🌟 Follow Ainsel Reviews – Curator for the weird & lovely. 🌟

GTA IV is a concrete elegy for the ones who came hoping – and stayed despite knowing better.

You don’t win here. You cope. You wander through the rain-slicked streets of Liberty with a phone full of regrets and a trunk full of past mistakes.
Niko is not chasing dreams. He’s burying ghosts in alleyways that smell like desperation and fast food. He laughs, but not with joy – with disbelief. And you laugh with him, because what else is left?

The physics drag like guilt. The cars are heavy, the choices heavier.
And somehow, between the silence of missed calls and the neon glow of a city that doesn’t care, you find something close to comfort.

It’s not the story of a man who makes it.
It’s the story of someone who keeps going when there's nothing left to make.
A quiet, broken anthem for all of us who needed a place to disappear – even if just until the sun rises over Broker.

And yet, Liberty lives on. The modding community keeps her heartbeat steady – fixing the broken, reviving the beauty, painting new sorrow over old bricks.
Visual overhauls, gameplay tweaks, reshaded nights, car packs that bring new steel ghosts to haunt the streets.
Even in decay, they rebuild her – like we do with memory.

10/10 If you haven't somehow played this already, you must.

While GTA4 has is own slew of issues that can make the game very difficult, to outright impossible to play on vanilla, if you can find the right mixture of settings combined with the mods that are out there it is so worth it. While I only have ~40 hours at the time of the review on this game, I can guarantee I have hundreds, if not thousands of hours when it was the current game pre-GTAV.

This game is how character development should occur in GTA games, and due to the Complete Edition not having online, all the pesky multiplayer achievements have been removed which were a bulk of the grind on this game.

Niko’s story is a tragic masterpiece. Liberty City feels alive, and the physics are still the best in the series. The DLCs (Lost and Damned, Ballad of Gay Tony) are essential. Underrated compared to GTA V.