GTA IV has now been out for just over one month. By now, most of the serious fans will have finished up the single player story (assuming they haven't been too distracted by the multiplayer) and the really serious ones will have probably dinged 100% completion. So, was it worthy of its portfolio of perfect scores? Is it the epitome of next-gen gaming? Beware, some vague spoilers ahead.

For the record, I have mostly enjoyed the game, completed the main story (choosing to stick the principle driven approach at the end) and have now basically left it to gather dust. That's just me - if I had more spare time I would probably go back to it, but I'm not making time, which I think is also important. Also note this is just a think-piece to promote discussion and not intended to offend you if you think the sun shines out of Rockstar's arse.

So why am I not picking up the controller and finishing off the assassination missions or cruising Liberty City's streets for more entertainment? Well, for starters I just find the place so horribly depressing.

I've never been to New York. I figure I must have seen pretty every square inch in some film, TV show or video game by now anyway, and there are plenty of other places worth visiting that I don't have rammed down my throat every time I switch to E4. But one thing I never noticed was how much it fucking RAINS there.

Every time I fire up the game, I emerge from whatever dirty rat hole my character has squatted in this time, to find a torrential downpour shrouding Liberty City in a dingy mist. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact the game's designers are / were based in Scotland. However, it is not without a great deal of irony that I find myself closing the curtains on the long shadows of another beautiful spring evening in Edinburgh just so I can see what happening in the digital metropolis of perpetual gloom.

Weather aside (I'm British and therefore genetically pre-disposed to grumble about the weather, real or virtual, at every opportunity) the entire game's narrative turned out to be a decidedly melancholy affair. Somewhere along the lines Rockstar decided to spill a bucketful of realism into the sunny, sarcastic GTA soup. But seriously, why? Does anyone actually want realism in their games (driving sims excepted, perhaps)? Life, most especially life as a murderous immigrant, is depressing enough as it is. We play games to escape that.

Just because the term 'realism' is chucked around in the videogames world as a synonym for 'great graphics' doesn't mean that every game should feel the need to get all gritty and sober. Yet now the cheerful, cheeky GTA of the former generations is long gone; the bright, colourful, cartoony characters have been replaced by serious, supposedly deep replacements.

The trouble is, this exposes one of the several myths about GTA IV - that the story is really good. It's not; it's actually a bit bollocks. Oh sure, it ticks all the right boxes, but basically all it does is rip off a dozen gangster movies and strive desperately to stick as many despicable crime families, gangs and ethnic groups into one small area as possible, covering up a lack of originality with a long string of supporting characters you're supposed to give a shit about but never do. The fact that the tongue has been utterly removed from the cheek just exposes them, their settings and a lot of the dialogue as cardboard cut-outs instead of light hearted parodies.

Then you're actually expected to care enough about these entities to engage in the various pointless mini-games the game has on offer. I do laugh now at the reviews that optimistically called these 'good enough to be games in their own right.' Sure... maybe on PS1. You can't really begrudge the fact that they're there - and Liberty City would be less without them - but to force you to soldier though them for the purpose of earning a little thumbs up from some throw-away 'friend' is just slowing down a game that already takes a good four hours of play for it to stop giving you training missions.

Incidentally, after only a few hours on the game, I'd ignored so many badgering phone calls from this needy band of hanger-ons that most of them hated me, would probably spit at me in the street and certainly didn't want to share their cheap guns or free taxi rides with me. Is it really so much to ask that I just wanted to wander the streets of liberty nailing the odd pigeon that I couldn't do it without a constant barrage of phone calls? Yes, I know about sleep mode - it's not that I didn't to find some way of interacting with the people, I'd just like to do it at a pace that didn't suggest stalking.

There's another huge irony at the core of GTA IV that can be easily overlooked, and for the most part, has been. There's all this effort to somehow make you give a damn about NPCs who you otherwise would have performed the same three 'go here, shoot this guy' missions that we've been playing over and over since, errr, Grand Theft Auto. But it completely ignores what you do literally ALL THE TIME: kill people for no reason at all. So, I'm supposed to care about the bleating of some fat coke dealer and do some work for her. Yet at the same time, I'm happily offing other apparently lesser drug dealers because they are merely a nuisance preventing me from picking up an old banger that may or may not contain some drugs or something. I don't really mind either way, but the way the two situations offset against each other is a bit jarring.

Another example - with all this serious dialogue and the mature, tragic events that befall Niko towards the end of the game, the complex moral decisions that are asked of the player, did we really have to have such pathetically adolescent humour throughout? I have to hand it to Rockstar, they literally did manage to make every single last game entity into a smutty joke, from Sprunk to Love-Meet.net to the 69th Street Diner (because the number 69 will NEVER EVER stop being funny, natch), to Liberty Swingers, to whatever crap they've written on the hot dog stands, to the fact that someone actually spent time writing vulgar in-game spam email for you. It's just a bit sad. And hey, look how many times they managed to insert the word 'cunt' into the game. If there's a better sign of a mature approach to writing game dialogue, I've yet to see it.

The reason it irks me is that it's such a contradictory - almost schizophrenic - approach to game design. Here you have the serious side - it's the tale of broken man, seeking revenge for a past trauma, mucking down in the seediest side of urban life to survive, to find justice for his past wrongs, to recapture his lost humanity. Here you have a hilarious man on the radio, swearing a lot or talking about trannies. Tee-fucking-hee. Neither approach is particularly wrong - I'd actually prefer the wild and childish side to the gritty, urban one - but together they make a really unsettling mix, and for me it only catalysed how glum the whole thing really is. At this time I am reminded of another Rockstar title that was decried for its "unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone". They should have tried GTA IV.

Now, as I'm sure someone will make me acutely aware, none of these gripes are anything but a subjective view of the game. There are plenty of other things I wanted to talk about - how shit the police are, how much I love the new vehicle physics, why having to dress Niko in a suit to complete a mission is about as bent as it gets - but I've really gone on long enough. It's worth noting that although there is some backlash against the wealth of perfect scores that GTA IV received at the hands of objective reviewers, I actually agree that this game is a 10/10 game. Sure no game is perfect, but Rockstar has come about as close as it is possible to get to technical perfection (unless you own a 60GB PS3, of course). It has very much set the benchmark for sandbox gaming for this generation. But, for me, the series has took a wrong turn about the time someone opted to put a filter the colour of a piss-stained teabag on the camera. I just hope future GTA's can recapture the magic of the earlier games.

Al Warmington is deputy editor of the Shiny Media games blogs. He is probably in a bad mood because he just completed Haze after more than 6 months of waiting and less than 6 hours of playing. If you disagree with his wittering, feel free to write in to tell him he is a lying [insert platform] fanboy who likes to [insert debauching practise] with domesticated livestock.

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