Grand Theft Auto 4 review

For all their censor-baiting controversy, we must remember that the first six installments of the Grand Theft Auto franchise have always fundamentally been about as "mature" as curling out a monster bumlog inside a crowded and badly air conditioned lift. Every attempt to evoke a gritty gangster melodrama was balanced out by a moment of abject cartoon stupidity: the original game awarded you bonus points for mowing down Hare Krishnas in a tank, Vice City introduced the time-honoured "fuck a whore to regain health" mechanic, and San Andreas deftly portrayed the urban plight of impoverished black Americans by inviting you to steal jet packs from Area 51 for Peter Fonda.

Grand Theft Auto 4, meanwhile, has simply glided into the eager gobs of the gaming proletariat like a lubed-up Greggs baguette full of hyperbole and wild dreams, wilfully jettisoning everything that might once have been amusing and fun. Gone is the giddy, coke n' Starburst-induced lunacy of old, replaced with a lifeless mess that somehow contrives to be simultaneously grim and gaudy AND incredibly boring, like Tim Westwood remaking Goodfellas for Men & Motors.

Foremost amongst the discarded is the characterisations. Okay, Tommy Vercetti and CJ Johnson might have been psychopathic thugs, but Niko, your morally reprehensible glove-puppet from somewhere frightful in the Eastern bloc, is an utterly unlikeable, emotionless prickwart, a Soviet-made Terminator with a profanity upgrade. This might be a refreshing change of pace from the usual chisel-jawed, all-American analogy for Christ, but if I wanted to play as an nihilistic, ugly, misanthrope from Europe I already have a remarkably authentic first-person RPG called Real Life. Niko has arrived on the shores of Yankdom looking for some unnamed third party upon which to exact revengement, but the storyline is advanced so sporadically that you'll either forget what's happening or make the conscious decision not to give a fuck.

The supporting cast are agreeably thick and generally useless and are therefore orders of magnitude more likeable than your snarky, one-dimensional asylum seeker. However, they're not beyond reproach, because outside of the traditional mission-based gameplay they insist on dragging you away from the storyline by phoning you up and demanding to be escorted to the theatre at the drop of the hat. Yes, Rockstar have at long last perfected the innovative "annoying friend who you don't really like but with whom nonetheless affect a superficial social facade in order to stave off their latent psychotic tendencies" mechanic and, having done so, ensure that you get your money's worth by ejaculating it out of your screen at every available opportunity. Combine this with the ranting roadside loonies spouting excerpts from Foucault's Pendulum and the spam emails for cock pills that show up every time you make use of the utterly pointless internet feature and you begin to wonder what other humdrum real-life inconveniences await us in the inevitable Grand Theft Auto 5. Teatime cold calls from Nigerian con artists? How about a minigame where you have to gingerly coax divots of dog shit out from the soles of your trainers with a toothbrush while trying not to gag?

Furthermore, while the pretensions towards turgid realism in a virtual world where evading conviction for serial murder is as simple as going to sleep are laudable, what do Rockstar think they're playing at by including the Internet inside a computer game? This is a worrying trend in danger of turning into some all-consuming multimedia ouroboros. Once we've accept this shit as de rigueur, it's a slippery slope towards games that include a fully-functional virtual console and virtual copy of the game you're already playing, and before you know it, our plasma TVs have been converted into infinity wells - sinister ontological puzzles of layered fictional universes from which there is no escape.

Also left emasculated by the Realism Bulldozer is the driving mechanic - which is frankly baffling, considering that despite the shooty bits and filigree of sidequests, Grand Theft Auto (see, the clue is in the title) has always been a driving game at heart. I was bitterly disappointed to learn that you can't drive at warp factor stupid all the time, and apart from handful of rare diamond-encrusted ultracars everything handles about as well as greased bricks in the cold vacuum of space. The game seems to be straining to guff the gritty urban experience into your lap, but it falls short, sticking in its anal pubes like a particularly persistent tagnut. The problem is that cities - while vibrant and bustling as the graphics and sound ably display - are, from a vehicular viewpoint, unpleasant and places to be. Once you finally find a decent set of wheels you'll have barely turned a corner before you've compacted it into a tinfoil veneer around a bollard, catapulting your Slavic avatar through the windshield with an urgent reservation at the asphalt buffet. Actually this is one of the best parts of the game, because in a rare condescension to dumb fun, the developers have implemented a bullet-time slowdown feature that allows you to savour the carnage in enough gruesome detail to make David Cronenberg jizz himself in half.

If that's the "auto" part of the game fucked, then at least they've got the "grand" in order. While the remade Liberty City may lack the incongruous diversity of San Andreas, it conveys the metropolis like nothing else committed to silicon. There's a sort of bleary mayonnaise filter on the camera which is obviously there to stop your GPU from going off like Three Mile Island, but at times it creates a transcendental Impressionist wonder - driving across a suspension bridge at dusk with the skyline glittering in the background is an authentic and truly haunting sight, and one of the few memories that linger on even after I've flogged the disc for pennies at Blockbuster.

Ultimately it's these flat impersonations of your own pitiful existence that contrive to make GTA4 a dull and listless affair, but admittedly I'm never going to be able to enjoy it on its own terms, purely because its older brothers and sisters were just too much bloody fun. These were the first true sandbox games, the ones that handed you a rocket launcher and a sprawling cityscape jampacked full of screaming artificial intelligences and positively encouraged you to turn the place into downtown Beirut like the Unabomber with a gutful of sweets and fizzy pop. GTA4 is a wrenching transition from a world which allowed you to binge on cheeseburgers until you resemble the pre-disaster Hindenburg, put on a gimp suit, parachute out of a Harrier jump jet onto the roof of a casino and then proceed to murder its clientele with a foot-long dildo.

For all the predictably awful "comedy" segments on the radio, Grand Theft Auto has just gotten too damn serious for its own good. It's still nominally a sandbox game, only now the best it can offer is anarchy distilled through the brain of an asthmatic accountant from Swindon. While it tries desperately to mitigate this critical pleasure haemorrhage by channelling the inner-city hell as depicted in uncompromising cop shows like The Wire and The Sopranos, it forgets that though these settings are relevant and enthralling to explore via tightly-plotted storylines and controlled camerawork, it's markedly less gratifying to be punted off a boat at midnight with a handful of coins and a bumpicking nonce for a sidekick and told to conquer the lot in the name of some arbitrary vendetta.