Grand Theft Auto 4

Whee! Crap! Whee! Crap! Worth: $25
based on 360 retail game

Don't believe the hype. This game is good, but not that good.

Driver 1 and 2, all three GTA3's, and Saint's Row have allowed me to indulge my fantasies of running red lights, crashing my car, and generally running around like an urban maniac. These games have lots of good and bad things in common. Great driving, lousy on-foot camera, terrible weapon targeting, good stories and characters, and outrageously long mission retries due to an obstinate lack of checkpoints.

GTA4 fits right in with all of this. Mechanically speaking, nothing has changed for this franchise. In a pitched battle, you don't fight the bad guys so much as you fight the camera and crappy aiming system. These problems were solved years and years ago by games like Mercenaries, Tomb Raider, Psy-Ops, and countless other third-person action games. More recent examples like Gears of War and Assassin's Creed demonstrate how good a third-person camera can be. In a word, it can be perfect.

But it's not in GTA4. To call Rockstar's on-foot game programming incompetent is an insult to incompetent people everywhere. Each close-quarters gunfight turns into a camera-swiveling nightmare. It's the most frustrating thing I've played since God of War 2's dreadful button-puzzles. It takes me completely out of my character and cruelly reminds me that I'm playing a poorly-made videogame.

Why isn't GTA4 worth zero dollars? The story and the city. I grew up near New York, so I'm having a great time driving around all my old haunts, and then crashing into them. If this game were set anywhere else, I'd return it and just read a walkthrough.

UPDATE:
It seems the best way to handle the gunfights is to go very slowly, take cover, fire thousands of bullets, and use dozens of grenades. Fight as heavy as possible. A common dying zone is when you walk through a swinging doorway. I've found that you can shoot the door open, then shoot everyone inside. If the door swings shut, just shoot it open again. You'll go through enormous amounts of ammo, but who cares? Just buy more. There isn't anything else to do with your money, and once you pull the big bank job, you'll have more cash than you can possibly use.

I try to make sure I'm always traveling with: full health, full armor, 70 Shotgun ammo, 1,000 SMG ammo (a must for drive-bys!), 500 Assault Rifle ammo, 20 grenades, and 9 RPG rounds (the max). This seems to do well for me.

UPDATE: June 3, 2008
I've played some Multiplayer with my buddy Arth. It works really well, and it's totally fun to race each other around Manhattan smashing into everything as we go. We spent some time at the airport trying to do jumps, then we swiped a pair of Blackhawk helicopters and strafed the Bronx until we got shot down by a swarm of very unsporting members of Liberty City's law enforcement community. Good times. But whenever we got into an on-foot shootout, all the camera problems return, so we stayed in vehicles as much as possible.