As it's got to be nearly impossible to have avoided by now, due to advertisements and word of mouth, GTA4 follows Niko Bellic, a war-torn eastern European immigrant in search of a second chance in America. Odds are that he wouldn't have made the long boat ride over if it weren't for his cousin's romanticized stories of how good life is in America-tales which turn out to be lies from the start. From there, Roman introduces you to his friends and taxi service that he's been running in order to make a living, and you start doing everyone's dirty work to keep him protected from debt. I won't go much further into it than that, but the story definitely has its twists and turns, as well as moments that will take your breath away even just a couple hours into it. I haven't been this compelled to move forward in a game since Bioshock, which says a lot for games in general and the quality of these two as well.

And since story can add so much to a game, it's hard to pick apart the technical aspects in what helped it along. Fortunately, there's a whole list of "what's new?" to turn to in cases like this. Probably the first culprit would be the previously mentioned physics engine. Euporia utilizes not only a robust system of weight and other properties to vehicles, people, and other objects that it gives the GTA series the best face-lit it could have asked for this generation. Not only is it going to change the way vehicles handle towards a more realistic direction, but the bleeding-edge technique of natural motion which tells any character's body how to respond to various wounds, how to fly and land when hurled, and even how to fall down stairs.

This is a game that swims in the details, and so many small ones will be invented through an engine like Euphoria that it just might blow your mind. Things like this don't just save animators lots of time; it makes the game all the more believable and more importantly, fun to watch if you're not playing. It also means the open world unpredictability was just multiplied a few times, which is a double-edged blade depending on how much it works in your favor.

Speaking of details, the city is as well put together as a working one in real life. This is either due to the team considering aspects such as a city water supply or traffic flows varying through the day/night cycle when they put it together, or simply a result of working so hard to recreate the most memorable sections of New York City within the space they took for themselves. You've never played a game this functionally and aesthetically detailed at the same time. You can take the subway system, taxis, or a helicopter to see the city; these aren't just for decoration anymore. And that's not the half of it. Want to see a movie? Go to a comedy club? Watch live theatre? Go on a date? Get Drunk? Eat something? Play Darts? Bowl? Shop? Hijack a boat off the coast of Broker and captain it into rush-hour traffic onto the lip of a bridge? You can do it!

It's at this point that the detail of the game sinks a bit further and I fear that I may never end this review, so I'll touch on things and let everyone experience the end results firsthand from here on out. That is the best way to play the game, after all. It's not like you really care about what happens when you step onto the tarmac at the airport, anyway. Really, it's no fun at all to get out of that mess. Not even with 30 grenades.

The game does have its weak spots, no doubt. For one, the controls are both simple and complex at the same time, because nearly every button other than the joysticks are context-sensitive to whether you're driving, riding shotgun, on the phone, or even what weapon you've got. This means you may have a case of clumsy thumbs for the first few hours, but once you get a hang of it, you'll have a blast. That doesn't mean you'll be a master of driving while shooting after any length of play, though-at least in my case, that's all luck.

These are skills you'll need to learn in order to move up in the game, though. And believe me, you won't even live one second online if you can't figure out how to swap weapons while in the car, while at the same time picking a station or getting in touch with someone on your phone. GTA4's multiplayer is nearly a revolution in my opinion, if only due to the fact that the lobby is the actual game world-pedestrians and all. The game slyly worked the multiplayer setup into the game's handy cell phone, which you'll live out of within a half hour of play for social relationships and side missions in the single-player mode. Players can go in and setup a party or simply join a game, in which they'll find themselves in a race, team-based goal, or free-for-all romp. There are a variety of missions to select, one of the favorites being a cops and crooks mode where the hunt is on, with the bad guys trying to reach an evacuation point before being taken down by the opposite police team. Others consist of a race that can be won on foot, by the skin of your teeth, or by just playing dirty with a submachine gun.

The game does a fantastic job of keeping things at a level where they aren't overwhelming, but are obviously deep as the Pacific when you start digging. It then goes a few steps further by allowing up to 16 players the option to muck around in the same open world it seemed the game would struggle to push with just one person. It's for these reasons that it single-handedly dishes out more content than any game on the market, next to the Orange Box which has five whole games in it. That's five individual games, just to restate how big this is. And those games are fantastic, which says even more when looking back at GTA4.

This is all without mentioning how pretty it looks for a game of its magnitude. We never expected it to look like Uncharted, but it's got a lot going for it. The game looks great in or out of a cutscene, and has a few tricks up its sleeve to help it along. The water, for instance, may take your breath away when you first see it-things obscure as they sink deeper down for crying out loud. It's just something else to stand at the edge of a river overlooking the city at night and watch the smoke trail from a single rocket trace off into the distance at it.

That isn't to say it's perfect. The game has its fair share of pop-in, which is slightly worse on the 360 version most likely due to the PlayStation 3's install onto the console's hard drive. But honestly, what did you expect with a GTA game? It's not going to be perfect, just great. As I told a friend when he asked if Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" was a track in the smartly-composed soundtrack, Rockstar has fantastic developers, not gods. While the issue may be forgivable, it can't be ignored that there is a difference between the two versions; no matter how trivial that may be to players. If you're really into the console wars sort of thing, you can find dozens of places on the internet (or even an official comparison thread on our own forums) which will nitpick to your heart's delight. I can make it easy for you, though: you'll love it whichever version you get-these aren't things you'll regularly notice while playing.

The only arguable difference is the upcoming download content which will be exclusive to the 360 version. It's too bad that nobody has any word on what it will be, except that it will supposedly be big. You don't say, in a GTA game? For that reason, I'll let you decide on a hypothetical basis whether or not that's worth it to you. In my opinion it can't hurt the game in any way, but unless it's got more story content like maybe a console version of the previous game's "Stories" iterations, then I can't think of anything that would be worth paying for to add onto this game-it's got enough of everything else.

So another generation has come and along with it a Grand Theft Auto title is born. It's not going to please everyone, but certainly it will make fans of the series happy for the space between another installment. Some like myself may despise the social aspect in the single-player mode, feeling like it's too needy, while others may feel it adds an extra layer of substance. On the same hand, there will be a few who just don't care for the masterful story within this GTA title, and that's just confusing to everyone else. Whatever your likes and dislikes may be, if the game can bring enough out of you that you care for aspects of it than a single feeling for the product as a whole then it's done its job of being a deep enough game to keep its reign on sandbox worlds. Hopefully this review was big enough to share a place next to its title.