I started playing it on the 25th of October 2008 until just before Christmas, then came back to it in February, finishing it on the 13th of February. I did a few sidequests after that, gained a few achievements. Stopped for a bit, then over the past weekend, I watched my boyfriend playing it through to the end, so I picked it up on Sunday and sped through the game, finishing it on Tuesday - total time of 13 hours, 8 minutes and 56 seconds. (I did the main story with no sidequests; completed a few social outings but that's all).
I really like this game. You might have gathered that already through the amount I have played it!
The story is set in Liberty City, same as GTA III (it's not really New York though it resembles it closely!), and the city itself has a lot of character. It really feels like you live in Liberty City. There are literally hundreds of people in the cast, just as voices in the crowds, and even after dozens of hours of play I still sometimes hear new dialogue from them. Somehow the acting from those hundreds of random people seems better than every star of a Japanese RPG dub into English I've ever heard. Maybe it's the quality of direction. Maybe it's the quality of the casting. They cast Russians as Russians. Irish-Americans as Irish-Americans. Italian-Americans as Italian-Americans. Jamaicans as Jamaicans. No put-on accents. Well, apart from the guy playing Niko Bellic who occasionally loses his accent. :/ On the whole, it sounds good.
There's a lot of bad language and off-colour remarks in the dialogue, but sometimes it's really amusing. I'm not normally one to find swearing funny, or laugh at the way a person speaks, but it is somehow very amusing when you nearly run over a man and he exclaims "Cheesy vaginas!" XD maybe because it's such an unwieldy and unlikely phrase to yell in surprise!
Each island in the city has its own distinct look and feel... no, it's smaller than that. You see a little portion here of Chinatown, a Koreatown, poorer areas that sprawl, poorer areas that are all boxy buildings looking the same, a theatre district, an expensive area with really huge expensive houses... one of the subquests is a guy sending you pictures of cars to steal from pictures, and by the end of the game I could recognise where it was parked by the background. It's that distinctive.
The writing in this game is very good. The story itself... hmm, I could take it or leave it, overall... but the characterisations, the uncomfortable choices the user is asked to make, and the humour of a lot of the dialogue and in-game advertising, radio and world, make it all worth it. The advertisements in the game are all brutally honest advertisements for scams and rip-offs and things that either play on stereotypes or things that seem useless except to extremely vain / peer pressured / gun-crazy / drug-addicted (prescription or otherwise) people.
The worst writing is if you go to the comedy club in the game and listen to the comics there; compared to the main game, they are completely unfunny. I guess they just can't compete; it's like if you eat an apple and a sugary dessert, it makes the apple seem totally unsweet.
The main character, Niko Bellic, is strangely likeable. Considering he's a cold and cynical killer, and all. Nicest mercenary / assassin / murderer I can think of. He heads to Liberty City in search of a "new start" in life, as well as tracking down someone bad from his past for revenge. He has really bad fortune. Most of the characters he meets in the game are bad people. Niko befriends some of them, all the same. Some of the characters are even worse than that, by a long way, and Niko often has to work for them. It doesn't seem so bad killing off dozens of people when you know that most of them were terrible people. Overall he lives a terrible life, though. The people are bad, the city is crazy and shallow and self-obsessed, and he can't even once buy food without the vendor describing it as something off-putting. If it wasn't for the humour, this would be a depressing game.
I wouldn't have it any other way though. As it is, it manages to be the exact opposite of all the critisisms levelled at it in the past. It is the exact opposite of glorifying gang culture. Although you see a lot of people doing drugs in the game, they are usually really messed up physically and psychologically so much that the game seems really anti-drugs. Most of the gangs in the city are divided by race, and so are full of racists, but they're all crazy bad people. Niko tries to make his money in the world by doing gangster work, but just digs himself into more trouble as he goes along, and even the top gangsters he meets are not living happy lives; either drug addicted or always having to live in fear of their lives.
It's a very good, very adult game. I mean in attitude.
(Speaking of adult, there are strip clubs in the city and you can go in and pay for a dance but it's just seedy, badly lit, and really ugly. The best thing is that Niko heckles the dancers through their routines, going "does your mother know you do this?" or whatever...)
There is now an add-on game that you can buy called "The Lost And The Damned", but I don't know if I want to buy it. It costs 1600 MS points, which is almost as much as I paid for the entire game, and you're part of a motorcycle gang (which I wasn't too excited about in the game), and I don't really like how motorcycles handle in the main game. And I only have a little bit of space left on my hard-drive for games (Microsoft charge far far far far far far far far far far too much for bigger hard drives, I'm not going to buy one!)
