Ever since GTA III first parked a car bomb slap-bang in the heart of established gaming convention back in 2001, the open-world sandbox has become the biggest, laziest, most oversubscribed and, most importantly, worst bandwagon the games industry has ever seen. ‘Sandbollox’ abominations such as Superman Returns, Transformers: The Game and Spider-Man 3 are bad enough, but the real damage occurs when established franchises, like Tony Hawk’s and Burnout for example, jump on board for no reason other than that linearity and structure – both of which can be found in plentiful supply in all of the last three GTAs – are now considered bad things, mainly by people who frankly wouldn’t know a great game if it pulled them out of a car and stamped on their head. Do you know what ‘you can do what you want’ really means? It means ‘we have run out of ideas’. All these aimless, hollow, indifference-inducing sandbox experiences – it’s enough to make you forget how awesome a sandbox game is when it’s done right. Thank God Grand Theft Auto IV is here to remind us.

Without a plentiful supply of entertainment value to keep you amused between missions, an open world rapidly becomes a drag and a bore. This is where most sandbox titles get it wrong, where Grand Theft Auto has almost always got it right in the past, and where Grand Theft Auto IV is, right now, getting it so, so right. Without a word of a lie, just standing on a Liberty City street corner watching the world go by is actually much more fun than most of the missions – never mind the tedious inter-mission wandering – in lesser sandbox titles. Yes, even more fun than a mission you chose because you were bored of wandering aimlessly around and it happened to be nearest option. Rockstar North has gone about creating a sandbox world in exactly the right way. The design team has come up with loads and loads and loads of ideas, then created a world that’s only just big enough to contain them all. It has not come up with a paltry handful of ideas then scattered them sparingly across a world deliberately made far bigger than necessary in order to give the game an illusion of scale and scope when, in fact, it has very little of either. If Grand Theft Auto IV was a bag, it would be one of those bags that transforms into a tent then turns out to be really hard to turn back into a bag because it’s such a tight fit. By the same token, many of the titles that pass for sandbox games nowadays are more like those bulging crisp packets that turn out to be bulging with air rather than crisps. Are you still with us? Oh… Well, put it this way then… a bad sandbox is a place where a developer puts a game; a good sandbox, one like Liberty City in GTA IV, is the game.

		DO YOU HAVE RESERVATIONS? If we had to pick fault... Okay, you forced it out of us. There were just a couple of minor things we didn’t like about GTA IV. Our biggest gripes are, as with past titles in the series, with the on-foot combat. It is, we should stress, much improved, with simple but effective cover and targeting systems. However, Niko and the game camera are still quite clumsy to control sometimes. When you press L2 to lock on, the target closest the centre of the camera view will be selected, but the camera view insists on pulling back to immediately behind Niko whenever he moves. This makes it a right bugger to move and target enemies not immediately in front of you at the same time. In-car shooting is also improved but still not intuitive. On the plus side you can now free aim using the right stick, but you can’t see the targeting reticule until you start firing, which is done by holding down L2. It felt very awkward to us, but looked easy when an experienced Rockstar staffer demonstrated it for us. But other than that? Honestly, so, so good. We swear.

As we have already said, Liberty City’s level of richness and entertainment is such that you can, and inevitably will, be entertained simply by standing in it watching what’s going on around you. We tried it for a little while. It was good, honestly it was, but we did feel we might be missing out on other things there were to see and do, and that if we stood there much longer we’d be in danger of wasting the precious few hours we had in GTA IV’s presence. So we took the plunge, went wild, threw caution to the wind. We started to walk.

We walked up a hill towards a row of shops. The first shop was called Belly Deli, which in itself was quite amusing, so we had a good look at the rest of the shops. Unfortunately, none of the rest of them had such funny signs, but the one at the far end of the row caught our attention. Or rather the man standing outside of it did. The reason we noticed him was that he wasn’t just standing there, and he wasn’t just wandering around aimlessly either. He was doing something that we’d never seen random GTA civilians doing before. That is to say, he was… doing something. Closer inspection revealed exactly what it was he was doing: spraying graffiti all over the shop front. A sandbox NPC with a sense of purpose? A sense of mischief even? Could this scenario be any more awesome? Yes, of course. Like any situation in GTA IV this situation could be, and was, made more awesome by the addition of a rocket launcher. We positioned ourselves on the opposite side of the street, got the little vandal in our sights and then pulled the trigger.

The resulting explosion destroyed the front of the shop, leaving a blackened smoldering hole where its window had been, and sent our behoodied victim arcing through the air, landing in a flaming heap on the other side of the street. Fantastic. Just bloody fantastic. Random acts of violence of this ilk are the lifeblood of the series but, ridiculously good fun though it might have been, the overkill of GTA-past could eventually get a little samey. This kill was different though. This kill was unique. Not only did it have environmental damage and ragdoll physics and real-time fire and smoke, it had a context all of its own. It even had a motive of sorts. GTA IV’s vastly increased levels of detail and realism, combined with its improved AI and physics, mean that scenarios much like this will be constantly unfolding throughout the time you spend playing it and no two will ever be quite the same. Not only does this make the game more unpredictable and varied than any other in the series, but also more lifelike and more meaningful. Oh, and better.

We should mention at this point that we could afford to waste rockets on petty delinquents because we were playing in debug mode – cheating basically. We were told that weapons are much harder to get hold of than before in GTA IV and indeed, it did appear that Ammu-Nation had gone completely out of business. Instead of just shopping for guns, ammo and armour whenever you want, you’ll have to make friends with people who can get you limited supplies of gear on the black market. As we revealed last month, socialising is now an important part of the game with time put into making friends rewarded with various favours. Rockstar informs us that socialising is entirely optional, but if decent weapons are going to be difficult to come by without talking to people, then that makes it as good as essential in our book.

While there’s no doubt that GTA IV can still be as frivolous and anarchic an experience as any of its forebears, we get the distinct impression that Rockstar is keen, where possible, to give you reasons to do things. Reasons beyond ‘for the sheer hell of it’, that is. There’s a feeling that everything in the game matters in some way and that, unless you’re pretty determined to make it happen, GTA IV won’t descend into mindlessness. This is perhaps best exemplified in the all-new police system. Every police officer in the game now has his own realistic line of sight, so you can get away with a lot more if no police can see you, but you can’t get away with anything much at all if they can. There’s a lot of police about though so, in general, it’s much easier to attract their attention. It’s a good job being chased is so much fun. Again, line of sight comes into play in chases. Instead of just driving as fast as you can towards a Pay ‘n’ Spray for an instant antidote, the only way to get rid of your wanted level is to get outside a certain radius (it gets bigger as your wanted level increases) from your last known position and remain there for five seconds or so. Understanding the police line of sight becomes vital because if the cops can still see you then your last known position is exactly where you still are. Cops will be displayed on your radar and you really have to pay attention to where you’re going to avoid being spotted by police emerging up ahead. It’s much better than the police chases in previous GTA games, and that really is saying a lot.

Grand Theft Auto IV was already secure in the top spot of our most wanted games list but, after a few hours playing it, we’ve had to add a couple more stars to its wanted level. We want it so much we’ve called in SWAT teams, feds, even the military. We’ve got it surrounded with tanks, barricades, helicopters and spotlights but Rockstar is still refusing to surrender it until 29 April. Hmmm… anyone got any tear gas?