“What?” I hear you say. “Anthony, you bought Grand Theft Auto IV years ago!”
Yes, but I hadn’t made a concerted effort to actually get through it until this last weekend. And now it goes on the pile with all the other Grand Theft Auto games I could never get through (which, incidentally, contains all of them. Why do I keep buying these games?)
So what happened? I am at a point about halfway through the game. The missions I’m stuck on are, specifically, The Snow Storm and Holland Nights. Both involve fighting your way through a long area (a burnt-out hospital in Snow Storm, a project in Holland Nights) and eliminating a specific enemy. Once you do so, cops teleport to your location and you gain at least a two-star wanted level. You must now fight your way out of wherever you are, facing much better armed-and-armored cops (or even SWAT guys, in the case of The Snow Storm). Should you manage this impossible feat, you must then get to a vehicle alive and lose your wanted level.
In the end, I think the real problem is the whole “I’ve got a hammer, so every problem is a nail” thing. “We need a GTA IV mission.” “Okay, what does the engine support?” “Killing bad guys and/or cops, getting a wanted level and then shaking that level.” “Okay, I guess that’s the mission, then.”
And the thing is, with enough retries I know I’d probably get through one or both of those missions. But what’s the point? The next mission is just going to be the same thing, only harder. Oh, and of course, there’s no way to trade time for skill. There’s no way to gain more health, get better at driving or shooting, or get better armor than the stock body armor. You play the game their way or you don’t play it at all.
And this really pisses me off because I really would like to see how at least one GTA story turns out.
Plus, what the hell is up with the complete lack of checkpoints during missions? Saint’s Row had them, and it made that game much more accessible than GTA. I really expected Rockstar to steal back the improvements Saint’s Row made to the gameplay, but of course they didn’t. Because that would make sense.
I didn’t finish GTA 4 either. I made it all the way up to the very last mission before I tapped out.
GTA 4 had numerous design problems for me. I can deal with having no in-mission checkpoints, but they should have designed their missions accordingly! So many missions start all the way across town where you get into a vehicle, and then they make you drive all the way BACK across town whilst they spout exposition for ten minutes in the passenger seat. This may be a neat and even effective method of story telling… The first time you hear it! After that, having to hear the same crap dialogue while driving around pointlessly for 10 minutes just becomes a painful punishment for failure.
Worse, the failure isn’t always your fault! The aiming system is a turd that fights you every step of the way (in the 360 version at least). Target the guy two feet in front of me who is blasting my face in with a shotgun? Nope, target the guy 100 feet away who is behind a wall and poses no threat. Sweet. Here’s an idea: Let me aim my own damn gun like every third person shooter ever!
Worse still, God help you if you have to do a mission with an AI buddy that you have to keep alive. I can’t count how many times my precious AI companion ran, nobly, straight into the field of fire of 10 baddies and I had to restart the damn mission. It got to the point where I had to kind of trick my AI buddy, usually by parking a long way back and picking off as many enemies as I could find by myself, then getting back into the car and driving a bit closer. For one mission, where I think you had to drive a garbage truck to a baddy hideout with a buddy, my buddy was so suicidal that the only way I ended up completing the mission was by trapping him between a car and a wall while I cleaned out the den. Awful.
Red Dead Redemption, despite the press, isn’t much better. I really don’t like Rockstar… And yet I end up boarding their hype trains without fail, and usually end up day one purchasing their stuff.
Yack! Escort missions? Glad I stopped when I did.
Although I will say one thing in GTA 4’s defense – you CAN free-aim. Just pull the left trigger about halfway down instead of all the way down. If I have to go up stairs, I tend to climb them backwards in free-aim mode so I can quickly kill anyone waiting there.
I’ve played vice city and san andreas to the end – san andreas twice actually. gta3 I played quite far, but can’t remember if I finished it.
In all the cases, I’ve ended up using a trainer, if for nothing else, to stop the damn timers on timer-based missions.
Vice city also has an infamous rc-helicopter mission near the beginning which is nearly impossible. Once you cheat your way through it, you will never need the rc-chopper skills for anything else.
They apparently realized this, because in GTA:SA the chopper mission is optional.
As for saint’s row, I quit when the game told me that it wouldn’t let me progress with the story before I ran around causing random chaos for a while.
Oh, forgot: GTA:SA has checkpoints in some missions; you retry a mission and it starts with a subtitle saying “later that day..” or some such and skips you halfway through the mission. Unfortunately, such missions are rather rare, and if you do anything else than just retry the mission, it’ll start from beginning the next time.