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Easy to Hate: ‘Grand Theft Auto IV’

Yeah, I spent the whole weekend playing it instead of blogging, writing, or doing anything useful. Sue me.

Pros

The graphics/sound are very nice. I haven’t noticed any of the major graphical glitches that flooded message boards. Not saying they aren’t there; they just aren’t hindering my “enjoyment” of the overall game.

The missions are varied enough to hold my interest and haven’t gotten repetitive (yet!).
Despite the actual functions of the controls, I like the layout of the controls now that I’ve gotten used to them. Of course, there are a couple of control functions I sort of hate, but I’ll go into that under “cons.”

While not as elaborate as San Andreas, the city design is very impressive, detailed, and real-feeling. Neighborhoods have distinct feels and citizens to match, and you can even see a little bit of pseudo-history in the city itself — places where arches that look like they’re hundreds of years old still stand for no apparent reason except that that’s just how metropolitan infrastructures work. Of course, just like San Andreas, there are a few areas where you can tell they didn’t spend much time working on the design or polishing the graphics. Overall, though, it’s really cool-looking (and I haven’t even played enough to unlike the big Manhattan surrogate).

One of the more subtle things that impressed me happens after (spoiler alert!) you kill Faustin and have to hide out on Charge Island. I was a little afraid because I still have a shitload of things to do on Dukes, and I figured it’d be like getting all but thrown out of Portland in GTA3 — everywhere you’d go on Portland, you’d have vicious gangs chasing you. Try driving through Little Italy, and you’d get blown up after a couple of good shotgun blasts from the Mob. Well, I had to do one mission that’s focused right on Hove Beach, in the heart of the people I’ve pissed off. Yet, nobody harmed me…

…until I opened fire on the mission’s target in broad daylight on a public street. I always thought getting exiled from an entire borough was kind of funny, but working it like this is a little more realistic. Not everybody knows Niko at first glance. Even if they did, they might not pay enough attention to the random guy going on a gay date at the diner. Then you shoot the guy, they take a second glance, and they’re all, “Oh shit!” I liked that.

Cons

The highly praised story and, especially, the dialogue are just atrocious. Like, to the point where all the 10/10 “best game of our generation”/”Oscar-quality writing” bullshit must have been written by PR people. I know I’m a big fan of fictitious conspiracies, but I find it impossible to believe so many reviewers praised things about this game that are, simply put, fucking terrible. Adding insult to injury, the cutscenes are about 1000 times longer than they need to be. For what purpose? About half of it is devoted to character development so bland and redundant, they make the folks on CSI: Miami seem well-rounded. The other half services either the grander story (with heavy-handed foreshadowing) or the game’s “sense of humor” (with the laziest dick jokes that didn’t make the cut for Adam Sandler’s last three movies*). The one or two percent left over is devoted to the actual mission.

The voice acting doesn’t help. For the most part, it’s bland and inoffensive; in some case it borders on horrible, but mostly it’s just…there. The cutscenes were a bit more pleasurable when they featured the voice talents of legitimate, well-known actors. Even then, they were still shorter. I don’t exactly have a stopwatch, but I’d wager the longest cutscene in any of the previous games is still shorter than IV’s shortest cutscene. Maybe I’m wrong on the actual timing, but they sure feel longer this time around.

I understand what Rockstar is trying to do. They’ve said it in the press, and it’s been repeated endlessly in the paid-for-praise early reviews: they’re making a groundbreaking piece of art that takes gaming to the next level. If that’s the goal, they failed. Big-time. Having shallow characters and the storyline of a direct-to-video action movie is less noticeable when the game isn’t bogged down in pretension; the previous Grand Theft Auto games had fun stories that rarely — if ever — attempted legitimate dramatic scenes. Look, when one of your big “character moments” is something so predictable, I figured it out before I even owned the game (based purely on what friends who rushed to buy it told me about the character), you’re doing something wrong. And you aren’t writing an “Oscar-quality” game. Well…maybe.

I guess the thing that disappoints me most here is that there’s so much room for quality. A few months back, I got hooked on Saints Row, a shameless GTA knockoff that manages to get right plenty of things GTAIV gets wrong. The story is absolutely atrocious, but it’s forgivable because the game is about having fun and blowing shit up; the developers accepted that and made fun, mercifully brief cutscenes to tie the shit-blowing-up together. That’s it. But when I thought about how much the city of Stilwater reminds me of Baltimore**, I started to think about what a lost opportunity the game is. No visual entertainment fits the “urban entertainment” description more than HBO’s Baltimore-set The Wire.

How great would it be to play a video game with the same kind of emotional resonance, bleak worldview, dense story, and complex characters? This is what Grand Theft Auto IV wants, but they’re either too afraid or too unsophisticated to go the full nine. Their attempt at “bleak worldview” results in awful, blunt-edged “satire” mostly found on the talk-radio stations (but also prevalent in many aspects of the story) — so it’s there, but it’s lame and obvious. I’m general both a patient viewer and player, but the only emotion I’ve felt so far is boredom. Neither the story nor the characters have hooked their claws on me, because both rely heavily on awful clichés (a cynical Eastern European ex-soldier haunted by his past? Revolutionary!) both from movies and from other GTA games (seriously, why is every “big mob boss” some kind of coked-up sociopath with an embittered lieutenant?). I’ve read a shitload of reviews and forum posts (seriously, I’m addicted to the comedy gold of the game’s staunch defenders), and the people who argue in favor of the story’s awe-inspiring quality act like they’ve never seen an actual good movie or ever read a book. I don’t mean that to sound snotty; it’s just incredible to believe anyone could see something like Niko’s backstory as a triumph for the medium. I’ve played Super Nintendo games with more nuanced and interesting characters.

So yes, I’m massively disappointed with the story/characters/dialogue/etc. When I first read rumors that this would be a more serious, dramatic game than its predecessors, I had hopes that, with the shitload of time and money they had at their disposal, Rockstar would come up with something great. I mention The Wire not because I yearn for a video-game rip-off of that series, but because the story’s length and complexity is a good frame of comparison. They should have strived for something like that, rather than Bad Boys 3: Only 50 Hours Longer and with a Little Eastern Promises Tossed in for Good Measure. Either step up the quality or embrace the fact that you’re making the shitty action movies of games, not The Godfathers.

Enough about that. Let’s move on to more shit I don’t like:

• The driving in previous games used to be fun. What happened to that? It seems like the main problem with the driving in this game are the brakes. Sure, most of the cars handle like shopping carts, but even that would be acceptable if they fucking stopped when you told them to. And the handbrake is just embarrassing unless you want to spin out the whole time. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m used to the driving enough for it to be tolerable…until I get into a car-chase mission, and then it goes back to infuriating me. Maybe it’s more “realistic,” but I’m pretty sure people aren’t going to GTA for realism. (If they are…wow, we’re in trouble.) Going back to embracing the “shitty action-movie” aspect of the game: in what action movie does the “hero” chase a car that makes a hairpin turn into an alley, while you skid past said alley, spin out, and slam into the side of the building? In what way is that entertaining to anyone? I have found a couple of cars (notably the yellow cab; I haven’t really learned the names of the other cars yet) that handle decently enough when you aren’t in chase mode, but shit…it’s ridiculous.
• Similarly, missions are too easy. I can’t tell you how many missions I’ve gone through so far, but I’ve beaten almost all of them on the first try; the others have taken a second try (and all of the failures have been the result of what I’ll call “rookie mistakes” — not positioning an easy-access car in case the guy flees in his own car, forgetting to refill my health before starting a new mission, etc.). And, to be fair, I’m fairly awful at video games. Some missions in earlier GTA games had me insane with frustration because I had to play them 10 or more times before beating them.

  I’ve accumulated a comical amount of guns and ammo without trying (I haven’t spent money on a weapon yet), so I’m not struggling to complete missions with the meager weaponry the game provides me. The attempt at Rainbow Six-like stealth hiding/crouching is a nice touch, but it makes things easier still. GTA is not for stealth — it’s for rushing headlong into a warehouse full of gun-toting lowlives, and just shooting like a motherfucker until everyone is dead. I don’t mind the more realistic approach, but the A.I. is uniformly bad. In the mission where you (spoiler alert!) kill Faustin, there are at least a dozen guards armed to the teeth. The game expects you to take them all out, then give chase. All you have to do is just run past them, unless one gets right in your face. Half of them didn’t even shoot; the other half were too dumb to stop and aim. I got through with very little health lost and killed Faustin with ease. (And you can tell it’s easy because some missions are laid out in a way that you can just tell they expected this to be a much longer, more difficult chase.)

• Shooting while driving is almost as awful as driving itself. Shooting while driving has never been GTA’s strong suit — remember the awful side-view drive-by missions, eventually replaced by the less-ridiculous-but-still-cheesy “someone else drives while you pick off targets” missions? Saints Row had a really nice implementation, where you’d just drive like normal but the target would be up, so you could fire when ready and know roughly where it’d hit. Adding an extra button to this just confuses the issue and makes it more difficult than it needs to be. (And yet, as mentioned above, I’ve still never had trouble beating a “shoot at a moving vehicle while driving” mission.)
• Dating. It was a largely optional, time-wasting feature in San Andreas. Here, it’s integrated into the story. And although I haven’t gotten to the “shocking reveal,” could it be more obvious that Michelle is an undercover cop of some kind? I called it on the first date, and if I’m wrong, I will owe anyone who disagrees with this rant $50. Anyway, integrated into the story or not, it’s a waste of fucking time.
• A similar but related tangent: they seem to have dropped some of the minigames I actually liked and replaced them with either nothing or nothing fun. Poorly implemented darts, bowling, and pool? Okay, pool was also in San Andreas, but again, also as an optional, time-wasting pursuit. So to reiterate: they’ve stripped the game of a lot of fun-but-pointless minigames while keeping and adding more pointless games but making them mandatory for story mode? What the fuck sense does that make? Oh, sorry, I guess that’s part of the “groundbreaking” experience. Just like The Wire, every piece matters. Right.

All right, I think that about sums it up. I feel like I have more to complain about (and some things to praise), but I can’t remember anything else at the moment. Most of what I had to say is on the nitpicky side, along the lines of my praising the only good moment of A.I. so far (the post-Faustin-death Russian mobsters not noticing you until you do something obvious), so I’ll probably shut the hell up until I’m further enough along in the story to make more detailed complaints about it.

*No, I’m not a pretentious snob who thinks Sandler represents everything wrong with Hollywood and society. (Rob Schneider’s your man for that, with Sandler serving as his cheerleader/enabler/financier.)
**Ironically, Wikipedia says (with no citation) that Stilwater is supposed to be “loosely based on Detroit, but more accurately Chicago.” I have never seen a city, in video games or in life, that looks less like Chicago than this place. Even Los Angeles, about as un-Chicago as you can get, has a small pocket along Wilshire that’s eerily reminiscent of Chicago. Based on the layout, demographics, and even the aesthetics (endless boarded-up rowhouses with a distinctly Colonial look), I get a Baltimore feel.

Posted by Stan on May 4, 2008 11:59 PM  | Permalink | Reviews | Digg It