The first time you put the game in your Xbox 360, you get a loading screen with a montage of images done in that classic GTA illustrative style. Then the game just begins. There is no menu screen where you choose single player or multiplayer or anything like that. All of that is handled in-game. Instead, you are thrown smack into the story. And outside of reloading failed missions (another nice new feature of the game—you can reload your mission from your phone right afterwards if you fail), that’s about it for loading times. GTA IV does an amazing job of streaming the entire world of Liberty City as you play. Despite what some other people who’ve played the game have already said, I experienced very little pop-up, something you can usually expect in games without hard load times. In fact, playing the game in a near-gold state a week ago, as well as now with a retail copy, my experience has been relatively glitch free. That’s not going to stop the fanboys from fighting over which version is better, Xbox 360 or PS3. Guess what…I choose Xbox 360. I’ll take achievements over a couple of higher-resolution textures any day.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past year or so—or perhaps waiting in line to check the Internet at one of those refugee camps in Californy—you know by now that Niko Bellic is the star of this game. Literally fresh off the boat in Liberty City, Niko is originally from an unnamed country in Eastern Europe, most likely somewhere in the Balkans based on his name and references he makes to his time in “the war.” As opposed to other games that let you make the character look however you want, Niko is no simple avatar for you. Like C.J. in GTA: San Andreas, and Jimmy Hopkins in Bully, Niko is an example of Rockstar’s—and namely writer Dan Houser’s—ability to craft complex and interesting characters to lead their games. But Niko is somehow different. He may be a ruthless killer, but otherwise he’s a fairly decent guy. He loves his friend’s family and has a wickedly dry sense of humor. He seems like the kind of guy who’d be fun to hang out with, provided he doesn’t shoot someone on the way to the bar. Niko is hardly a psychopath; he’s just made some unfortunate career choices and become very good at doing some very ugly business. The actor who voices Niko, Michael Hollick, does a superb job, and the fantastic motion capture and animations (especially the detailed movement of his face as he expresses emotions) also go a long way toward bringing the character to life.

We first meet Niko as his cousin Roman is picking him up at the docks. Roman is instantly engaging, a wild and crazy guy who’s really just another shlub trying to achieve the American dream. He’s as ingratiating as he is spineless, but he’s also instant compelling as a character. Roman’s fate becomes as important to the gamer as Niko’s does. I found myself feeling very protective of him as the game goes on, something I’ve never really felt I had in a video game: a friend.

In fact, the concept of friendship is central to GTA IV. Like in the prior GTA games, missions are identified by the person who gives it to you. You know, all those little letters on your map. And as in the prior games, as you progress you meet more people, unlocking more missions. But thanks to GTA IV’s ability to build relationships with certain other characters, they feel less like a device and far more real. You can call up friends and go hang out, playing pool or darts or just getting totally s***faced at a bar. As a bonus, each of those characters has a special friend ability that you can unlock, that gives you assistance in one way or another (one person brings you guns, another can deliver a helicopter to you, etc.) Again, though, a big part of why this works is the amazing writing in the game. Characters are much more complex and nuanced, far more than in prior games when characters were often more like caricatures. GTA IV has a story that features real characters with real feelings that you will feel emotions for.

The excellent characters only help to drive an excellent story. I won’t spoil anything for you here, which is difficult to do. Like all GTA games, it’s a wild ride from beginning to end, and along the way you’ll have some key decisions to make, whether or not it is to execute a certain person at the end of a mission or let them go, or make a distinct choice between two paths that are presented to you. But it’s a reasonably wild ride (i.e. no aliens or jet packs) and something you’d expect from a serious Hollywood auteur. When I said the game reaches a new high water mark, this has a lot to do with it. Dan Houser has written one of the great tales about immigrants and the American dream. At one point, Roman exclaims: “We’re going to the top, Niko. The top!” To which Niko responds: “For now, let’s just try and survive, cousin.” That right there is your story in a nutshell. Full of twists and turns, it won’t end up where you expect, but you’ll love the ride and be left wanting more. Seriously, after 35 or so hours to get to the end of the story, all I wanted was more. Those downloadable episodes can’t come soon enough.

While all the story and writing is mindblowingly great, it wouldn’t be half as effective without the technological and design achievements Rockstar has managed to pull off. Yes, at first blush, the game is simply a “next-gen” GTA. But the amazing graphics, with some incredibly natural-looking lighting and really excellent performance for a game that models such a large and detailed world, are only half the story. The implementation of the euphoria animation engine is an excellent display of that technology. People in the world move in a very natural way—just watch Niko walk down some stairs. When guns start firing, enemies fall in different ways depending on where they’re hit and even do neat stuff such as clutch their neck and stumble away or roll around on the ground once they’re shot. It looks amazing, but if you back up and look at the whole picture, it’s really just continuing to make the entire world more natural and more believable.

But the fact that it looks cool when you shoot a guy is again only part of the story. GTA IV finally delivers a good shooting mechanic to the franchise. Your time on foot, gun in hand, was always one of the weaker points in the prior games. A poor target-locking system was partially to blame, but the whole system needed an overhaul. And, boy, did it get one. GTA IV features a shooting system that borrows from the “stop and pop” concept that drives Rainbow Six Vegas and Gears of War. Niko can, and must, take cover, popping up to take shots at locked-on enemies, that can be tweaked slightly with the right thumbstick for head shots or even leg shots for people you just want to incapacitate. For the first time ever in a GTA game, combat is more fun than frustrating, and Rockstar seems to know it. Why else would they put so many big shootout levels in the game, far more than any other game in the GTA series.

Of course the alpha to the omega of shooting is driving. You couldn’t have a GTA game without it. This time around, thanks to the more advanced physics at play, driving is more of a challenge. It’s rewarding to those who enjoy it, like me, but I can see how it might be frustrating to some. No worries…just take cabs everywhere. They act almost like a teleport and I, for one, used them all the time. Best innovation to the GTA series ever. 

Maybe the second best innovation is your cellphone. A lot of games have used the cell phone as a stand in for a pause menu, to make your world seem more real by putting a real thing in it to replace something that is unrealistic. You can’t pause real life. The cellphone in GTA IV is amazing, though. Your cellphone is the link to your friends and acquaintances. It’s how they contact you for missions and it’s how you contact them for favors or just to go play some darts. It’s got your personal organizer for missions set at a certain day and time, and you can also do other special stuff with it. For exampoe, you can call 911 to summon a patrol car—then just “borrow” it when the cop arrive up. There are other neat things it does, such as the number you can call that will tell you what the current song playing on the radio is, which ties into your account at the Rockstar Social Club website (provided you register) and enables you to purchase the MP3 at Amazon.

Ah, yes…music. Another cornerstone of the GTA series. In general, Rockstar doesn’t like it when we, the media, publish information about the songs that appear in the game. This isn’t because of a need to be tight, but because they want people to be surprised when they hear a certain track in the game. I can get down with this. I will say this: The radio stations are pretty awesome and have great DJs. When did you ever think fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was going to lend his voice to a game? They run the gamut, from rock and hip-hop to a Puerto Rican-flavored reggaeton station to a spacey modern-music station that plays high-brow experimental stuff such as Philip Glass. (It’s okay for me to say that one, because it was in the original trailer.) In general, though, the music collection this time is less of a hit parade than Vice City or San Andreas. Instead, they tried to put in a lot of cool music you know, as well as stuff you don’t, hoping to turn you on to something different. Rockstar’s taste in music is pretty impeccable.

Going back to the phone for a minute, this is your seamless entry into the multiplayer modes of the game. GTA IV features fifteen modes that you’ve probably already heard about, including standard Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch types, as well as racing and the more GTA-centric Cops ’n Crooks mode. Cops ’n Crooks is amazing with 16 players—it really feels like you have a gang on the run…or, conversely, that you are a part of a big police department battling your way across town. The fact that the world of Liberty City is open in multiplayer modes makes for some pretty interesting possibilities. I look forward to insane videos on YouTube of gamers doing cool stuff together. Rockstar pulled out all the stops on multiplayer, maybe as some kind of atonement for never really including it in the prior games. It’s hard to say if GTA IV’s multiplayer will be as huge of a hit on Xbox Live as CoD4 or Halo 3, but one sure hopes so.

Having laid out all these amazing things that Rockstar has achieved in moving its game miles ahead of anything anyone has ever attempted to do in a video game, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what gamers will experience playing through. I haven’t even covered going on dates, watching TV, your friend Brucie, getting on the Internet, the great GPS system or the four-player cooperative missions. There are so many little things, so many great details, so many unexpected random events, that I could write a book and it would just be an incredibly long list of observations. Instead, go play the game for yourself. When you see how Rockstar brought everything together in a perfect storm of video-game design, you’ll think about the score we gave it and you’ll have a hard time disagreeing. I promise.