Grand Theft Auto IV

 Grand Theft Auto IV is a game that was released in 2008. It got a pretty good reception as GTA's usually do, they are great games and it still is. But how does it hold up after all this years? Well here is some insight into that.

Gameplay

The gameplay of GTA games is generally good. The controls for PC are not that great for the earlier GTA games but for GTA IV, they work just as good as any shooter from around that time. Generally everything works as it should with some exceptions. The game is fun to play, as you would expect from a GTA and it has everything that a GTA should have. There isn't much to say about it other than the game plays well and there is lot to do, it's good. 

The story

Now this is something that Rockstar, the maker of the game, has always been good at. No matter what the rest of the game is like, the story is always fantastic. With these types of games I rarely dig much into the side missions and other content but playing through the main story line, it was fantastic. Without spoiling too much it has a humble and a reckless beginning, with plenty of twists and turns, full of action and a satisfying but even a little bit of a sad ending. The endings of which there are two but they don't differ that much from each other. A fantastic story, that is to be expected.

Open World

This is something that I've always had a little bit of a problem with, the maps of GTA games, mainly that they are all islands. Now this isn't a problem if you just think about it as a standalone game but when you think about the universe of GTA it does bother me a bit. (There is going to be some shit about other GTA games, if you don't care about that just skip the rest of this paragraph.) The problems that the GTA universe is meant to be a satire of the USA and it has all the major cities, like Miami (vice city), Los Angeles (Los Santos) and New York (Liberty City) but they are usually all on their islands and disconnected from each other. The worst part is the difference between San Andreas and GTAV where they are both basically set in the same city but the surrounding area is different and both are still portrayed as their own islands. San Andreas comes closest to being even a little bit realistic since it has a lot of other cities connected by land and you would think that newer games would have fixed this problem of just being an island as computing power increases but the problem has just gotten worse.

Now to the part of the open world that is actually about this game. The city feels quite alive for such an old game and is also very detailed. It feels a bit off how city is separated into different islands that you can't get into until later in the game, but I guess that's just how games handled unlocking new places back in the day. An easy solution. There is also one of the islands, the last one, that feels off on it's own. I don't know why as it is a vital part of the story and clearly seems to be doing its own thing, just like the other islands, but something about it feels wrong. Other than the world of Liberty City as an open world is a solid experience. 

How does the game hold up?

As this is a quite old game it doesn't always work as it should, especially with the very outdated "games for windows live" thing. Now I know that has been deleted, but I had to mention it as it did still cause me problems even after being deleted. This was maybe the third time that I started game but the first time when I actually finished it. The first two times were when "games for windows live" was still a thing and I lost my save game. It was most likely caused by changing hard drives, but the second time that the same problem happened I blame "games for windows live". I did no changes for my PC but when "games for windows live" was deleted from the game, the save game seemed to disappear as well. So I had to star the game third, or maybe even fourth, time over. 

The second problem I had was how the game ran. Even with having a pretty beefy computer that was built YEARS after the game came out, I still didn't seem to be able to max the graphics out and hold even 60 fps. As it turns out this was a blessing in disguise. In the late game there is a mission, that you cannot finish if your game runs over 30 fps, I believe, since that how the game original ran on consoles, I think. But since the game was still so demanding, all I had to do was to increase the graphics setting so that the game would run at 30 fps. For such an old game it's almost surprising that this was the only problem that I had. 

All in all GTA IV was a very solid experience, as is expected from Rockstar. I would only wish that they had fixed more of the problems that newer PCs bring to the game the same time that they updated it and removed games for windows live. This would total out in score format is 8/10