As you can see, I’ve finally received my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV and despite some minor problems with signing up for Rockstar’s Social Club service and tying it to a Windows Live account, have managed to get it running. As expected, my PC is a bit too behind the curve to be able to turn all the dials up, so I have to settle for mostly medium quality graphics settings. It’s not painful on the eyes or anything, but the game does have an annoying tendency to makes shadows all blurry and everything is a little too jaggy for my tastes. I guess Rockstar hasn’t quite caught on to AA filtering yet.

Of course, no GTA game is ever going to win any beauty contests. The strength of the series has always been in the scope and detail of its cities, not in top notch graphics. Still, there’s no denying that the scope of Liberty City is beautiful in of itself. Cruising past the game’s rendition of Times Square is certainly an impressive experience. The city is wonderfully alive too with lots of interesting stuff going on in the background. Cops chase crooks and actually load them into patrol cars when they catch them. The bridges have working toll booths. Perhaps best of all, buildings and interior locations are now seamlessly integrated with the main city.

What I dislike most about this game so far is that it feels too much like a linear RPG set in an open city rather than a real sandbox. Previous GTA games had plenty of side activities that were mostly unrelated to the main plot, and I enjoyed being able to buy new houses and businesses. So far I haven’t seen any of that in this iteration of the series. Rockstar seems to think that GTA is all about the story and seems to be trying too hard to make it a serious epic, eschewing the over the top whackiness I loved in previous games. I’m enjoying it well enough so far, but my favourite GTA is still Vice City. We’ll see when I get to the end of this game if my opinion changes.