Grand Theft Auto IV earns a 9.1 overall, and that score certifies it as a narrative landmark and one of the most acclaimed games ever made — a grounded crime epic whose story, physics and atmosphere the series itself never fully recaptured. It is also, undeniably, a game showing its age, held back by dated visuals and a troubled PC port that demand patience or mods. The 9.1 holds both truths: a towering achievement in storytelling and physical design, wrapped in a technical package that has not aged as gracefully as its ambitions.
Buy it for the story and the weight
Buy GTA IV if you value what it does better than almost anything else: grounded, mature, character-driven storytelling and a physical world with real consequence. This is the game for players who want a crime drama with the weight of prestige television, for anyone curious about a landmark in open-world narrative, and for those who appreciate the granular Euphoria physics that make Liberty City feel so tangible. The Complete Edition's three interwoven campaigns deliver dozens of hours of interlocking storytelling, Niko Bellic remains one of gaming's great protagonists, and the grounded, melancholy vision of the American Dream gives the whole experience a thematic seriousness the series traded away in its more entertainment-focused sequels. If you can meet the game where it is, GTA IV offers something genuinely irreplaceable — a crime epic with literary ambitions and a physical world that pushes back — and for players who prize substance and weight over slickness, it remains deeply rewarding. It is a classic worth experiencing, and the Complete Edition is the way to do it.
Skip it, or mod it, if the age will bother you
Approach GTA IV with clear eyes, or skip it, if its technical age is a dealbreaker. The 2008 visuals look clearly dated next to GTA V or any modern open world, the user interface and conveniences are old-fashioned, and the heavy, realistic vehicle handling will feel awkward to players accustomed to the tight controls of newer games. Most consequentially, the PC version is notoriously troubled: even after the 2020 patch, it often needs community graphics mods to run and look acceptable on modern hardware, and an unmodded install can be a genuinely frustrating first impression of a classic. A player who expects a modern open world to run flawlessly out of the box, or who cannot get past dated visuals and controls, will struggle here, and there is no shame in that — GTA IV asks you to accept its age and, on PC, to do a little work to make it run well. If you are unwilling to tinker or to look past 2008-era presentation, this may not be the entry point to Rockstar's catalog for you, and GTA V or RDR2 might serve better.
A landmark with no true successor
What ultimately lifts the 9.1 to a verdict on something special is that GTA IV's core vision remains genuinely unmatched. A Metacritic 98 and a sweep of perfect scores marked it as a critical landmark in 2008, but its more remarkable legacy is what came after: the GTA series moved toward bigger, slicker, more entertainment-driven spectacle, and in doing so it left behind the grounded narrative weight and the granular Euphoria physics that defined GTA IV, never to fully return to them. That makes this game not just a classic but a singular one — there is still no true successor to its specific combination of literary crime drama and physical realism, and players who want that exact experience have nowhere else to go. Time has dated its surfaces, the PC port tests one's patience, and its late-game pacing sags, but the things GTA IV does best, it still does better than any game since. The 9.1 is the verdict of an aging masterpiece — technically showing its years, artistically timeless — whose grounded vision of Liberty City endures as one of the medium's great achievements, and whose absence of a true heir only makes it more worth revisiting.
