It's not even close to a 10/10 game. Not close at all. GTA 4 is mediocre by any measure. It's a giant gimmick. Pretend like you're free to do whatever you want, but, really, you'll be fed what to do on our time line and you've got about 8 buildings you can actually enter. But there's plenty of open, empty space to drive around in. There's cardboard buildings, but you can't enter those either.
If the game can't do a decent job at being a shooter, when almost all of the mid and late game missions are shooting missions or delivery missions, then it doesn't deserve to be a 8/10 or 9/10.
Go here, get money, shoot these people.
Go there, get those drugs, shoot those people.
Go here, murder this person.
Go through shooting gamut of people over and over and over.
The game does not deserve top scores.
To pile it on, the "friend maintenance" is annoying, at best. I, personally, never did any of the activities with people after the first two or three times. They were just boring as well, repetitive, and served no purpose. If I'm going to play a game like that, i'm going to play it for fun, not because i need to keep these people happy by doing busy work so I can get some inconsequential perk.
I think a lot of gamers were starved for something good since this was the first big game of the year on the PS3 and 360, and now my 360 is just collecting dust as my Wii gets all of the play time again. Mario Kart is much more fun than GTA 4.
Don't get me started about the technical issues with the game. It needed another 6 months of polish, at least. I don't understand why so many gamers are willing to accept mediocrity, and not only accept it, but praise it.
