Grand Theft Auto IV Comments by Kieron Gillen

I feel little inclination to play it again on PC with better graphics. Short but good story and little else to do once that was done. The new clip editor is a throwaway feature. How about mayhem missions please? More open-world gameplay is needed in the single player.

Having read the comments about the PC game and seen the jaggy-looking screenshots on other forums I have to say that this version looks a tad disappointing. No support for AA - it doesn't even work if you force it - and very high system requirements even to get it looking and running like the 360 version. Even then it would be missing that version's 2x AA.

For example, my own PC which can run Tomb Raider: Underworld at 1680x1050 with maximum settings and 4x AA and 16x AF at a higher framerate than the 360 version which is 1024x576 native with 2x AA and inferior textures would not be able to run this game anywhere near as well as the 360 version. And as I said it wouldn't have any AA so it would look uncannily like the inferior PS3 version which also lacked AA.

Disappointing really. Terrific game but I can see why it only got 9/10 personally... it's really not optimised properly for the hardware and doesn't make proper use of modern graphics cards' capabilities.

I'll admit it could run a little better, but the offficial forums is already again full of idiots who complain they can't put all the sliders to the right. *sigh* If Rockstar had limited the sliders to half of how far they go now, they'd probably be happy.

Just said it in the forum: the engine is a peculiar one. The game looks really rough up close, but gorgeous if you move just a little further away. Never seen a game before where this makes such a big difference. Just moving my screen a little bit further back helped a lot.

I have no idea where you got this review from kieron. i am running a fairly standard set up for a mid-high range PC, and the game runs appalling badly for a released game. Textures and antialiasing are no existant, shadows are abysmal, and due to a huge memory leak i have to restart the game every 20 minutes. All the extra programs added are a joke. My poor firewall was going mental during the instal and the first few hours of gameplay. I am very dissapointed with this product and will be trying to return it to gamestop today

And this here review is one reason why "review" copies should not be given reviewing space. From reading the report on other sites and the other one posted by none other than the good man Kieron himself, it seems the release candidate is absolutely abysmal.

You should take this review down, and re-do it with the release game on a mid-range comp and not some glorified alienware-paid-for beast and see how it fares then.

I've been looking forward to this game coming out for PC for months now due to not owning a modern(ish) console to play it on, and now im glad Im skint this month and couldnt pay for the game. Ive bought the previous games and was going to this, but christ Im glad I didnt now. My computer is not high end, but it plays Far Cry 2 smoothly and some other ones I bother with when not on WoW but I have a feeling I'll get about 5-10fps on this just like Bully.

What has R* been doing on PCs these days? Coding games in Visual Basic or something..

Pretty poor review. What is the point in spending half the wordcount on how great it is to have custom soundtracks? As has been noted that was around since the first PC version of GTA, hardly a fucking revolution is it.

I think ultimately GTA is one for the newbs who aren't familiar with the series. For the rest of us its just more of the same, or in some respects less of the same. With added ringtones :)

Not a great review EG. It is relevant to point out the steep hardware requirements and frame drops and 360 controller support. But where's the reference to the short main story and the utter lack of things to do outside of the main story (well unless you want to shoot hidden pigeons). Rockstar experimented with a more film-like main story, which is admirable, but forget about the gameplay? Gets a 7 or 8 at best.

Kieron Gillen sucks cocks.

LoL @ giving a game 9/10 that won't even run comfortably at 1680x1050 on a HD4870 1GB, with every freaking setting almost as low as they go!

Well after finally getting this on the PC I have to say I'm disappointed, while it looks far better than the console versions its so damn buggy, crashing with out of video memory errors every 20 minutes despite being a GTX 280 in just 1680x1050 just doesn't cut it. I'd recommend people keep away until at least another 2/3 more patches come out

does it still have car races? they were fun.

So agree with the comments in the review about how spooky it is that the right tunes play at the right moments! I ripped all the music from all the stations in Vice City and put it in the Independence FM folder. Tuning into it always seems to bring the right song up. Like driving back to the flat after a mission and the sun going down with that sort of pink look everywhere and then 'I wear my sunglasses at night' coming on, the tracks always seem right on the ball - which shows how excellent Rockstar is! bet i could rip the GTA IV songs and put them in San Andreas and it would sound right too!

So yes, you have to do a lot of tweaking. (I have a 256mb 8600GT, 2gb memory. AMD 5600 dual core PC!), but once done, playing the game just gets better the more you play!

This game has also shown that hardcore PC gamers are part of the reason for the continuing decline in the PC gaming format,with their demands that every game should be played maxed out. It is his attitude that leads to the No.1 reason why gamers go to console and not PC - constant upgrading! I play this game at 1024x768 with Low Textures but everything else High. With Distance set to 1 and shadows to 1 I still get good shadows and I still get distance draws, having these options set means no pop-in and little fade in and a 30+ framerate nearly all the time. For the life of me I look at my game and see video's where textures is set to Medium and I see no difference at all. What I do see is PC gamers willing to have the most laggy game all so they can play a little more closer to maxed out!

I play retro PC games, like Thief, as well as modern AAA PC games,and for me it's about immersion. Liberty City is the most realised city evr put into a video game. You owe it to yourself to play it with little lower settings so you get smooth gamplay and no pop-ins, only that way can you immerse yourself into this great city and great game!

It's a great game except for the mission re-plays. First, you should be able to make mistakes and have the story change and the game carry on. Second, if you have to re-play a mission - don't take the bloody car I arrived in away, so i have to steal another - and don;t start the re-play so i have to do 10 minutes of something again to get the the actual mission!!!

Overall, this game is second to GTA San Andreas in my view, GTA IV is a pretty game (if you're PC can run it!), but it is more shallow and with much less content than San Andreas. If the Belic story was put in the SA world, then the game would have been about perfect.

Every PC GTA game has got better until the GTA IV 'multiformat' version came along, which meant PC gamers get unoptimized code with a built in emulator so we can play, in effect, a 360 game!