I've finally finished GTA IV - according to the ingame clock, I spent over 70 hours on the game. I gave my impressions of the single player game a while ago (click here) and, for the most part, those impressions have held through the game. In terms of final impressions, there is only one more thing that I would add.
In my initial impressions, one of the strengths that I listed was that the game had so much you could do in terms of hanging out with your (ingame) friends. However, it turns out that this is also one of the games weak points.
In the second half of the game, you build up a small repertoire of friends. One of the achievements in this game is for all your friends to like you at least 90% by the end of the game. This also has ingame benefits as each friend confers benefits to you if they like you enough (for example cheap guns, car bombs etc).
The problem is that you have so many friends (and girlfriends) that they just end up getting in the way. Any time you are on a mission, or hanging out with one of your friends, another one of them invariably calls up and you end up having to bail out which leads to a drop in your friendship rating. In the end, you spend so much time hanging out with your friends that you don't seem to have time for the actual missions themselves! Furthermore, although there are lots of different things for you to do, you spend so much time hanging out that it actually gets very repetitive.
In the end, I just gave up trying to butter them up and just completed the missions. This really destroyed the immersiveness of the game for me near the end. At that point, it was painfully obvious that you were playing a game, as opposed to living out the life of a former Euro soldier in USA.
In effect, great game - shame about the ending.
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