Some things in gaming are just made to be special. Although the thought of travelling to New York, taking in its environment and then seeing some of the first ever code with-missions-in of Grand Theft Auto IV is scarily consequential, there’s no doubt in our minds that it’s a special, frighteningly valid experience. We were privileged to have been there, and after having our minds blown and our expectations met, we’re convinced that we can bring our stunning GTA IV excursion back to you. When this game hits, an entire generation of PS3 owners will be left with a IV-shaped crater in their brains; this is going to shake the world.

We should’ve always known. We were sat there like everyone else in the world, on 29 March, waiting for that trailer to load with the maximum possible anticipation; it came, and then it went, but in retrospect it never prepared us for what we saw this time around. Refined beyond belief, boasting an abundance of new features and the greatestlooking city of all time, we finally understand what Rockstar is trying to achieve. This is the GTA franchise, but rebooted. This is a new vision of what we once knew the series to be. If the trailer was a taster, then our exclusive look at the game was surely the entrée in what is going to be a supremely delicious gourmet experience.

Meet Niko Bellic. Well, actually, you’ve met him already, but now you’re meeting him again – being played. Our demo begins in a dizzying hue of advertising beacons, crowds and the most triumphant tribute to modern capitalism that Liberty City has to offer: Star Junction. Based on the visually bullying but unique entity of Times Square, we see a similar level of advertising madness, and this is the perfect place for Niko to start his day. Welcome to Liberty City, then, where even the civilians are optimised from their blockish predecessors. Women are carrying bags, luckless and homeless alcoholics are loitering on the sidewalk and city slickers are conversing on their mobiles. With this in mind, we already feel at home in this new take on Liberty City, which reads to us as an absolute love letter to the great city of New York. For Niko, this homeland is going to provide him with a very interesting day (see "My Day in Liberty City").

It’s a feeling we haven’t felt since GTA III, all the way back in 2001. It’s that idea of discovering something new, living and breathing, with the in-game city sounds and residents absolutely separating you from your real-life environment. Vice City and San Andreas were both classics, sure, but the world you inhabited only made (contextually) moderate leaps between each iteration, rather than the full-blown changes needed to completely re-energise the franchise. GTA III set the standard for the PS2, but that’s not all the series was responsible for; and if we had demanded more than what the GTA franchise gave us on the PS2, then we were surely asking too much. We had three generationdefi ning titles that expanded in scope each time, with the emphasis on freedom and rags-to-riches storytelling. It was always semi-ironic, immersive and, at its height, a soul-lifting toybox that had layers of fun at its disposal.


With the PlayStation 3, however, we expected something else. It would have been so easy for Rockstar to do what it did before, but that would never have been in the franchise’s nature. Just as it did six years ago with GTA III, Rockstar is recreating the sandbox genre that it invented in the first place, with every feature receiving a treatment, good or bad. Gone is the rags-to-riches cartoon swirl of the previous games, and in its place we find a story of one man’s struggle from rags, only to find slightly better rags as his reward. The world of GTA IV is about consequence, and the realistic tone of the city only emphasises how much this makes sense. Liberty City has a vibe, an identity; if the PS2 was all about freedom, and exploiting the idea of that, then GTA IV is about intimacy, immediacy and vibe. The following events take place in real time… and they elevate that description beyond PR spin.

There’s a corrupt cop in town, going by the name of McReary, and he has dirt on Niko’s past. Mercifully, some skilful muting by Rockstar stopped us from learning about his history, although we were intrigued all the same. McReary wants you to meet him in Castle Gardens, since that information he has on you demands a favour. Knowing that this will inevitably require bloodshed, you contact Little Jacob, an arms dealer who is also a good friend of Niko’s cousin, Roman, with the objective of acquiring some weaponry out of his car trunk.

You heard right, folks: you call him. Previous GTA games had you as the pawn in a giant game of telephonic chess, but instead of receiving those stupid calls whenever you wanted to get on a tractor and run down some civilians ("Hey Cesar, Suchandsuch is leaving San Fierro, right?"), it’s your call in GTA IV. Everything is done at your own pace, and there’s no pressure or being led by the hand; Liberty City is yours, even if you are under the thumb of your bastardising superiors. The phone is the centre of Niko’s Liberty City experience, just as it is for most of the real world (see "Get Myself Connected").

You arrange to meet Jacob on Rotterdam Hill, in Alderney (GTA IV’s version of New Jersey). Rockstar’s representatives informed us of Little Jacob’s place in the game, as well as other peripheral characters like him: it’s relationship-based. Presumably built on attention, reliability and good graces, relationships have been touted as a major part of the game, as maintaining them with arms dealers like Little Jacob are key to your progress through the missions. There’s no marching into Ammu-Nation, here; if you don’t forge the relationship, you don’t get the weapons. And beating on a policeman will only land you in jail, or, as it could easily be, dead. You collect the weapons out of the trunk and make your way across town in another cab; it’s easier, you see, than nabbing a car and evading the police, and you can even set a marker on exactly where you want to go.

After setting up your mission (named "Call and Collect") via an expressive, highproduction cut-scene that loaded instantly, you’re off to solve another case of blackmail. Interesting, then, that Niko finds the successful people to be in exactly the same position as he is – a bitter reminder of how tough life is in Liberty City, and maybe a further point on Rockstar’s "rags to slightly better rags" storytelling. The mission is to retrieve a Memory Stick from the blackmailer, which contains information on McReary’s more… ”questionable” activities, ones that could threaten his position. Not a million miles away from one Officer Tenpenny, then, and just as determined as ever in emphasising your status as a piece of shoe shit.

Thus, you arrive at the waterfront where McReary’s "problem" is resting, benchbound. The first thing you notice, however, is that this isn’t going to be as trigger-happy or simple as you assumed. There are no arrowheads to direct you, for one, and determining which figures you need to kill requires perception. Therefore, McReary’s idea involves giving you the man’s number and picking him out of a crowd based on who answers their phone at that time. Genius. It doesn’t end there, however; Rockstar also said that you’d have to see who hung up before you made a move. Fair enough, we say, as getting the wrong guy would blow the whole thing wide open.

Within five minutes of our first mission, we found ourselves grinning at these simply unique, perception-based missions. If we want to find something to complain about in GTA IV, we’re going to have to work really hard, because even the strongest points of the previous entries have received an overhaul. None more so, it seems, than the mission structure.

McReary’s man picks up the phone, and puts it down at the same time as us; handily, he stands up to search for his phone, thus revealing his position. There’s no opportunity for a stealth kill here, sadly, as civilians swarm the waterfront area, and only broad daylight gunfire will suffice in order to retrieve the Memory Stick. Thus, you head towards the man, pull out the gun as if nothing else matters, and bring his attention to your actions. With the shotgun out, a reticule flashes up and we’re suddenly seeing Niko’s first use of weaponry from a third-person targeting perspective (see "Smokin’ Faces"). A pang of excitement flashes through our minds for a brief moment, before the victim fearfully stands up only to witness his own, brutal slaughter. The weapon is put away.

The shit hits the fan. Suddenly, the famous Wanted level is flashing multiple stars, and your mind concentrates on just one objective: escape. At this point, we notice that the HUD has been streamlined to only a few displays. The map remains, sensibly, as does the Wanted meter and the money, but the visuals of it are reduced to mere blips in the top corner of the impressive display, with the map remaining in its lower left corner position. Rockstar wants you to appreciate the visuals of its golden, gargantuan city without any last-gen distractions.

Remembering to grab the Memory Stick, you pocket it for a later return and make for the edge of the sidewalk, where a car is parked. Suddenly, the map is flashing with circles of blue and red – hey, what is this, Driver? No. Rockstar representatives began to explain about this, as the Wanted system has also been completely revamped from the previous games. It’s now based on vision, we were told, with each circle representing the line of sight of the police chase (see "Wanted").

Once Niko is in the car, escaping, we get a real impression of what driving around Liberty City will be like. The vision is flipped, for one, with the default camera resting around the left-hand side of the car above the road. It still looks easy to control, and Rockstar’s efforts on this part actually make the city look far cooler than any previous GTA game has. The wide, comfortable angle is somewhere between the standard setting on previous games and that sinister "Cinematic" perspective that made the game a bitch to control. Cruising through Liberty City looks brilliant, frankly, and the golden skies of the city are even more detailed than before. We could slip into our whole "love letter to New York" rave, once again, but we’ll mercifully call it the most detailed, city-resembling entity we’ve ever come across in a videogame. It’s more polite.

Also, it’s the details that make it what it is: the buildings are a part of the environment, a feat that Rockstar could never have achieved with the PS2. On the PS3, however, it’s all there, running all the time without loading screens. As well as this, every street has a name, serving to solidify the identity of such a dense place.

Little improvements, such as people drinking on the street and carrying shopping bags, are leagues beyond what the PS2 brought us. Walking into them with Niko causes him to perform various actions, such as pushing them and knocking the objects out of their hands. Once again, it’s the sort of detail that was never there in the PS2 titles, or indeed any title before it.

Then, you discover that there’s also an in-game internet, and that it has its own content of pages. Although we only saw a preliminary form of what the web could look like, imagine the possibilities of such an item: secrets, objectives and more could be at your fingertips, and with the right amount of effort made it could go well beyond gimmickry. This is exciting stuff, and is further proof of the extensive detail in the new Liberty City.

Of course, so much of what the game has to offer remains unknown to us. Helicopters, for example, if they exist at all in GTA IV, are out of our knowledge for the time being, as is the presence of hidden packages and rampages. Rest assured, however, that not everything has changed in GTA: the sense of humour will be there, be it in the radio stations or, as ever, the brand titles. If TW@, the internet cafe, isn’t proof enough of their cunning humour, then Rockstar’s GetALife version of New York’s MetLife building surely is.

One thing we do know, however, is that some form of multiplayer is available in GTA IV, and that it is accessed via your mobile phone (or "Cell Phone", as our weird American cousins insist on calling it). Should we do our whole speculation thing, right here and now? A bit. Expect Rockstar to have learned some lessons from its fun multiplayer experiments with the PSP, as well as adding some absolutely new, nextgen- only features. The ideas we envision are exciting, but we’ll simply need another look at the game before we can make any kind of a judgement on this aspect. It’s a lingering thought, however, when you consider that GTA dodged online play completely in the last generation…

Like we said, though, it’s merely lingering, especially when the single-player looked so thoroughly refined and refreshing. A lot of people will criticise Rockstar’s decision to set it in a realistic city (not least of all Jack Thompson and no doubt some ill-informed tabloids), but the gamers that do take issue were probably envisioning a country’s worth of exploration, and more exotic weapons than ever (Electric Brick, anyone?). This would never have made sense on the PS3, we now see. If Rockstar were to follow the cartoonish road and make something overblown, it would have left a realistic and mind-blowing release as only a dream. Instead, the idea of being able to create a city that lives can finally be realised on the PS3, while the PS2 releases were always dogged by the fact that the hardware wasn’t enough for what the developers wanted to create.

Perhaps we should take a step back, though – this isn’t a religious pamphlet, after all, or even a press release. It wouldn’t be in our nature to drool like animals, since even the prettiest model on the catwalk can have a hairy tit mole, or a calf disorder. If we were to look at the exclusive demo and extract everything from it that we could, we would say that the difficulty of doing things such as car-jacking, or evading the cops, could well prove an obstacle in some gamers’ enjoyment. Although we relish a lengthy, realistic adventure, we found that San Andreas was hard enough for us. Will reset objectives, consequences and complex AI make the GTA experience a bit too inaccessible for the average gamer? Rockstar doesn’t seem to think so, but the difficulty of some of the things we saw could surely alienate some.

Still, this isn’t going to harm the no doubt monstrous sales of the title, nor is it likely to deface our opinion of it. The previous paragraph, in all honesty, was an active attempt to find fault with what seemed like very good, near-complete preview code. We found ourselves feeling a little guilty about our praise of the title, especially when the fanboy inside us rarely surfaces, even for the most quality of future titles.

Then, it dawned on us: there is a reason that our fanboy comes out to play with GTA. We’re talking about a series – an industry-challenging series, no less – that has a score history in Play of 98%, 97% and 99% respectively. Sometimes, it’s just worth ditching the veneer of cynicism, and GTA IV becomes the sole possessor of a unique, Play-branded style of praise. This feels like the series as it has always been; yet it also feels different. It feels better. When you recognise that the previous games are near timeless in terms of exploration, mission structure and freedom, you begin to realise what GTA IV may actually achieve.

It’s only in the second mission that we realise this. Although it sort of took place at the same time as Call and Collect, this is the type of mission that is a little more freeform. You do have to tackle certain tasks and go to certain places, of course, but it’s all on you, and this type of mission can run in conjunction with whatever else you’re doing at that time. Car-jacking, hanging in cafeterias, surfing the web: it’s your choice. Rockstar wants you to believe that it’s all part of the same experience, rather than a set of features that are isolated to whichever mission you’re doing. The car-jacking, the internet, the phone and the city – it’s all part of the same game, and the lack of loading screens really helps to solidify this feeling.

The second mission was even more dramatic than the first. Although all the preparation for such a mission will seem a little, well, lame to some, the idea of it being in your own time was a sensible pacing decision. Besides, the pay-off was the absolutely incredible shoot-out in the offices of Goldberg, Ligner and Shyster (if only they could make a joke out of that...), which certainly had a "blaze of glory" feeling to it. We weren’t sure if there were any other escape routes out of that office, but the sheer tenacity of the police force in that entire event suggests that death is always around the corner in GTA IV. Exciting, though. The new combat engine actually makes us relish such a battle in GTA, whereas the previous lack of tactics made us a bit fearful and cautious. Seeing Niko die, though, in that giant crossfire was an almighty way to end the demonstration… Clearly, Rockstar wanted to conclude with a summary of the title’s overall tone.

What is that, though? Failure? Impossibility? Now that we’ve witnessed the title first hand, you see, we have even more questions to ask. If the trailer weaved us a web of speculation, then this is easily a paddock of speculation, or at least a beehive’s worth. In addition to this already puzzled state of mind, the exclusive screenshots we’ve been handed give us more unanswered questions. Look, for example, at the incredible shot of Niko grabbing onto the back of the truck. Now, we saw nothing of that sort in our lengthy demo, but it looks absolutely stunning. As a cut-scene, this would be purely frustrating to watch in lieu of our massive expectations, but as a piece of gameplay? It would possibly be the best thing in the entire world. Still, it all depends on what Rockstar decides to keep in the final code.

Another question we have is over the mission we saw. Was that the only way to kill the man by the seafront, or the lawyer in his office? Obviously, there was a reason that Rockstar wanted us to see what we did see, but was it perhaps showing us alternatives of what could happen? As ever, we don’t know. Rockstar has also been touting the term “High Definition” a lot, but its meaning goes beyond the visuals (which are absolutely identical to our shots of it, amazingly). What Rockstar wants to create is an accessible, detailed world that absolutely everyone will love. It’s more than just the story, the car stealing or the brutal murder; it’s all three and everything else in the same, seamless experience, and it absolutely feels a cut above the rest. It’s almost like seeing into the future of gaming, or a template of what will be achieved by the PS3 for years to come. In another respect, it really is like looking into the future: it’s still four months away...

We’re not complaining, though. We’ve been privileged to witness to the most anticipated game of the all time, and we finally have the cause to call it that. So many developers have problems with the next-generation hardware, and many early titles suggest that the PS3 development has been viewed as a chore, rather than an opportunity.

Rockstar, however, has seemingly created a GTA game that nobody could have imagined: it embodies everything that the series has stood for since its inception, yet every little aspect of it has been it has redone and optimised for the new generation. This, when you give it some real thought, is a remarkable feat. How many developers, year after year, leave the formula of a well-liked title identical for the next generation? It’s almost always every one.

Even our most favoured titles, such as Devil May Cry 4 or Ninja Gaiden Sigma, barely outpace their last-generation predecessors, but as soon as GTA IV started up, we saw a rebooted, beautiful and fresh-feeling title that just made us smile. We sat there, simply, and smiled. There were no “WTF?” remarks or misunderstandings; we just wanted to get our hands on the damned thing. No game from now until then will settle this feeling and, at this point, Grand Theft Auto IV is the brightest light on the PS3’s horizon by several billion suns. The future’s not far.