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GTA4 Hands-On

I'm sitting in the back of a Yellow Cab cutting through Manhattan at a crawl. The cabbie lets loose with a torrent of vulgarities directed at the truck in front of us.

"Yeah, just stay there, because you're not going anywhere and now I'm not ****ing going anywhere. Park right there."

He lays on the horn.

A map pops up on the video screen showing our exact location, easy to pinpoint because now we're not moving at all.

Outside the passenger window people walk by, each, seemingly, in their own world. The level of detail is amazing, the buildings, piled almost on top of one another, are all alive with activity. Wind whips down the street tossing scraps of paper in the air, it almost looks like the real thing, like Grand Theft Auto IV.

But it's just Manhattan on a crisp weekday morning, me trapped in a cab, staring at the taxi's video screen built into the seat in front of me, headed to see and play around with Rockstar's latest.

Later, inside Rockstar's nondescript offices, located next to a Best Buy in Greenwich Village, I experience Manhattan again, though now it's called Algonquin.

There's no confusing the two, reality and game. Reality is boring and drab, Algonquin is shot from spectacular cinematic angles. I suspect there's a filter involved, something that gives the world a touch of artistry.

Later, over beers at a nearby pub, Rockstar's Jeronimo Barrera tells me that Rockstar loves its filters. It helps, he says, fool the eye, masks some of the imperfections that games, no matter how next-gen, will always have.

I ask about the game's camera angles, which fascinate me. The game makes extensive use of them—and not just during cut-scenes. They seem to pop up at times during play, making you feel like you're part of a cut-scene of your own creation.

Barrerra says one of their team members has a lot of film experience and brought that to the new game.

It works. Not because it makes the game feel like you're watching a movie, but because it makes the player feel like they're making one. There are times when playing Grand Theft Auto IV that it felt less like a video game and more like an engine for experiences. Like the game was, at times, transcending what I had always thought was important about video games, having fun, and opening my eye to a new way to enjoy gaming, by creating.

It helps that the controls have been, or at least feel like they've been, totally revamped for this latest GTA. To any adept of the franchise the controls will still feel very familiar, but gone is that mushy feeling that made me struggle with previous versions of the game.

Movement is tight, backed up by Rockstar's use of the Euphoria, a game animation engine that anatomically animates character movement by simulating not just the body, but the muscles, bones and, it is said, the central nervous system. The result, the thing that matters to gamers, is a layer of movement minutia that help brings the world to life with moments like accidentally tripping a side kick, or watching someone flail as they plummet from a high rise.

What's important though is that these things don't happen as much by accident or because of bad control mechanics. GTA IV's controls do what the best control designs are meant to do, not get in the way of the experience.

Driving, too, is much improved. The times you are behind the wheel feel almost like you are playing a racer, with tight turns and the ability to really maneuver in a city that's all about making split-second decisions. Designers even added a slow-mo mode which allows you to slow time down as the camera drifts up and away to top down perspective, making it much easier to cut between cars, slip past barricades and perform bootlegger 180s.

I found myself wasting inordinate amounts of time playing keep away from the cops, just because I enjoyed the driving so much.

The biggest change in the game's controls, though, come with shooting. I'm a huge first-person shooter fan and I absolutely hated the shooting controls for previous GTAs. The problem was I always wanted to play what was essentially an action game like a shooter.

The new system allows you to do just that. Aiming has been tightened up and now includes a reticule that shows your targets current health. There's also a two stage lock-on system, allowing you to lock-on to a target, but still aim at particular body parts to perform things like headshots. Instant kill headshots. A cover system lets you pop up and fire or fire blindly at targets.

I played through a few missions during my hands-on, but it was "Harboring A Grudge" that felt most like a classic shooter. In the mission, you make your way to a warehouse rooftop near the dock of Algonquin. Down below is a sea of bad guys talking over the finer points of a prescription drug deal.

I start by sniping a guy, marveling at how much it feels like sniping in some of my favorite shooters. I toss down a few Molotov cocktails, mostly missing because, as with grenades in just about every shooter I play, I throw like a grade schooler.

Deciding to take advantage of my ridiculously robust arsenal, I switch to a rocket launcher and send a couple of rockets toward the bad guys. The first glances off the sheet metal roof in front of me, sending the rocket spiraling out of control. The second skips off a container. Finally I manage to plant one in the cement next to a cluster of bad guys. I'm rewarded with a glorious explosion and a few less enemies.

Moving down the roof, not so gracefully, I scramble to some cover and switch over to an assault rifle. The game plays fast, letting you pop off shots quickly and precisely. I take out a couple of people with the simple lock-on. Emptying bullets into the bad guys until they drop, and then I slow down and take my time with the loose lock-on, shifting my aim to focus on headshots.

Taking out the last few guys, I realize that I've just played through an entire mission of Grand Theft Auto IV as if I was in Call of Duty and it felt nice.

And the game has a lot of nice touches an awful lot of nice touches that really have nothing to do with game play. When you snag a car, sometimes the door is left unlocked and you can just hop in. Other times you have to smash in the window with an elbow.

To shoot while driving you have to smash out your window. Once, while driving around a guy who was smoking pot, I smashed out the window and within seconds billowing clouds of smoke were pouring through the busted glass.

There's almost no HUD—instead your entire communication with the game and its many options is through your cell phone. You use it to get missions, find people, even do things like play (and buy) music or take pictures in game.

One of the more memorable moments for me was almost an accidental aside. Standing near the docks one in-game evening, I noticed little white lights lifting and drifting down. Nice touch, I thought, they've included distant airplanes. As we moved toward the lights, talking about some mission or maybe the mechanics of play, I looked up and saw that those lights were now fully formed airplanes. I could actually make them out in detail.

"Oh wow, those are actually airplanes?" I said, a little surprised.

My demo team seemed just as surprised.

There is an entire airport of them, they tell me, taxiing, landing, taking off. And it's all part of the game.

It's no wonder then that when a team of game guide writers descended on Rockstar to work through Grand Theft Auto IV and write their books, they were surprised at the level of depth they found both in game and story, likening it to a Final Fantasy.

GTA IV, I'm told, is a game measured not in hours of play, but weeks. But its greatest potential, I suspect, won't be found in the traditional measures of game—graphics, sound design, mechanic—but in how these things manage to stay transparent and elusive, allowing the gamer to be the center of an experience they create.

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A couple of months ago, before I had a chance to play GTA4, I got into a discussion with an industry insider about Rockstar, and in particular, the Grand Theft Auto franchise. We were talking about whether the polarizing series, much beloved by gamers and reviled by non-gamers, had jumped the shark.

Would this be the last GTA, I wondered. The insider was quick to say no, even after I pointed out that I had watched a chunk of the single-player campaign, which impressed me, but didn't seem to include any giant leaps forward for the franchise.

"Did you see multiplayer?"

"No."

"Just wait."

After spending a morning at Rockstar late last month, playing around with Grand Theft Auto IV's single player campaign, the guys walked me to the room next door to check out Grand Theft Auto's first real take on multiplayer.

Over the course of several hours I had a chance to check out five multiplayer modes, including a short co-op campaign, out of what is rumored to be the game's more than dozen multiplayer modes.

I was happy to find that Grand Theft Auto has most definitely not jumped the shark.

I was initially disappointed when I discovered that my expectations, no matter how unreasonable, that GTA4 would let you play through the entire campaign with a friend weren't to be met. But that was short lived.

The sheer level of customization in the game, the wild variety of play, and the unsurpassed size of the maps made the lack of a full co-op campaign seem like an afterthought.

To start playing a multiplayer game you bring up Nikko's cell phone in the single player campaign and, using the in-phone menu, select multiplayer. So you can drop into one of these sessions whenever you want.

While you can't play as Nikko, the campaign's main character, you can customize your own character, creating someone by choosing male or female and then selecting among four different heads, four torsos, four legs and several types of glasses and hats.

All but one of the multiplayer modes supports up to 16 players. (The co-op missions only support up to four.) The host has an amazing array of options that they can control. While setting up a game, the host can choose to modify the routine, like respawn times, weapon selections and friendly fire, or the unusual, like the time of day, the weather, how heavy the traffic is or how many people are on the street. You can even control police presence in your matches.

While the game allows you to select parts of the map to play in, choosing specific boroughs, smaller neighborhoods, or areas like the airport, it doesn't prevent players from roaming the entire city during any given match. Instead the respawns and weapon drops only occur in those areas.

While the high level of customization adds a lot to the experience, I was just as wowed by some of the little things built into multiplayer, like the ability for players waiting in a lobby to turn on their radio and listen to GTA's soundtrack.

Deathmatch
My first experience with GTA 4 multiplayer was deathmatch and team deathmatch.

Instead of winning with kill counts, both of these modes look at your cash total to see who won the match. Cash is earned by killing members of the other team and you can get extra cash by darting out to collect the money they drop when they die.

The controls were solid, as I've mentioned before, but what made this deathmatch feel so different was that it felt like it was taking place in a living, breathing world. People were walking around, there were cars to be stolen. You can actually load up a car with your entire team and try to drive-by the other team mates. You could even, if you felt like it, take off to parts unknown, areas on the map nowhere near where the action was taking place.

Deathmatch was fun, and the added twist of an open world and a huge map, definitely upped the value, but it was still deathmatch.

Cops N Crooks
The next mode we played was Cops N Crooks, a variation on your typical deathmatch mode where you have to find and take out the bad guys.

The team playing as cops can see the crooks on their radar, but the the crooks can only see the escape point on the map and don't know where the cops are until it's almost too late. The mode has two derivations: In All for One you need to kill the boss, played by one of the crooks. In One for All everyone has just one life and once the crooks are dead the cops win.

There were some really nice touches to the game that made this stand out from some of the other modes I've played in shooters. For instance as the bad guys, you can give each other waypoints on the live map, allowing one player to drive and another to navigate.

We also played matches were the bad guys split up into two groups, doubling the chance for the boss to get away because we weren't sure which group he was with.

Lots of fun, plenty of potential, especially when you factor in that this all still takes place in GTA's open world.

GTA Race
This was the mode I least wanted to play, but came in as one of my favorites to mess around with. Imagine Mario Kart in a real world, with real cars. Now add machine guns, pistols, rocket launchers, molotov cocktails, in fact every weapons in GTA. Now, let people get out of their cars and do whatever they want to win, or prevent other people from winning. Wow, just wow.

This mode lets the host choose vehicle types before a race, the race course, time limit and number of laps. Sure the game has checkpoints, and you need to hit them, or most of them, to complete a lap, but being the fastest doesn't get close to guaranteeing a win.

In our introduction to the mode, myself and Newsweek's N'gail Croal were burning around the course, which I believe took place near GTA's Central Park, when we came to a stone archway we absolutely had to go through to complete the lap. Problem was, there were cars, lots of cars blocking our way. By the time I had assessed the situation, one of the other players ran up to me and killed me at the wheel.

The race quickly devolved into a deathmatch until we realized that Croal had nosed his car through the wreckage and was burning through the laps. In another race, this one taking place at an airport complete with moving planes, I didn't bother trying to speed through the course and instead clamored on top of an airport gangway with a rocket launcher and just waited. When people came by I blew up their cars. Meanwhile Rockstar's Jeronimo Barrera was taking great pleasure trying to mow down Croal in what looked like a golf cart.

From what I played of it, GTA Race could easily be a standalone game, something that would occupy a gamer's attention for months.

Hangman's NOOSE
The final mode we played was probably the most impressive. Hangman's NOOSE is Rockstar's answer to a story-driven campaign mode. Instead of allowing players to complete chunks of the single player campaign with a friend, the developers decided to create side missions, featuring ancillary characters, that can be played as a group with a total of four people.

Rockstar declined to say how many of these co-op missions the game will ship with, but I'd think it would come with more than the one and I'd bet that the 360 DLC will be all about this mode.

The mission we played was Hangman's NOOSE. In it you're asked to rescue a crime boss from an army of police who are picking him up on the runway of the airport. The missions started out on the runway and as we shot it out with cops, two more armored SWAT trucks drove up, unloading more and more cops.

The first play through was pretty succinct, we grabbed the armored truck, got the boss in it and tore across the city to our extraction point while the city's entire police force mobilized to stop us.

The second play through didn't go nearly as well.

A Rockstar developer took the wheel of the armored car again, and another rode shotgun. Croal hopped into the back to shoot at pursuing cops. I opted to swipe a helicopter that was on the runway and followed the wagon as it entered the interstate, trying to gun down the stream of cop cars in pursuit.

Then it happened: Croal was shot. The hit didn't kill him, but it did knock him from the truck which continued to speed toward the drop off point. Soon Croal was surrounded by cops on the middle of an interstate. I turned my chopper around and told Croal I was coming for him. Landing the copter in a nearby clearing, I got out to try and find Croal, but he had snatched a car and was already out of the police infested area.

I ran back to my copter only to find its rotors had been snapped off during my crap landing next to a copse of trees. The whole thing ended with me being gunned down by a phalanx of cops as I ran down the interstate toward the distant extraction point, and the whole team losing.

The missions was actually very straight forward, lacking almost completely in narrative and pretty short, but that works in GTA IV. It works because the game, especially in the multiplayer modes, seems to be providing you a way to create your own experiences.

I could replay Hangman's NOOSE a dozen times and not get tired of it, mostly because each time through created a different experience. It's so open ended that they story you play, as with single player, often seems like your own.

I've certainly not played enough of Grand Theft Auto IV to being able to say whether the game will live up to mounting expectations, but I can certainly say that Rockstar hasn't been caught resting. This game, and it's unusual and varied take on multiplayer gaming isn't packed with obvious innovations, but it still manages to innovate where it counts most: In storytelling.