Grand Theft Auto IV Multiplayer Hands On

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For those who prefer their slaughter on a more intimate scale, the smaller games, designed for between two and four players, offer compact little multi-staged missions against NPC opponents, with a strong focus on co-operative play. Ensuring that you have to work together, all team members get just five lives, and must all meet up at the rendezvous point to end the mission. Enemies are fairly stupid and easy to kill, but vast in number. Earning 100 dollars for each kill, plus a hefty bonus for completion, these are your best bet for advancing through the online ranks. In Deal Breaker you race to a drug deal and bring down the rival crew. Bomb da Base II involves stealing an armoured car full of explosives and then using the charges to destroy a boat. Hangman's Noose, on the other hand, requires you to protect gang boss Petrovic as you escape from a police sting at the airport. Fairly linear, these are modes where you have only a small amount of room for improvisation, which makes your choices all the more engaging. Trying to get Petrovic past a police barricade in an airport luggage trolley, for instance, probably isn't the best idea. Is it, Tom? [To be fair, that was Martin. I was the one suicide-bombing the cops using grenades. - Ed]

Based on a few days of intensive GTA multiplayer action, there's certainly a lot to praise here. You won't go short of gameplay options, that's for sure, and even when you've mastered every mode, there are enough tweaks that can be applied to keep things varied in the long term. The way it ties in with the Rockstar Social Club website is cute, enabling you to track the statistical carnage across the city on a daily basis, but the actual multiplayer section of the site isn't open yet. It's probably too much to expect the level of multimedia features that Halo 3 offered in this regard, but this a game crying out for the ability to retain some evidence of your outlandish escapades and share it with friends.

Online vehicle races are not for those still struggling with the handling.

That's not to say there aren't grumbles or improvements that can be made. Graphical purists will find much to sneer at in the PS2ish models and texture pop-in, while a laggy connection can make certain modes unplayable as cars and characters vanish and reappear all over the place. The ranking system doesn't offer much in the way of depth or incentives, being rather long-winded with large gaps between level-ups but no real reward for your perseverance. Some new hats for hours of play aren't exactly generous.

The free-roaming Party Mode, meanwhile, is a great idea. It's essentially a live gameplay lobby with no cops and loads of guns, not unlike Burnout Paradise's Freeburn, but the fact that you jump from there to the same stark lobby screens to start an actual event feels like a poor use of the space. A smattering of on-the-fly group tasks, such as destroying a certain number of vehicles or jumping from a certain height, would make it feel less like a copy of the existing (and self-explanatory) Free Mode. As you're already in the city, why not trigger the games within that city, and have players race to the area where the fun begins? For a series so dedicated to immersion, and given that everything happens in the same city, the stop-start nature of a long multiplayer session feels a little odd. It'd also be nice to be able to play some of the activities like pool, darts and drinking.

A shaky technical start and some room to improve, then, but hopefully we'll see some small updates and patches to tweak the front-end functions as Rockstar monitors how people are playing. In terms of pure gameplay, what GTA IV online lacks in sophistication it more than makes up in gleefully entertaining lunacy. Which is all we ever hoped for, really.