Grand Theft Auto IV review

It's a powerful and flexible system, integrated like all of GTA's options into the in-game mobile-phone browser. Press F2 at any time and the last thirty-or-so seconds are stored to your hard-drive. Call up the replay editor, and you get to cut it, re-arrange angles on the action, caption it, soundtrack it and generally mess around. I especially like the ability to lob in filters over the action. And the word SEXY!!!! in capitals. That may just be me. The only real problem with it is the F2 aspect isn't as simple as "the last 30 seconds". It depends on how much your PC is having a little think right then. This unpredictability does lead to a little frustration when you think you've saved an action sequence which makes the end of John Woo's The Killer look like the Bridges of Madison County and you've only got half of it.

Also, there's the option of your own music in game. By lobbing music files into a set folder, you can play them on the new radio station, Independence FM. This can be used as a simple track player or - if you give the chance for the game to have a little think before playing - turned into a full radio station, complete with news bulletins and DJs insulting your choice in music. This is a not insignificant improvement to GTA IV. While the radio banter was all very well in the original and its use to forward the plot far more interesting than its traditional cut-scenes, if you just wanted to actually listen to a tune while you drove - which is always a sublime experience - you had to spin the dial far too often. Now, just load up a cross-genre selection of stuff you dig and you're away.

And immediately the delicious moments of game/music irony amp up. Yeah, the the first time LCD Soundsystem Get "Innocuous" dropped on the normal radio stations I had to drive around for its whole length to get my I-am-in-the-GTA-IV-advert-f***-yeah! thrill... but a moment of music/world immersion hit me pretty much every time I skipped to Independence FM. Accelerating away from a desperate cop fight as Iggy Pop's final scream in Death in Vegas' "Aisha" rocketed out of the speakers... Crystal Castle's remix of "Atlantis to Interzone" as I dodged traffic tearing over the bridges... Shellac's slaying-anthem "Prayer To God" or Miss Kittin's purring about taking a life as I'm on the way to a hit... Robyn's "Who's That Girl?" after a certain betrayal early in the plot. All magical. And hell, everything in GTA is always better when you've got Shampoo's "Trouble" yelping sarcastically in the background.

On a less surface level, the changes in multiplayer are inspired. And while the custom-game support to allow you to find appropriate games easier is a functional boon, its real appeal is as simple as crossing out one number and replacing it with another. That is, "16" swapped for "32". The possibility for mayhem of the best GTA game modes increases pretty much exponentially as you amp up the number of players. Until you've had 32 bikers line up on a starting line for a race around the centre of a city, you haven't really seen GTA IV at its most insane. That is, best. One of the general criticisms of GTA IV is that it's abandoned the dumb-but-fun ground to the dizzily stooopid Saint's Row while chasing other priorities. If you consider that true, 32-player chaos totally puts that idiocy back in. Any time I played, I honestly didn't care whether I won or lost. By playing, I'd totally won.

Any untotalling of the win happens outside the system. There's quite a lot of hoops you need to jump through outside the game. To play multiplayer, you have to have a (free, I stress) Games for Windows account plus another one for the Rockstar Social Club. You can skip the login of the latter (if you don't want multiplayer or uploading videos), but it does have to be running in the background. For Steam users, it's three processes in the background. It's not a lot of hassle, certainly, but it is a bit of hassle, and worth knowing if you're the sort who get angry when talking about DRM. While we're talking about that, there's online activation too.

Personally, that sort of transitory problem is the least of my reservations, and the reason that I'm gravitating towards a nine is elsewhere. It's not even the frame-rate issues. It's because, while the game's a genuine ground-breaking blockbuster in videogame history, there's a few more annoyances than I'd like for a ten. Primarily, a lack of mid-mission checkpoints is frustrating, especially in a game where failure is more often from a momentary high-speed crash accident on the way back from the actual bank raid rather than an actual failing of skill during a shoot out.