Niko Bellic: A Real American Anti-Hero
In your first several hours with Grand Theft Auto IV, it’s easy to want to approach it with a checklist of expectations and start comparing it to what you think a “next-generation” Grand Theft Auto game should be.
- New carjacking animations? Check.
- Improved gunplay? Check.
- GPS on the map? Check.
- Corny-yet-still-somehow-funny jokes? Check.
It’s natural to want to take that sort of clinical approach to a sequel, but as I moved through Liberty City and became more entrenched in its story, that stuff simply ceased to matter. At that point, and for the rest of the game, the only thing that mattered to me was Niko Bellic, the game’s protagonist. Is he going to survive this time? Are his new-found friends going to make it out alive? Will he ever find what he’s looking for, and will finding “that special someone” bring him the inner peace he needs? How did every single person he encounters end up so psychologically damaged?
That psychological side to the game translates into characters talking about how they feel, and about what they’re going through. It’s extremely well-written and made a serious impact on me. This isn’t the carefree killing-and-carjacking romp you might have expected. The way the characters act made each life harder and harder to take until I found myself rooting for Niko, hoping that he’d find what he was looking for and finally get some peace. Of course, once you’ve gone on a crime-spree that has you working for just about every different criminal in Liberty City, getting out unscathed simply isn’t an option.
To say too much more about the specifics of the story would start to detract from your own personal enjoyment of discovering it for yourself. It made a serious personal impact on me, and there were some plot twists that simply made me stop playing for a few hours because it started to hit a little too close to home and started reminding me of people in my own life. Seeing these virtual lives getting torn apart by heroin addiction, depression, or forces beyond anyone’s control made an emotional dent on me that no other game has done before. That makes being the man in charge of who lives and who dies even tougher. Later in the game, you’ll start to make very tough decisions, where you’ll have to kill one of the people you’ve been working for at the request of the other. By that time, I was so invested in these characters that the choice felt like much more than pushing a button on a game controller.
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