This game was a cultural phenomenon of its time, so in true keeping with my tradition, I waited 16 years before actually finding out what all the hooplah was about. Don't get me wrong, I was interested - I can probably still recite some of the gushings about it I read in a magazine back then, waxing poetic about the game's living world, its vehicular combat, its in-game internet, how incredibly detailed it all was. But I didn't own a PS3 or Xbox 360; all I had was a Pentium III that was older than I was, so I figured there was no chance of me playing it. Little did I know back then that this game's PC port was so borked that even folks who owned high-end PCs in 2008 couldn't enjoy it.
I'm reviewing the Complete Edition incarnation of GTA IV, the one that's available on Steam. I purchased the game in one of my impulse purchases because Steam sales are more addictive than crack, and then I fucked around for 4 months before deciding it was finally time to play this game. And guess what? My laptop, which is no warhorse but still outstrips GTA IV's recommended requirements, still couldn't run it without stuttering like King George VI giving a speech. Clearly this game's requirements are only a suggestion. So I gave up, and tried the game on my dedicated gaming computer. That computer is a beast, and since I recently bought it and it's my precious baby, I almost didn't want to install the quasi-malware Rockstar launcher and Social Club bullshit on it that's required to play this game. But the refund period was long since gone, so I complied with their draconian demands.
And guess what? It still wouldn't let me play the fucking game. By this point I had 2 hours of Steam playtime on a game that hadn't even launched yet. First I had to solve 4 separate captchas to assure Rockstar that yes, I know what an upright cow looks like, and then I had to verify my email address again, and now finally I could play the game.
But what the fuck. Why does playing a game you bought have to be an experience on par with passing through an Israeli checkpoint? I gave up on video game piracy a while ago because of the perks Gaben's platform offers, but if the refund window had still been open, I would definitely have gone that route.
After all that, how's the game? Well, it's all right. GTA IV is amazingly detailed for its time - cars take realistic damage, the passengers inside them take realistic damage, you can shoot the driver to make them fall over onto the horn and go BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. The cars handle much more realistically than any game I've ever played; they have actual weight, and using the brakes is a necessity rather than a choice. While it takes some getting used to, the driving in this game - and believe me, there is a lot of it - is pretty fun.
The same cannot be said for riding motorcycles, however, and thankfully there are few missions that require you to. No matter how good you think you are at video games, you will always look like a monkey trying to fuck a football when you ride bikes in GTA IV. Out of the ~15 attempts I had to make on the final mission, one of the few that required repeat attempts (the difficulty in this game is usually very fair, which is surprising when you consider how bullshit most GTA games get later on), the list of failures go something like this:
- 11 were due to the required motorcycle section (the game suddenly loses all open-endedness to force a setpiece on you, and even if you shoot 15 rocket launchers at the final boss's boat, he won't die)
- 1 was due to me not stabilizing the helicopter fast enough, because the helicopter controls are almost as bad as the motorcycle ones
- 3 were due to a game-breaking, widely reported bug that Rockstar has had 16 years to fix, but they were too busy cutting content from the so called 'complete' edition to do so, leaving players to find workarounds.
Dear God, this final bug. It's not the only one in the game, but it's the most egregious, and really highlights how awful the PC port of this game is. Sure, it finally runs smoothly provided your computer is powerful enough to be able to run the game ten times over on its officially stated 'recommended' settings, but it's still not bug-free. NPCs getting stuck on geometry is extremely common, and the effect can range from you being forced to skip a cutscene and force the game to move on, to having to retry the whole mission because you can't bear to watch them bumping into walls like idiots any longer.
There are still stutters, and this was the first game to crash on my new PC - it can run brand new games at the highest settings with nary a glitch, but a 2008 game crashes. Sometimes Rockstar decides they're still not done bullying you, and their proprietary launcher closes without starting the game, so you have to click the Play button on Steam again and hope this time the two frontends this game mandates will both work. Not only that, the game doesn't seem to register manual saves, only autosaves after completing missions. Sometimes I lost progress because I had manually saved without completing a mission. I suspect this is because the Rockstar Launcher has its own cloud, which shuts down immediately when I quit the game after saving. Know an easy solution to this? DON'T HAVE TWO LAUNCHERS FOR ONE FUCKING GAME.
I realize I'm spending a lot of time talking about the abysmal performance of the PC version than the actual game, but when it's this egregious, it spoils the whole experience. I will try to talk about the game some more now.
Combat is much better than in previous GTA games, although it still is just on the level of a passable third-person shooter in 2008, one that lacks an open world. The cover system is finicky, and oftentimes it's better to make your own positional cover behind walls and boxes without snapping to surfaces. If you play with a controller, the triggers are used in all their analog glory - a half-press for manual aim, a full squeeze for auto-aim. There are a few missions that are extremely well-structured, such as the Heat-parody bank heist, even if a lot are simply the repetitive 'drive here, kill that' loop. The world is nice and detailed, though the NPCs are more cowardly than people in real-life - if you so much as sprint near someone, they will run away screaming. The in-game internet is rife with hilarious mockeries of the 2008 world wide web, some of which I sorely miss. There are also some fun side activites you can explore alone or on dates (romantic or otherwise), such as a strip club with at least 5 clones of Nicki Minaj walking around, a cabaret show that's honestly very entertaining to watch, darts, pool (played on a table made of ice, judging from the physics), and SEX. Pick up hookers and kill them after so you can get your money back. It's tradition.
Like all GTA games though, GTA IV suffers from most of the content being concentrated on the first island. There isn't even that much difference between the three islands - in the previous incarnations of Liberty City, you truly felt like you were moving to more affluent parts of the metropolis as you changed islands, whereas almost all of LC feels like a ghetto here. The third island hardly has anything to do at all. I've always felt that the reason memes about GTA are concentrated in the first third of the games is because most players don't progress past the first island. I guess Rockstar know that too, so they left the other two islands bare.
Despite all its flaws, GTA IV is extremely addictive. It's a decent game even in 2024, with an ahead-of-its-time attention to detail. With the issues it has though, I can't recommend buying the Steam version of the game. Rockstar don't care about fixing the bugs, and they don't care about your experience once they've got your money. They can't even be arsed to renew the licenses for the music, having removed 50+ songs so far, and it's only going to get worse. Every time I switched to the rock radio station, 'Wild Side' by Motley Crue would be playing, because there were about 4 fucking songs left on the thing. Do you want to have a cumbersome, watered-down, buggy time with this game? Nah. If you have the choice, I sincerely recommend finding an old PS3 disc and playing that instead. Don't give Rockstar your money for an incomplete 'complete' edition.
I'm reviewing the Complete Edition incarnation of GTA IV, the one that's available on Steam. I purchased the game in one of my impulse purchases because Steam sales are more addictive than crack, and then I fucked around for 4 months before deciding it was finally time to play this game. And guess what? My laptop, which is no warhorse but still outstrips GTA IV's recommended requirements, still couldn't run it without stuttering like King George VI giving a speech. Clearly this game's requirements are only a suggestion. So I gave up, and tried the game on my dedicated gaming computer. That computer is a beast, and since I recently bought it and it's my precious baby, I almost didn't want to install the quasi-malware Rockstar launcher and Social Club bullshit on it that's required to play this game. But the refund period was long since gone, so I complied with their draconian demands.
And guess what? It still wouldn't let me play the fucking game. By this point I had 2 hours of Steam playtime on a game that hadn't even launched yet. First I had to solve 4 separate captchas to assure Rockstar that yes, I know what an upright cow looks like, and then I had to verify my email address again, and now finally I could play the game.
But what the fuck. Why does playing a game you bought have to be an experience on par with passing through an Israeli checkpoint? I gave up on video game piracy a while ago because of the perks Gaben's platform offers, but if the refund window had still been open, I would definitely have gone that route.
After all that, how's the game? Well, it's all right. GTA IV is amazingly detailed for its time - cars take realistic damage, the passengers inside them take realistic damage, you can shoot the driver to make them fall over onto the horn and go BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. The cars handle much more realistically than any game I've ever played; they have actual weight, and using the brakes is a necessity rather than a choice. While it takes some getting used to, the driving in this game - and believe me, there is a lot of it - is pretty fun.
The same cannot be said for riding motorcycles, however, and thankfully there are few missions that require you to. No matter how good you think you are at video games, you will always look like a monkey trying to fuck a football when you ride bikes in GTA IV. Out of the ~15 attempts I had to make on the final mission, one of the few that required repeat attempts (the difficulty in this game is usually very fair, which is surprising when you consider how bullshit most GTA games get later on), the list of failures go something like this:
- 11 were due to the required motorcycle section (the game suddenly loses all open-endedness to force a setpiece on you, and even if you shoot 15 rocket launchers at the final boss's boat, he won't die)
- 1 was due to me not stabilizing the helicopter fast enough, because the helicopter controls are almost as bad as the motorcycle ones
- 3 were due to a game-breaking, widely reported bug that Rockstar has had 16 years to fix, but they were too busy cutting content from the so called 'complete' edition to do so, leaving players to find workarounds.
Dear God, this final bug. It's not the only one in the game, but it's the most egregious, and really highlights how awful the PC port of this game is. Sure, it finally runs smoothly provided your computer is powerful enough to be able to run the game ten times over on its officially stated 'recommended' settings, but it's still not bug-free. NPCs getting stuck on geometry is extremely common, and the effect can range from you being forced to skip a cutscene and force the game to move on, to having to retry the whole mission because you can't bear to watch them bumping into walls like idiots any longer.
There are still stutters, and this was the first game to crash on my new PC - it can run brand new games at the highest settings with nary a glitch, but a 2008 game crashes. Sometimes Rockstar decides they're still not done bullying you, and their proprietary launcher closes without starting the game, so you have to click the Play button on Steam again and hope this time the two frontends this game mandates will both work. Not only that, the game doesn't seem to register manual saves, only autosaves after completing missions. Sometimes I lost progress because I had manually saved without completing a mission. I suspect this is because the Rockstar Launcher has its own cloud, which shuts down immediately when I quit the game after saving. Know an easy solution to this? DON'T HAVE TWO LAUNCHERS FOR ONE FUCKING GAME.
I realize I'm spending a lot of time talking about the abysmal performance of the PC version than the actual game, but when it's this egregious, it spoils the whole experience. I will try to talk about the game some more now.
Combat is much better than in previous GTA games, although it still is just on the level of a passable third-person shooter in 2008, one that lacks an open world. The cover system is finicky, and oftentimes it's better to make your own positional cover behind walls and boxes without snapping to surfaces. If you play with a controller, the triggers are used in all their analog glory - a half-press for manual aim, a full squeeze for auto-aim. There are a few missions that are extremely well-structured, such as the Heat-parody bank heist, even if a lot are simply the repetitive 'drive here, kill that' loop. The world is nice and detailed, though the NPCs are more cowardly than people in real-life - if you so much as sprint near someone, they will run away screaming. The in-game internet is rife with hilarious mockeries of the 2008 world wide web, some of which I sorely miss. There are also some fun side activites you can explore alone or on dates (romantic or otherwise), such as a strip club with at least 5 clones of Nicki Minaj walking around, a cabaret show that's honestly very entertaining to watch, darts, pool (played on a table made of ice, judging from the physics), and SEX. Pick up hookers and kill them after so you can get your money back. It's tradition.
Like all GTA games though, GTA IV suffers from most of the content being concentrated on the first island. There isn't even that much difference between the three islands - in the previous incarnations of Liberty City, you truly felt like you were moving to more affluent parts of the metropolis as you changed islands, whereas almost all of LC feels like a ghetto here. The third island hardly has anything to do at all. I've always felt that the reason memes about GTA are concentrated in the first third of the games is because most players don't progress past the first island. I guess Rockstar know that too, so they left the other two islands bare.
Despite all its flaws, GTA IV is extremely addictive. It's a decent game even in 2024, with an ahead-of-its-time attention to detail. With the issues it has though, I can't recommend buying the Steam version of the game. Rockstar don't care about fixing the bugs, and they don't care about your experience once they've got your money. They can't even be arsed to renew the licenses for the music, having removed 50+ songs so far, and it's only going to get worse. Every time I switched to the rock radio station, 'Wild Side' by Motley Crue would be playing, because there were about 4 fucking songs left on the thing. Do you want to have a cumbersome, watered-down, buggy time with this game? Nah. If you have the choice, I sincerely recommend finding an old PS3 disc and playing that instead. Don't give Rockstar your money for an incomplete 'complete' edition.
Puerto
6 days ago