GTA IV Quickie Impressions
April 30th, 2008I’ve just played a couple hours of GTA IV and thought I’d give some of my initial, brief impressions.
- It seems quite a bit like past GTA games, although with perhaps a bit more focus and (obviously) better graphics and technology. Liberty City does feel more “alive” than the cities in previous games.
- Because of the first point, part of me wonders what all the hubbub is about, as it (at least initially) seems more evolutionary than revolutionary.
- On the other hand, I’ve only just started, and I am interested in seeing where things are going. As several reviews have mentioned, Niko does seem like a more likable character than the ones from past GTAs, the story is well-told, and a lot of the problems with the gameplay from past iterations (for instance, targeting) have been tuned. The huge improvement in graphics also seems like it helps make the game a lot more interesting as well.
- It appears that some real “decisions” will need to be made in the game which may affect how things happen down the line. These could provide some interesting developments.
- Does the fact that the game contains so much random STUFF actually make it that much better to me? Do I care that I can go bowling, play darts or pool, watch TV, surf the Internet (which I haven’t done yet), get drunk, and go on dates, etc, or are they just wastes of time? The extremely positive reviews (including now 2 perfect 10’s from two reviewers not really known to give them out) seem to view these as huge assets, but I’m not sure if I care that much about this stuff yet. Getting drunk and having to drive home was pretty funny, but is that really interesting more than once? Obviously a lot of care went into creating so much detail for the game, and it certainly helps with the immersion, but I’m not sure how long I’ll spend browsing the in-game internet or watching TV. I suppose I’ll see.
- Along with this, I haven’t spent really any time just going around punching and shooting people, trying to get my “wanted” rating up, as it seems like everyone likes to do when they get their hands on the game. I tend to like the story and missions better, which could explain why I may not have all that much patience for a lot of the “extra” activities in the game, but again, we’ll see.
- I very briefly tried out multiplayer and to my pleasant surprise, it was a blast. I didn’t even try out anything that interesting… just a quick game of Deathmatch and it was pretty fun. Here’s a brief recap of some of the things I was able to do in Deathmatch: Smash another player into a wall with a vehicle, cap a driver in the head as they came at me attempting to run me over, blew up a car passing by with an RPG (which creates EXTREMELY satisfying explosions). All in all, it was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to trying out some of the other game modes.
More impressions as I progress through it.
Posted in Impressions, Jeff, Xbox 360 |
April 30th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Thanks for the preview. It sounds about like I expected, which goes to the point we were making before about hugely popular games like this getting a little extra love in the score department. Several of my co-workers got the game and when I was talking to them about it yesterday, no one was really blown away, or even really terribly impressed. The general consensus was that “yeah, it’s good, but amazing? not so much.” Very similar to the responses I got when first discussing games like Halo 3 and Twilight Princess and their seemingly inflated scores. This is in contrast to games like CoD4 and Super Mario Galaxy where most everyone I talked to actually WAS thoroughly impressed.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:33 am
I wonder how much of that is a question of expectations? I didn’t really expect CoD4 to be amazing, so its quality came as a bit of a surprise. On the other hand, Halo 3 was billed as the Second Coming, so I was a lot more confused when it wasn’t a religious experience.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:04 am
The thing is… the reviews for the game haven’t just been potentially “inflated” like Halo 3 or whatever, they’ve been nearly universally outstanding. This will probably change as more of the “reaction” reviews come out, but as of right now, it’s sitting comfortably at the #1 spot at Gamerankings.com. To be honest, even with all of the hype, I certainly wasn’t expecting that.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I’m not sure what I expected, but to be fair, GTAIII averaged 97 on metacritic and VC and SA both averaged 95. If the game is better than those (and by all accounts it is), there’s not much room to go up before you start hitting your head on that 100 number.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
This is why I made all the ruccus about people like you putting too much stock in numerical reviews from ‘fair and balanced’ reviewers who are about as credible in judging the quality of the product as music critics. [hint: music critics suck. they are immense jackasses.]
Things like metacritic…game rankings…and the subsequent attention whoring from blogs and forums really is a shame. You should ONLY pay attention to the Pros and Cons aspects of the game, and ignore all SUMMARY aspects like scores.
and yet nobody follows my advice
April 30th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Laesp-
You mean, like “This is the best game since Ocarina of Time” or “This reminds me of the first time I watched The Godfather” or “You’ll never look at games the same way again”? Even the New York Times review was overwhelmingly positive. Those kinds of non-numeric statements?
I’ll agree that the numeric review is less important than the words, but theoretically speaking, the reviewers hope to match their numeric score to their review text. The fact that so many reviewers thought it was appropriate to match the text of their review to a numeric score of “10″ (or quite simply, just a really high score in general) seems relevant enough to me.
And for what it’s worth, while my impressions may seem a bit down, I am actually having fun with the game. I’m still not sure whether I agree with the perfect 10 reviews or not yet, but at this point, it’s sort of irrelevant. I’m having fun with the game and want to continue playing it, and that’s really what matters right now.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
“This is why I made all the ruccus about people like you putting too much stock in numerical reviews’
What is why? I’m not sure what the problem is that needs solving.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
I was quite excited about this before launch, but I can say after playing it that it is easily the biggest dissapointment in gaming I have ever had. How bad is it? I rented it and I just quit out of the game to play Perfect dark zero.
I honestly have to wonder what the reviewers were smoking when they talked about…well nearly every aspectof the game, since every aspect of it for me has been a frustrating mess. Saint’s row was more fun.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
“I rented it and I just quit out of the game to play Perfect dark zero.”
Ouch.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
My friends,
Please make sure that you read completely my posts before you respond. I mentioned three things:
- numerical scores are overblown
- score aggregators like metacritic and Game rankings are overblown
- the SUMMARIZING points of a reviewer is irrelevant and misleading, and should be ignored
- reviews are only useful for gleaning the Pros and Cons aspects of a game.
THat last point is key. I never said the text portion of a review is free from the moneyhatting, fanboyish, misleading element that plagues the numerical score.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:56 pm
speaking of gta…
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18458
Make an article about this will ya? I think it’s pretty significant.