Multiplayer preview: GTA IV

If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere. It's up to you, Liberty City, Liberty City, sings David Hollingworth.

Time was you’d have to apply a hack to GTA to be able to enjoy the run of the city with your mates, but even then it was painfully obvious that the game simply wasn’t built with more than one person in mind. It was fun, of course, but lacking. GTA IV brings both the fun and a lot of clever touches to its new multiplayer mode.

I only got to play four of the multiplayer modes, but even that small part of the larger whole we found a lot of variety, and some stunningly fun gameplay. Myself, a half dozen other journo types and some local Rockstar personnel squared off for some eight player Xbox Live action; while the games were being set up, I took a sneak peak at the avatar selection, and there’s a huge amount of combinations you can use to make up your Liberty City Citizen. Before I could get too picky, though, everyone else was ready to rock, so into the game we plunged.

First up was two rounds of straight up deathmatch on the crowded streets. The game host can choose how big an area of the city to fight over, and our first stoush was limited to messing up a small island,, and with only medium scale weapons to take down opponents with. The game started in an orgy of gunfire, carjacking, and screaming, panicking civilians, and just got more chaotic from there. While the new, slightly more simulationist gunplay makes the experience a lot more tactical than you might expect, you can still find someone leaping an ambulance over a pile of burning cars to take you down from your perfect firing position – so it never feels like anything less than GTA style carnage and mayhem.

Our second deathmatch, however, was sprawled over the entire city, but with respawns set to deliver players straight into the action. The game was again chaotic, but the nature of the spawns led to an organic, flowing gunfight that moved all over the city.

GTA Race was the next hotwired cab off the rank, as it were. It’s a checkpoint style race, nothing that any racing car player hasn’t really seen before, but with health packs and weapons spread across the circuit. On busy streets, once players start to pick up weapons like firebombs and SMGs, the race becomes a super-destructive demolition derby. It’s fun, to be sure, but if you fall off the pace it tends to get a little boring. Then again, that could just be my bad for letting someone shunt my car off the road into a tree. Carjacking takes valuable race-time!

Cops & Crooks was the penultimate mode we had a play with, and it was here that we started to see some of the real innovation Rockstar’s putting into GTA IV. It’s a two-sided game, with the Crooks needing to get their boss to a randomly spawned getaway car; they start on foot, however, and only with pistols.

The Cops, on the other hand, start in a car – we had four cops all in the one vehicle – and with SMGs. They can see the Boss, but only the boss, and not where he’s going. We played a few rounds of this, and as each round sees the Cops, Crooks and the getaway car spawn in a random location, each game was very fresh. The Crooks don’t know where the cops are until they’re on top of them, so it’s a mad scramble to find a car and make the dash, but whether you put the Boss into one vehicle while his goons provide cover, or any other harebrained getaway plan, is up to you.

A similar mode, and our last taste before the game comes out, is Hangman’s NOOSE. This is a co-op game where you and your criminal buddies must secure an aircraft and its surrounds from swarming SWAT teams. Once secure, your boss comes out, and you have to get him into a vehicle and speed him to a getaway point. Of all the modes we played, this was the most cinematic; at any given time, the game looks like either footage of the North Hollywood Shootout or some epic crime film drama. Cops and copcars seem endless, and without teamwork, the game’s a near certain loss. But get working together, and success is sweeter than winning a mere computer game deserves to be.

And all of this in a game that looks to have an engrossing and large single player component to boot! A new GTA game is always cause for interest, and after getting a taste of multiplayer I’m actually more excited about GTA IV than any previous release.