The first being TLAD which is a fantastic story set aside from Niko Bellics story but it entwines with Niko's story. Rockstar truly shined here, showing us that they can indeed make other stories set in the same time, same moment, same game as another character. It has flaws and it has its pros both of which I will mention below:

⚫There are 12 races. No achievement or purpose.
⚫25 gang wars (or 50 for items in game). No achievement for doing these.
⚫50 seagulls. (like the flying rats/pigeons) No achievement or purpose.
⚫10 Angus bike thefts. No achievements or purpose.
⚫5 Stubbs dirty laundry missions. (like the fixers missions). No achievement or purpose.
⚫All of the above is not needed for 100% achievements.

⚫It improves on bikes.
⚫It improved and excelled in a new sub-story in the same time as Niko's.
⚫Racing was much more fun!
⚫More GTA!!

Apart from the last item on my cons list, TLAD is an amazing story. It shows what rockstar could really do back in the day and TLAD introduced us to mechanics never seen before in a GTA game. 9/10! Worth it in every way!

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GTA IV also comes with 2 DLC's. Episodes, if you will. The second being TBoGT. This is also a phenomenal story set aside from TLAD and GTA IV's. It also intertwines with both of those stories which I thought was amazing. It also improves on REPLAY-ABILITY which I will mention in PROS! I am not going to spoil the story but this was PEAK GTA. This is what we all wanted. It is a MUST PLAY!! It did not come without its negatives of which I will state below, so let's get to it!

⚫25 drug wars (or 50 for items in game). 1 achievement for doing 25. No point in doing the other 25.
⚫50 seagulls. (like the flying rats/pigeons) No achievement or purpose. They did not learn from TLAD.
⚫10 club management missions that also have no effect on your game at all.
⚫All of the above is NOT needed for 100% achievements.

⚫It improves on replay-ability by adding in sub tasks to do during missions such as - get 25 headshots, maintain 70% accuracy, dont damage the car 10% e.t.c
⚫It improved and excelled in a new sub-story in the same time as Niko's and Johnnys.
⚫Story was AMAZING.
⚫Added in the ability to dance in nightclubs
⚫Added in parachuting which was a revelation back in the day
⚫More GTA!!

Apart from the last item on my cons list, TBoGT is an amazing story. It shows what rockstar could really do back in the day and TBoGT introduced us to mechanics never seen before in a GTA game. Especially the sub missions in your missions as it added in so much replay ability! 10/10! Worth it in every way!

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GTA IV will forever have the best storyline out of any game in the GTA series, imo better than GTA V too. Other in-game factors like vehicle physics, deformation and animations in this game were so ahead of its time, better than how they were worked in newer RSG titles. Obviously the game is over 16 years old, so graphics and overall game quality are incomparable to GTA V or other newer games, but for its time this game completely overhauled the open-world scene for any future titles trying to compete

This game was a cultural phenomenon of its time, so in true keeping with my tradition, I waited 16 years before actually finding out what all the hooplah was about. Don't get me wrong, I was interested - I can probably still recite some of the gushings about it I read in a magazine back then, waxing poetic about the game's living world, its vehicular combat, its in-game internet, how incredibly detailed it all was. But I didn't own a PS3 or Xbox 360; all I had was a Pentium III that was older than I was, so I figured there was no chance of me playing it. Little did I know back then that this game's PC port was so borked that even folks who owned high-end PCs in 2008 couldn't enjoy it.

I'm reviewing the Complete Edition incarnation of GTA IV, the one that's available on Steam. I purchased the game in one of my impulse purchases because Steam sales are more addictive than crack, and then I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ around for 4 months before deciding it was finally time to play this game. And guess what? My laptop, which is no warhorse but still outstrips GTA IV's recommended requirements, still couldn't run it without stuttering like King George VI giving a speech. Clearly this game's requirements are only a suggestion. So I gave up, and tried the game on my dedicated gaming computer. That computer is a beast, and since I recently bought it and it's my precious baby, I almost didn't want to install the quasi-malware Rockstar launcher and Social Club ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on it that's required to play this game. But the refund period was long since gone, so I complied with their draconian demands.

And guess what? It still wouldn't let me play the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. By this point I had 2 hours of Steam playtime on a game that hadn't even launched yet. First I had to solve 4 separate captchas to assure Rockstar that yes, I know what an upright cow looks like, and then I had to verify my email address again, and now finally I could play the game.

But what the ♥♥♥♥. Why does playing a game you bought have to be an experience on par with passing through an Israeli checkpoint? I gave up on video game piracy a while ago because of the perks Gaben's platform offers, but if the refund window had still been open, I would definitely have gone that route.

After all that, how's the game? Well, it's all right. GTA IV is amazingly detailed for its time - cars take realistic damage, the passengers inside them take realistic damage, you can shoot the driver to make them fall over onto the horn and go BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. The cars handle much more realistically than any game I've ever played; they have actual weight, and using the brakes is a necessity rather than a choice. While it takes some getting used to, the driving in this game - and believe me, there is a lot of it - is pretty fun.

The same cannot be said for riding motorcycles, however, and thankfully there are few missions that require you to. No matter how good you think you are at video games, you will always look like a monkey trying to ♥♥♥♥ a football when you ride bikes in GTA IV. Out of the ~15 attempts I had to make on the final mission, one of the few that required repeat attempts (the difficulty in this game is usually very fair, which is surprising when you consider how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ most GTA games get later on), the list of failures go something like this:

- 11 were due to the required motorcycle section (the game suddenly loses all open-endedness to force a setpiece on you, and even if you shoot 15 rocket launchers at the final boss's boat, he won't die)
- 1 was due to me not stabilizing the helicopter fast enough, because the helicopter controls are almost as bad as the motorcycle ones
- 3 were due to a game-breaking, widely reported bug that Rockstar has had 16 years to fix, but they were too busy cutting content from the so called 'complete' edition to do so, leaving players to find workarounds.

Dear God, this final bug. It's not the only one in the game, but it's the most egregious, and really highlights how awful the PC port of this game is. Sure, it finally runs smoothly provided your computer is powerful enough to be able to run the game ten times over on its officially stated 'recommended' settings, but it's still not bug-free. NPCs getting stuck on geometry is extremely common, and the effect can range from you being forced to skip a cutscene and force the game to move on, to having to retry the whole mission because you can't bear to watch them bumping into walls like idiots any longer.

There are still stutters, and this was the first game to crash on my new PC - it can run brand new games at the highest settings with nary a glitch, but a 2008 game crashes. Sometimes Rockstar decides they're still not done bullying you, and their proprietary launcher closes without starting the game, so you have to click the Play button on Steam again and hope this time the two frontends this game mandates will both work. I realize I'm spending a lot of time talking about the abysmal performance of the PC version than the actual game, but when it's this egregious, it spoils the whole experience. I will try to talk about the game some more now.

Combat is much better than in previous GTA games, although it still is just on the level of a passable third-person shooter in 2008, one that lacks an open world. The cover system is finicky, and oftentimes it's better to make your own positional cover behind walls and boxes without snapping to surfaces. If you play with a controller, the triggers are used in all their analog glory - a half-press for manual aim, a full squeeze for auto-aim. There are a few missions that are extremely well-structured, such as the Heat-parody bank heist, even if a lot are simply the repetitive 'drive here, kill that' loop. The world is nice and detailed, though the NPCs are more cowardly than people in real-life - if you so much as sprint near someone, they will run away screaming. The in-game internet is rife with hilarious mockeries of the 2008 world wide web, some of which I sorely miss. There are also some fun side activites you can explore alone or on dates (romantic or otherwise), such as a strip club with at least 5 clones of Nicki Minaj walking around, a cabaret show that's honestly very entertaining to watch, darts, pool (played on a table made of ice, judging from the physics), and SEX. Pick up hookers and kill them after so you can get your money back. It's tradition.

Like all GTA games though, GTA IV suffers from most of the content being concentrated on the first island. There isn't even that much difference between the three islands - in the previous incarnations of Liberty City, you truly felt like you were moving to more affluent parts of the metropolis as you changed islands, whereas almost all of LC feels like a ghetto here. The third island hardly has anything to do at all. I've always felt that the reason memes about GTA are concentrated in the first third of the games is because most players don't progress past the first island. I guess Rockstar know that too, so they left the other two islands bare.

Despite all its flaws, GTA IV is extremely addictive. It's a decent game even in 2024, with an ahead-of-its-time attention to detail. With the issues it has though, I can't recommend buying the Steam version of the game. Rockstar don't care about fixing the bugs, and they don't care about your experience once they've got your money. They can't even be arsed to renew the licensed for the music, having removed 50+ songs so far, and it's only going to get worse. Every time I switched to the rock radio station, 'Wild Side' by Motley Crue would be playing, because there were about 4 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ songs left on the thing. Do you want to have a cumbersome, watered-down, buggy time with this game? Nah. If you have the choice, I sincerely recommend finding an old PS3 disc and playing that instead. Don't give Rockstar your money for an incomplete 'complete' edition.