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By KevinG (9th May 2008)GTA is back with a vengeance. It’s been nearly four years since GTA: San Andreas and now packing a brand new physics engine, Rockstar have created their most realistic virtual environment yet.

If you have just woken up from a coma recently or were hiding in a sensory deprivation chamber out on some remote mountain top you may have missed GTA IV’s world-wide release for Xbox 360 and PS3, at midnight on April 29th. Such is the scale and appeal of this game that if you were not spending your time anxiously waiting outside the shop doors yourself then you know someone who was.

There are all manner of records that have been smashed in the last week or so, from the amount of money generated in week one (US$500 million) to the number of units moved in the same period (6 million copies - 3.6 million on launch day), so let’s get to grips with what could already be the game of the year, if our precognitive abilities don’t fail us.

You take control of Serbian Niko Bellic, who arrives off the boat in Liberty City to live the American Dream. A veteran of the Bosnian war, Niko has been enticed to come by his cousin Roman, who has emailed stories of his wild lifestyle and fabulous successes. When Niko meets up with Roman it quickly becomes apparent the Roman is fond of telling tall tales, and is in fact up to his eyes in debt with local gangsters and only owns a small taxi company. It is at this taxi company that Niko meets up with Vladimir Glebov and quickly gets embroiled with the underbelly of society, the Liberty City Bratva, while trying his best to help solve Roman’s problems. It’s about here that the familiar feel of GTA returns and the plot begins to thicken, with new characters introduced quick and fast and the whole feel of the game develops. You can fiddle around with the radio in your cars, with a gaggle of stations featuring some brilliant scripting and discussions, evident that Rockstar used just about every cent of the rumoured US$100 million it cost to produce.

As the very engaging and at times downright hilarious story unfolds through the early missions the controls required to play the game are activated and explained. Niko will make contact with various characters as the game opens up and you will have the ability to develop friendships’/relationships with some of them. The ability to have girlfriends has survived from San Andreas and now you can have as many as can be kept happy at one time. There are moral choices that can lead to or hinder the development of a friendship so be careful what actions you choose. To help develop a friendship you must contact friends and ask them to go out for food, to go to the bar, to maybe bowling, pool or a game of darts. The relationships are an important new aspect added to GTA IV and making sure that you maintain these friendships has its rewards. Roman will offer a cab service that will pick you up and drop off anywhere and anytime you need for free, and others are unlocked from friends in due course.

Liberty City is a virtual treasure trove of an environment to play in. It is much more vivid than previous games and feels like a real, lived-in city. The environment is smaller in size to GTA: San Andreas but all of that space has been filled with eye catching views and things to do. The city really comes to life at night and the shadier denizens can be seen on street corners and in the more decrepit areas. The citizens are engaged in there own lives, and as you wander the streets you will catch snippets of conversations amid the screams, as they dive out of the way of your recklessly driven car. If for some reason you don’t feel like driving, or say Niko has had a few drinks in the bar with his girlfriend and is in no fit state to drive, you can use cabs without jacking them.

As with just about everything else in the game, getting around has been pulled into the 21st century. You now have GPS to help guide any recently made car, mobile phones to call people, arrange dates and enter cheats (dialling 911 will start up a car that has died, by the way) and there are hours of outrageously funny TV, radio and internet content to absorb.

Niko’s mobile phone is one of the main interfaces with the story. Characters will ring you on the mobile when you are receiving missions, after a failed mission you can instantly repeat it by selecting the retry option on the phone. In another example in how the game world has been developed, you can call the numbers displayed all over the game world. If you have unlocked special services from a friend then you can select these from options on the phone and if you want to meet up with a friend there will be options for activities listed here as well.

There are 18 radio stations available in game among which you will find songs by the like of Bob Marley, Black Sabbath, Justice, Kanye West, The Who, and Thin Lizzy. The GTA series has featured great music in the past and this time it’s bigger and better, recognised by the above artists who have signed.

Getting back to the game, and there’s no other way to say this but the single player gameplay is outstanding, with the new features added in the GTA IV physics engine helping make real the game world which has had so much invested in it. Aiming weapons at specific body locations has huge bonuses to efficiency (or cruelty). Taking cover during a shoot out gives you added protection but there are times when this can be less than easy so get well used to how it works. Breaking into cars is a real joy and jacking someone is as easy as ever, but now the car owners are more persistent and will get dragged along the road if they are holding the door handle when you drive off.

There’s going to be huge debate about the handling of the cars, but I have to say that the system Rockstar decided on not only works well after some practice, but probably requires more skill to learn than before, meaning that the brakes need to get a workout because you can’t take corners at 160 kmh any more, and reacting to the very bouncy nature of the cars is a skill in itself.

The cops in Liberty City must have been on training course since the previous visits as they will appear very quickly if you break the law and are persistent in chasing you down. There is a new evasion system where the level of stars attained will result in larger search areas centralised around where you were last spotted. To escape their attention you must get outside the search circle and stay low or get to a Paint’N ‘Spray without the cops spotting you. Items found around the city, i.e. bricks, cans can be picked up but it is much more difficult to find weapons than in previous versions of GTA so be prepared to seek them out as it is really worthwhile.

But now we get to the knee-wobblingly good bit, never-before-featured-in-a-GTA-series online multiplayer. No longer do you face the prospect of shouting in joy at a six-star escape only to realise you’re the only person in that cold room, because not you can have a friend along. Many friends.

In stable stuff, you can customise your character’s look by changing the race, sex, hair, and clothing. By using Niko's mobile phone in the single player environment, you can set up or join in any of 16 online modes. It’s a great way to see the entire city in the early parts of the game and get your hands on the full arsenal of weapons. You can either go for deathmatch and other usuals, but other modes like ‘Mafiya Work’ and ‘Cops and Crooks’ see teams working together which can be fun.

As a whole GTA IV is not a re-imagination of the whole series, it is a natural progression from the cartoon like feel of the early games to a newer, grittier, more realistic environment. The GTA purist may lament some of the changes, gamers may get annoyed with some of the glitches, but not for long, the game is just too engaging to be bothered with the small issues and there are too many new features to distract. There is always the possibility that new features will be added in later downloads and even if they are not, GTA IV will be a hard act to follow for any other game release this year.