I’ve been playing GTA 4 for a week now, and I find the game pretty underwhelming. All the reviews I’ve read gave the game a 10/10 or similar glowing reviews. Was there a payoff? There is so technically wrong with the game, it would be deserving of a 7 tops.

The game is waaaay too buggy to deserve that perfect review. I could not even load the game on the PS3 the first weekend I got it until I read that you have to disable the internet completely or else it would freeze up. What the heck? For the money and effort going into the most hyped game ever, they should have at least worked out a major bug like that. A patch was released a little under a week after the problem was addressed, and works fine now. I also have a problem with the lack of interactive scenery. The blatant GTA: San Adreas clone Saint’s Row was actually a really fun game with probably twice the amount of open buildings than GTA 4, and the map was about 1/3 as large. This makes Liberty city a very barren place. The people and places are very sparse.

It is a fun game, but it’s not leaps and bounds greater the PS2 versions. It’s a bit glossier ad smoother, but it’s not the cinematic masterpiece video game reviewers make it out to be.