Liberty City is back in the limelight in Rockstar’s latest take on the Grand Theft Auto world. With the title of IV, this installment is arguably the first “true” sequel to the game that made the entire franchise famous, GTA III. Vice City and San Andreas both took place earlier in the time line and in other locations, whereas Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories were more like side shows.

Set in the present day, complete with cell phones and internet cafés, GTA IV also features a completely new take on Liberty City, a lot more faithful to its real world role-model New York City than its predecessor from GTA III.

The game puts you in the role of Niko Bellic, a Serbian immigrant and veteran of the Bosnian war, who at the start of the game is literally fresh off the boat. You are greeted by your cousin Roman, who has been telling tall tales of his success in the land of opportunity.

As it turns out, you quickly notice that Roman is just barely any better off than yourself, and so the game’s traditional journey through the underworld takes off, starting from the very bottom.

It is, in some respects, difficult to talk about Grand Theft Auto IV without mentioning the incredible hype that surrounds it. Few games have been as anticipated, and fewer still have reached the same kind of early sales figures. Much of this hype the way we see it, stems from building on a very successful formula, which was pioneered (and subsequently widely imitated) in GTA III.

The prime features of this formula include an open, sandbox-style and very alive world where the character is given a lot of freedom; a central car-theft and driving game component; plenty of tongue-in-cheek western-world criticism; and, well… frivolous amounts of violence.

GTA IV follows this formula closely. In fact, the core of the gameplay is pretty much exactly the same. You start out with little more than the clothes you arrived in, and slowly work up your fortune through a long series of varied missions from a multitude of characters, some more colourful than others.

When you aren’t doing missions, the whole of Liberty City (at least toward the latter parts of the game) is open to you. You can call a friend up on your cell phone to visit a comedy club, go bowling, get drunk, visit a strip club, or several other options.

If you take care of your friends, they will ultimately take care of you, by way of certain in-game bonuses achieved by getting them to like you enough. You can also just drive around to take in the sights, listening to your favourite radio station and observing the very well-designed inhabitants of Liberty City go about their business.

This part in particular, making sure the game world is alive and authentic, has received extraordinary amounts of care. In no other game so far has the stage been as detailed, or your personal agenda been such a small part of it. You pass by people talking on their phones, jogging, or trying to pick up a date, and even if you hang out at one specific place for a long time, it’s unlikely that you’ll see the same situation come up twice.

You can stay in your room and watch TV, featuring several shows by and with people living in Liberty City (and some real-world ones too), or go to an internet café and visit a great many websites not unlike today’s offering, whether you’re looking for blog circles or a mail-order bride. To sum it up, Liberty City really feels like a living, breathing entity, whose existence goes on whether or not you happen to be there and observe it.

Having said that, your options for interacting with all this variety of people and places are, much like in earlier games, with few exceptions rather limited. You can’t deal with people in more ways than bumping into them and getting them annoyed with you; or in the spirit of the franchise, going on a killing spree and taking them out, eventually getting the police to come after you.

One thing that is new though, is the addition of “friends”. Now and then showing up on your map, they are little encounters with random people trying to get by in Liberty City, who for one reason or another are in need of Niko’s friendship. They are like little side missions, widely varied, and with a certain continuity in and of themselves.

If you choose to help a friend the first time around, chances are you might bump into them again at a later time to see what became of them. This is a very small part of the over-all game, but you still get a heart-warming feeling from many of these minor missions, and it’s easy to think that real people just like that are most likely somewhere out there in the real world, right now.

While some things are new, other things have been removed. Unlike GTA: San Andreas, IV seems to go for an at least slightly more realistic take on the Grand Theft Auto world, and certain elements that may have been considered too over-the-top have been removed. There is no more jetpack for instance, nor can you strafe the highway in a fighter jet, or skydive down to the ground when you’ve had enough.

The only vehicles you can fly in GTA IV are helicopters, and the gimmicky bicycles have also been taken out, along with the ability to customize your character at gyms and hairdressers. You can still change what you’re wearing, but the selection of clothes and accessories is surprisingly limited.

Graphically, Grand Theft Auto has never looked better. This may not be all that strange, given the new-generation systems, but still, whether you’re up in a helicopter, on top of a skyscraper or driving across the Algonquin Bridge, there is a lot of eye-candy to be had. Many of the locations look remarkably, almost photo-realistically like their real world counterparts.

The audio is top-notch as well, be it the voice acting or the sound of your car glancing against another at 110 mph. The offering of radio stations and colourful DJs is more diverse than ever, and as a couple of nice touches, not only can you change the ring tone of your cell phone, but there is also a number you can dial in-game whenever a track is played, to get the name of the artist and the song sent back as a text message.

Not everything has made the move to next-generation consoles as smoothly though. GTA IV still suffers from a, even for consoles, clumsy and limited save game system. Like in previous titles, you can still only save your game between missions, either through the auto-save just after completion, or from one of your safehouses.

Now, several of the missions you will be undertaking are lengthy and contain several steps. It’s not uncommon to start at your safehouse, drive off to get the mission, drive to location A to pick someone up, drive to location B for the actual job, go through a shootout or a pursuit, and then reach a critical part where there’s a decent risk of failure. If you do fail here, it’s back to the start in order to go through the entire thing again, spending 10-15 minutes just to get back to the challenging part.

It may not sound like much, but when you’re restarting the build-up section of a mission for the fifth time, it gets frustrating. It could be argued that this doesn’t have anything to do with limited system resources, but is just Rockstar’s traditional and intended way of making GTA challenging.

However, forced repetition isn’t a challenge; it’s just a waste of time. With GTA IV hyped up as GTA on a next-gen console, we don’t think a save-anywhere feature or at least checkpoints throughout missions would have been too much to ask for.

Another arguable drawback with the game is that when all is said and done, it is essentially more of the same, and deviates very little from the trends set by its predecessors. If you loved them, you will love this. If you on the other hand loved GTA III, thought Vice City was pretty darn cool, felt that San Andreas started to get just a little bit repetitive, well… chances are you will feel like the formula is starting to wear a little thin.

We say arguable though, because there is a case to be made for not fixing what ain’t broke. Judging by the success of the GTA franchise, there’s bound to be enough people out there who think Rockstar’s formula is where it’s at.

Our final bone to pick with Grand Theft Auto IV, is how it ends. Without giving too much away, there are branching endings depending on a choice you have to make in one of the later missions. The problem is that no matter what you do or how you play it, the story ends on a rather dark note, seemingly delivering the message that crime doesn’t pay, and criminals ultimately cannot be happy.

We won’t argue this case, but with a game that goes to great lengths to present the moral choices involved in working your way through the criminal world, and also to build a rather likable character in Niko Bellic; that kind of moral sermon at the end doesn’t sit very well – especially not from a game labelled Grand Theft Auto.

Finally, can GTA IV then be said to live up to the hype surrounding it? We say, not really. It is by all means a good, well-made game, but in the end it’s also a somewhat aged formula delivered in a fresh package. It’s definitely worth playing, but unless you’re an already made fan who loved all the previous games, don’t expect your world to be rocked the way the buzz would make you believe. Of course, if you by chance have never played any GTA title or derivative thereof, this would be the proverbial golden opportunity.