And so, 37 hours 31 minutes and 23 seconds after he started his journey, Niko Belic went to his apartment in Algonquin and went to sleep. Thus I saved my game for the last time.
I really enjoyed Grand Theft Auto. This is the first of the series I have finished, let along getting more than about 20% through the main story. In the previous games (GTA3 and Vice City) the horrid controls always brought me to a point in the game I couldn’t pass. While the controls in 4 aren’t great (it’s far to easy to drop a grenade at your feet and be unable to run away), they’re a major improvement over the previous games.
The music is great, as always, and the world is amazing. The credit sequence when you beat the game (which is LONG) is a collection of camera pans over the city so you can see bits of the amazing detail.
My only major gripe (besides the controls) is that some missions are needlessly annoying due to the lack of checkpoints. While they exist, there often aren’t enough. In the finial mission in my story arc, there are essentially 5 phases. While some (like the last two) are relatively short, the first three are not. Yet only the only checkpoint is after the first phase. So when you die in phase 2 (and you quite well may), or phase 3 (easy again), or phase 4 (easy here too), you get to replay all that stuff again. By the time I beat the whole mission, I had played phase 2 (a big shooting phase) 6+ times. Of course, each time eats up ammo, so I had to go buy more every once in a while.
It was an amazing game. I’m glad I played it, and I can’t wait to see the DLC.
