Critical Eye: GTA IV
Picking the scabs off the “greatest game of all time”.
Oh man am I gonna be roasted for this one. I figured I’d kick things off with a bang and point out the flaws in GTA IV. I will admit, GTA IV is a fantastic game, and only Oblivion can relate to it when it comes to an open sandbox world. However, despite all this, there are a few flaws to the game.
The Physics
It may sound like a small thing but for me this makes what could be a fantastic, godlike game into simply a very good and kind of tedious one. Put simply the physics in this game are surprisingly random. Case in point (which I’ve come across several times) are cars. Many times have I experienced massively varying results when it comes to scenarios in driving. Sometimes hitting the emergency break glides me nicely around a corner. Sometimes (at roughly the same speed, sometimes lower) it sends me into a wild spin. On at least three occasions (again at roughly the same speed as the first to results) it’s actually launched my car into the air.
Driving over a civilian results in one of three things:
I hit them and they go flying, nothing happens to me.
I hit them, my car slows to a crawl and they move about two feet.
They go flying thousands of feet in the air and I flip backwards.
This DOES NOT happen. Seriously, it just doesn’t. Or rather it does but is shouldn’t.
To say nothing of rocket launchers and being hit by a car doing anything between rolling me along the ground to launching me across a river and into a fifth storey window.
Repetition
The missions offer little variance. There seems to about three mission types and that’s it. Drive someone here, shoot this person, drive here then shoot the person. Occasionally there is a nice break in the monotony, like the bank raid with the Packie brothers. On the whole not a great deal of fun.
While I’m on the subject, I get very annoyed when I complete the game and then have nothing to do for the rest of it. What’s the point of having a sandbox, open and free city when there’s no side missions, no fun stuff to do. I know there are “civilian” missions, but in all my time of playing I’ve only seen one. They need to be more obvious.
yeah I feared something like this would happen. and it almost always does. instead of a game that could have been almsot perfect, you get some good game that looks nice but has some things that make you go insane.