GTA IV impressions after one hour of play

Monday, April 28th, 2008

1) The cars handle really crazily now; I guess they are more realistic? The shitty cars I got to use had a hard time handling at high speeds, and really couldn’t drive on grass at all.

The character seems to have the same sort of rules. You have momentum and can no longer turn on a dime. Jumping still kinda sucks, though, and it was hard to tell what fences you could grab onto and get over, and it was easy to accidentally not make a jump over a short object.

b- There’s a lot of neat procedural animation, even if the whole game isn’t procedurally generated. The game tries to adjust the character so if you are standing with your feet on uneven surfaces, the animations compensate, and you don’t clip through or hover over one. It looks neat.

iii. The multiplayer works exactly like Burnout Paradise.

4. The new wanted system works exceptionally well. Instead of a flat star rating, the first cop that sees you and gives you that one-star wanted level has a radius around him, and if you can escape it then you get off. Any other cop that spots you before you escape also has the radius, and as you get more stars, the size of all the radii increases. The size of a helicopter’s was too big for me to even see on the minimap.