Grand Theft Auto 4! It's a return to the dark and grimy Liberty City. Except it's expanded A LOT! The city truly does feel alive everywhere you go, like a city that never sleeps. The only downside is that the open-nes from games like San Andreas and 5 aren't there. Sometimes you can feel a little claustrophobic in the city. The map is pretty bland and very gray. Which, while it does fit the theme, I feel like it could've been more interesting. For a game from 2009 though, it's not bad!
The story is pretty good, although a little slow and the missions are a bit repetitive. 90% of them are: go here, start cutscene, drive to the other end of the map during dialogue and shoot these people, and drive back. I feel like there could've been a lot more interesting missions to make with the setting, which Rockstar does do with in the DLC.
Niko might've become my new favorite GTA protagonist. He's blunt, ruthless and doesn't take any ♥♥♥♥, nor let anyone get in his way of his personal vendetta. At the same time, he does have good morals. For example, most of the time, he tries to solve things by talking it out first and only taking shots as a last resort. He stands up for ALL of his friends, especially his cousin, no matter how weird or annoying they might be.
Speaking of friends, the friendship system in this game is.... okay. It's a little difficult trying to keep the relationship up between upwards of 5 different people. It's more annoying and chore-like than fun. However, they do unlock certain perks when you have high friendship with them. Most notably (and, imo, the only useful one) is Little Jacob and his discounted guns. The girlfriend system is very similar with 3 girls have different perks at a high like percentage. I'd say stick to ones you find the most useful and feel free to ignore the others. It's not worth the hassle most of the time (except for some nice extra dialogue)
[b]The game does have some other flaws here and there but there's 2 that annoyed me the most:[/b]
- Bugs. Even with mods that help alleviate some bugs, there's still plenty. In my case, I got a bug where I couldn't hang out with Dwayne because my email inbox was full. Even after deleting emails, I got new ones, but none from him. Locked out of a whole friend and perk because of that.
- Lack of checkpoints in the middle of missions. Yes, you can retry the mission immediately from your phone if you die or fail, but then you have to do the looooong drives to the actual destination. Only upside is that there's "new" dialogue when you fail a mission so it keeps it SOMEWHAT interesting. This game is different from 3, SA and VC in that the map is a LOT bigger, and the missions are A LOT longer. So, restarting a mission is way more of a hassle versus those games. THANKFULLY, they've "fixed" this in the DLC and did add checkpoints during missions. So if you fail, you don't have to start from the very beginning.
And that's about it for the base game!
I don't have too much to say about the DLC...
[b]The Lost and The Damned:[/b] While cool to have a biker-themed crime story, it felt pretty boring and all the missions were very similar to the main game. Drive here, talk, shoot, drive back. The story itself was pretty predictable and pretty meh.
[b]The Ballad of Gay Tony:[/b] I actually liked this DLC more than the main game. And for one MAJOR reason: The variety of missions. Yes, there is still drive-talk-shoot missions, but there are A LOT that feel more "GTA". A lot of helicopter-oriented parts (which are great, but the controls are TERRIBLE with KB+M, I hope you have a controller on hand), hijacking, theft, making things explode.. it's great! It doesn't feel repetitive in the slightest AND the story is very good and ties up some loose ends from the main game.
All-in-all, it's a good, fun Rockstar game with a great story. Pretty much like all their other games as you would expect of R*
