GTA4 Preview-Gamespy

Here we are to bring you the highlights of another preview, performed by Gamespy.

The first thing they did? You guessed it, they picked a fight, sadly it was with a group of three thugs and they lost. Although they did get a good idea of what the fighting system was like, Rockstar have made it more complex than the old one button fighting you may be used to in GTA games, now while in fighting mode you can use each face button to perform a variety of different attacks including dodging and counterattacking.

After their shameful loss they started the first mission which serves as a tutorial for fighting. The story of the first mission is that your cousin gets into some trouble with a bunch of loansharks and you have to beat them off your cousin and then chase after the leader loanshark in a car. It is a nice simple mission to get straight into the fighting aspect of the game.

They soon found out about the new line-of-sight wanted system, if you break the law then you get a radius around your position which grows as your wanted level goes up. You can get out of this radius and this is how you get away from the cops. As they found out about the wanted system they also found out a lot more about the cover system, how you can cover behind not only behind walls but pretty much anything on the landscape, for example a parked car.

As for the driving experience, each car has its own pros and cons, each car handles much differently and they have fixed the bad handling around corners in previous GTA games which means you will have to drive with slightly more caution than before but if your car flips over then it won’t explode.

There is a feature which lets you hail a cab to take you anywhere in the game by a press of the button, or you can always stick to hijacking. In addition to this some cab drivers are undercover cops who can bust you, or open fire.

Of course they needed to test what it was like to get your character drunk and try control him. Needless to say he was quite hard to control, but being drunk only lasts a matter of minutes so it didn’t get overly annoying. Nearly anything on the landscape that you walk into will make yourself fall over and they found out the hard way by making him walk into the middle of the street.

Gamespy actually found some bugs in the AI and weapons while they were playing the game, nothing to worry about, just small things that you wouldn’t notice unless you were actually looking for them.

Read the rest of the GTA IV Preview