Edge gives its verdict on 2008’s biggest game.

As you drive around Liberty City, flipping between radio stations, absorbing the inanity of their commercial messages and the bilious hypocrisy of their small-minded politics, you realize that the America of GTA IV is a country coming down from its trip. The humor – some crass, some clever – errs towards the absurd, as the series has always done, but never before has it been so cutting, so impassioned or so relevant.

Filtered through the world-weary eyes of Eastern Bloc immigrant Niko Bellic, the American Dream is all strung-out, sapped dry from the coke-fuelled megalomania of the ’80s, paying in full for the arrogance of its ’90s empire-building – and what little remains is at the mercy of relentless subdivision, as everyone tries to carve off a little piece for themselves. Even the criminal organizations familiar to previous GTAs are at the end of their game: fractious, desperate and doomed. It’s unforgiving stuff – an evisceration of America’s insularity, its gluttony, its petty suburban miseries, its lethargy and artificiality. As funny as GTA IV is, this really is laughter in the dark – brilliantly observed, unnerving and bitter.

This may seem a bit heavy for a GTA game. It is, after all, a series which delights in tooling you up for celebratory moments of carnage. No player of the previous games will be unfamiliar with the experience of standing on a rooftop, gleefully taking down police choppers with a bazooka as support teams screech to a halt down below. Other games have since pared down the genre that GTA first created into entertaining confections – sandboxes which exist solely for the joy of their destruction. It is probably GTA IV’s greatest achievement that it eases the player from this mindset. Yes, there’s still the freedom to cause havoc, and inevitably you do; the difference is that you’re no longer impelled to toy with GTA IV’s world in quite the same sadistic way – you live in it.

This adjustment of tone sees the eradication of the more frivolous, preposterous elements of GTAs past. There are no jetpacks this time around, clothing remains within credible limitations, and helicopters are the most outlandish things you will commandeer. There are no hidden packages, the jumps are fewer and less conspicuous. GTA IV manages to coax you away from casual mayhem by loading you with more meaningful commitments – simultaneously stepping away from and surpassing the kind of peripheral distractions that were to be found in San Andreas.

You develop and maintain relationships with other characters, phoning them on your mobile to arrange hook-ups. The kinds of things you can do with them – going bowling, drinking, playing pool or darts, visiting comedy or cabaret or strip clubs – while breaking up and pulling you away from the main missions, feel no less significant to the overall story. These aren’t diversions but ancillary features of Niko’s life, just as critical a part of the experience as anything else.

moscalloutYour interactions flesh out Niko in a way which makes him the most sympathetic and well-drawn GTA protagonist yet/moscalloutCertainly the minigames are competent enough, and the various clubs are mad experiences best left to the player’s own discovery – the kind of thing that only Rockstar would be ballsy enough to attempt. But the real motivation for spending time with your friends is that they make a significant contribution to the texture of the world. Their esteem for you isn’t just a percentile measurement which, upon growth, unlocks extra game modes and side missions; your interactions flesh out and explain Niko’s character in a way that makes him the most sympathetic and well-drawn GTA protagonist yet – as well as perhaps the most tragic and nihilistic. Tommy Vercetti was a wise-cracking Mafioso cipher, more an aggregation of sharp gangster caricatures than a fulsome and believable character. San Andreas’ CJ was a more credible figure, but the fact that he was a likeable chump stood at odds with the player’s sociopathic control over his behavior.

Through encounters with friends and girlfriends, GTA IV tackles this disconnect head on, revealing that the contradiction is in Niko himself: a man troubled by his own bleak world-view, traumatized by his experience of the Balkan conflict. With his humanity whittled down, Niko arrives in Liberty City looking for revenge, but you don’t have to spend long in his company to hope he finds redemption instead. The writing makes a mark not only in quality but in quantity: missions have multiple dialogue options so that you don’t have to listen to the same lines on each replay, and even the GTA tradition of barking pedestrians throws up few repetitions.

The escalation of world detail over previous GTA games is phenomenal. Now you can go to internet cafes, swap emails and look up Liberty City’s various institutions and businesses on the web. A police computer now lists current crimes and has a searchable record of their perpetrators. The radio stations discuss your deeds. Such stuff is perhaps trivial in isolation, but in aggregation creates an unrivalled sense of a living city.

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