Analysis - What a Wonderful Exploding World

Following a recent—and still ongoing—gaming binge I’ve realized that open world action games, best exemplified by the Grand Theft Auto series, constitute my favourite genre in the video gaming medium. Following the fairly on-rails single player experiences of the Call of Duty and Gears of War games I’ve come to really appreciate interactivity or at the very least well-executed mechanics: games like Half-Life 2, the Halo series and BioShock give you a variety of tools but don’t hold your hand, preferring to let the player work their way through a scenario as they see fit.

In the case of open world games, where missions are accessed in a continuous environment and non-player characters abound, the beauty is how you can make other entities react, like dropping a pebble into a pond just to see the subsequent ripples. Or, in the context of GTAIV, dropping a live grenade in the middle of a traffic jam smack dab in the centre of Star Junction.

Analysis - Why Grand Theft Auto IV is the Best Shooter Ever Made

I’m destined to be eternally behind the curve, which is why I didn’t first listen to Arcade Fire’s Funeral until five years after its release and why I’m only now getting into Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto IV. I had played about an hour of the game back in my second year of university but with the sheer number of games I was playing that year it kind of got lost in the shuffle.

Come January of this year and I was finally getting around to playing Batman: Arkham City and realizing how much I love sandbox video games, so I picked up the Game of the Year edition of GTAIV from a grocery store electronics section for pretty cheap. While it took a few months for me to truly warm up to it, I can say without hesitation it’s up there with Arkham City and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as one of the best games I’ve ever played, and for the most unexpected reason: not the open world (though I love that) or the characters and dialogue (love them even more), but because of its shooting mechanics. GTAIV beats out Mass Effect 3 and even Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 in that department, managing this not in spite of its flaws but because of them.