Once upon a time, the Grand Theft Auto series was held up as the gold standard of open world games. True, the series never actually invented the genre, and if you want to be pedantic about it, early games like Elite were way more open and far larger in scope than any of the GTA titles. But it’s inarguable that the concept only really took off with the release of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, so much so that similar games like Crackdown, Saint’s Row and Mercenaries were known as GTA clones.

In many ways, the open world genre can be regarded as the apogee of video games. It is after all the ultimate realization of the fantasy of entering a fictional and yet realistic world with its own set of internally consistent rules, densely populated with autonomous AI-controlled agents that you can interact with, and being set completely free to do as you will with the sandbox you’re given. So it is especially sad that despite its illustrous pedigree, Grand Theft Auto IV isn’t much of an open world game and at times even risks forgetting that it is a game at all.

Don’t get me wrong. Liberty City is an amazing place and getting to visit it is almost worth the price of admission alone. It’s significantly smaller than San Andreas but more than makes up for it by being jam packed full of detail. No more cruising past blocks of nondescript generic buildings. This is a vibrant, thriving city filled with specific, named restaurants, laundromats, banks, theatres and shopping malls. Different neighbourhoods feel distinctly different and have all of the appropriate details, down to business names, street signs, store fronts and the riff raff hanging around on the streets.

It should be noted that on the PC GTA IV has rather steep system requirements, but if you do have a decent gaming rig, walking around in Liberty City is a wonderfully real and immersive experience. Ironically for a game that focuses so much on driving, the only way to fully appreciate all that the city can offer is to hoof it. Pick a street to walk down and window shop at all the different stores. Duck into a secluded alley and gingerly tiptoe past the trashcans and bums. Go underground to take the subway and admire all the posters and graffitti. No matter where you go, everything looks convincing and polished. GTA IV might not stand up to a frame by frame comparison with Crysis, but taken as a whole, it’s unquestionably a more impressive technological achievement.

All that detail isn’t just for show either. If you drive up to a toll gate, you’ll actually need to stop and pay or be wanted by the cops. You can walk up to a newstand to buy a soft drink or stall for a hot dog to quickly refill your health. Take a cruise in a helicopter at night, and you’ll see all of the skyscrapers nicely lighted up. The verisimilitude is further enhanced by new toys. In addition to the now familiar radio stations, GTA IV also implements fake television stations that you sit and watch and even a fake Internet complete with spoof websites and an e-mail system. You even have a spiffy mobile phone complete with a list of contacts, organizer and camera. To get an idea of the possibilities, try dialing “911” with it.

What does disappoint me about GTA IV is that Rockstar spends all this effort to create an amazing city and then fails to cut you loose in it. Instead you’re held on a tight leash on what you’re supposed to do and where you’re supposed to go throughout the game. While previous GTA games were always a lot more linnear than advertised, the problem feels far worse in this particular iteration and is further compounded by the severe lack of side activities to do. You can still do things like vigilante missions, steal specific cars and assassination missions, but these are all now pre-scripted events instead of the semi-random activities they used to be. The oddball stuff like delivering pizzas, rampaging through the city, putting out fires with a fire truck and sending patients to hospital in an ambulance are all totally gone.

One thing that annoyed many people in San Andreas was having to regularly hit a gym to exercise. That’s out now but it’s been replaced by something even more annoying. You now have to regularly call up your contacts and do their favourite activities with them or risk alienating them. This isn’t restricted to just your girlfriends either as your male friends will also insist that you spend some quality time with them. Imagine driving across town to start a story mission and getting a call on a mobile phone from a friend who wants to go grab a bite to eat or visit a strip club. It may be novel the first few times but gets tiresome very quickly.

What’s more, despite the stronger focus on plot-based missions, they really aren’t much good and are interrupted far too often by cutscenes. You don’t get to do anything in the missions that you haven’t done a thousand times already in previous GTA games and few missions are memorable or special in any way. Rockstar even insists that story missions be done in a specific way, which further detracts from the game being a free-form sandbox. For example, in missions where you’re supposed to chase an enemy vehicle until it stops at a scripted location, it’s not uncommon for the vehicle to be completely invulnerable to all damage until some invisible checkpoint has been triggered.

Gone are the whackiness and sheer, unbridled fun of the previous titles to make way for a more serious story. Previous games were never shy about sending you off to cool locales to do weird stuff, even if it didn’t make much sense within the contect of the larger story, but GTA IV plainly insists on keeping a tigher rein over the narrative. This is, to me, the root of the whole problem.

The blurb at the back of the box advertises the game as the dramatic story of an immigrant from Eastern Europe trying to live the American dream. Predictably, America isn’t quite the land of opportunity the protagonist Niko Bellic expected and he ends up getting into all sorts of trouble and owing powerful people all sorts of favours. None of this is exactly original stuff but Rockstar seems to think that it’s Oscar-worthy or something and worth sacrificing some of the craziness of the previous games for. Unfortunately, they’re wrong and as much as Rockstar wishes otherwise, they don’t have the talent of Francis Ford Cuppola and GTA IV isn’t The Godfather. Actually, it doesn’t even come close to matching The Shield.

For an example of how highly the developers seem to think of their writing and storytelling skills, look no further than the Comedy Club and Cabaret shows you can take your dates to. It’s amusing at first to be able to walk into these buildings and actually watch a real show, but the silliness and stupid jokes wear thin after a while. But when you try to actually skip through the sequence, your date complains about being forced to leave before the show’s over!

The fact of the matter is that games aren’t movies and game designers aren’t directors. While it would be nice to have a decent story in a Grand Theft Auto game, the story in GTA IV isn’t actually any good and trying too hard to keep things serious and shepherd the player down a fixed course just dilutes everything that was fun in GTA. Players should be free to do whatever it is that they enjoy the most, and the game should always come before the story. Until Rockstar recants and go back to their roots, there will be plenty of other games that will be happy to take the throne and be a better GTA than GTA itself.