Delayed since last year, my pre-order was almost a year old when the special edition finally shipped from Amazon. A lesser product might have been casually forgotten, but not the first next-generation outing for Rockstar's incredibly popular franchise. As a fan of the series from the very first top-down outing on the PC, it's fair to say that my anticipation had reached fever pitch when the delivery finally arrived, and anybody who has seen me on Xbox Live might begin to think that I'd left my 360 playing GTA IV and gone on holiday, such has been its constant presence in my disk drive. Now the game has gone on to break all kinds of records for the fastest selling game of all time, and unlike much of the trash that sells millions despite being a bit on the average side (Sonic & Mario at the Olympic Games, I'm looking squarely in your direction here), this title not only lives up to the hype but actually manages to exceed it - which is no mean feat considering how many websites' pixels have been spent speculating, praising and raving about the many facets of Grand Theft Auto IV's development.

With recent outings in the series setting the game in the Eighties and Nineties, GTA IV takes steps early on to establish itself as a more contemporary adventure - indeed, certain parts of the city are closed off due to a generic terrorist event, mapping international paranoia quite cleverly. You take on the role of Niko Bellic, freshly arrived from an undisclosed Slavic country and eager to make a fresh start after years losing any kind of moral sensibilities in the army of said mystery nation. Your first contact is your cousin Roman, and you proceed to perform simple missions for him before all the experience you gained committing atrocities in the army is put to good use in the manner that fans of the series have come to expect. As your list of criminal contacts from Liberty City's seedy underbelly expands, so too does your knowledge of Niko's mysterious past. Without wanting to give too much away, there is a far deeper and darker motive for his emigration than you might first realise - and the fact that this is played out in full before the end credits roll shows that nothing in this game has been added without full consideration and development.

The fact that you have no customisation in the look and back-story of your character may feel a little outdated in comparison to some of the recent attempts at 'homaging' GTA's success from its rivals - both Saints Row and Crackdown allowed 360 owners a choice in the look of their mayhem generator - but it allows for a surprisingly deep storyline and an often sympathetic character. Unlike past outings, where GTA's protagonists have been displayed as remorseless killing machines, gang culture killing machines and speechless killing machines, Niko recognises that he has lost his morality and you occasionally catch glimpses of regret that he will never live a normal life. The glamour of the existence is also played down - unlike, say Vice City, where everything was gaudy, glorious and ultimately successful for Tommy, Niko never scales the heights of Criminal Overlord - and you get the feeling that he doesn't want to. On a number of occasions he aims to make a fresh start only to be drawn back in. It's quite sad in its own way. The game also creates moral quandaries in the storyline in a really impressive manner - when you have to make a game-effecting choice and find yourself changing your mind twice on route to the waypoint, you know you're playing something with a slightly more cerebral storyline than cliché-fests like Gears of War.

But perhaps I'm getting a little too far ahead of myself. Let's assume that somehow you've managed to miss the international phenomenon that is GTA, either in the gaming media or the screeching tabloids. What do you actually do in the game? In short, GTA is an urban crime sim. With the sandbox of an immaculately created city to play in, you go about making money in the most morally bankrupt ways available. These start off small scale (getaway driver, collecting protection money, etc.) but quickly progress to the more serious stuff that would get you the virtual electric chair were the fictional police force not either very forgiving or seriously naïve. Crimes like assassination, murder and bank robbery lead to more dogged attention from SWAT teams and the FBI, right up to helicopters and tanks. The main challenge on these later stages is getting out alive. Outside of the main missions, GTA has always excelled at giving you plenty to do elsewhere, where you can become a virtual taxi driver (negating the need to dust down your Dreamcast for some Crazy Taxi), crime fighter (leaving Crackdown firmly in the box) or ice cream van driver (to my knowledge, no-one has made an ice cream vendor sim yet).

The main game unsurprisingly sticks resolutely to this formula, but it has still managed to make significant evolutionary changes along the way. These generally seem small on paper, but make for a huge improvement in practice. First are the changes to the gameplay; the most immediate being that it now auto saves after each and every mission, regardless of whether you return to your base - a godsend, as the previous arrangement saw me running into the arms of another urban crime sim (namely Saints Row) just last year. Then there's the improved aiming and cover mechanisms, which allow you to pop head shots quite easily without losing auto-aim completely. The cover mechanics aren't quite up to the standard of Gears of War or Rainbow Six: Vegas, but are on a par with Mass Effect, which is good enough for this reviewer. Finally, and seemingly most minor of all, is the addition of a properly user-controlled mobile phone - actually the most impressive development in the entire game. From here you can instantly restart failed missions, call up contacts for extra side quests, call up other players to gloat in multiplayer, and even prank call 911 for 'borrowing cop cars'. It also allows you to call up your friends to go out and have drinks, go bowling or see a strip show, but with the nefarious types you befriend over the course of the adventure they'll only be a bad influence on you (if you believe the Daily Mail).

Indeed, theoretically you can do quite a lot in Liberty City without ever needing to fire a gun. There are plenty of activities for you to take part in, all impressively implemented into the main game. The most delightful of these is the Internet, available at various cybercafes across the city and integral to certain missions. The fake websites are all accurate, tongue-in-cheek renderings of the usual 'net fare with a mix of dating sites, spam and others dotting the place. Your email can often provide side missions as well as back-story too, so there's plenty of reason to waste time on the virtual Internet, as if we didn't already waste enough time on the real thing. The originality doesn't end here though - there are things that made me grin with surprise and delight throughout the city, and probably plenty more that I've missed on a first play through. The game world feels so much more real than in the past, with folks in the street answering their mobile phones, real television channels to watch and genuine comedians to see live. Indeed Ricky Gervais provides his voice and likeness to perform a couple of sets in the game. This realism is matched by the AI, too. To use just one example, I managed to fail a mission after shooting someone who was interviewing me for a job, when his secretary came in and called the police. Second time around I stabbed him and no-one was any the wiser because I was that bit more subtle. I'm really just scratching the surface here and you're sure to see additional stuff that I didn't have the word count to mention, which will make your jaw drop.

Graphically, GTA IV is no slouch and doesn't seem to suffer from the 360's hard disk being optional (the PS3 version requires a partial install). It's very stylised in such a manner that may be off-putting at first - a loose sort of cartoon realism, if that manages to make as much sense in print as it does in my head. The characters all have a great deal of personality (although I managed to ruin/make the game for me and my friends list by noticing a few hours in the similarities between Niko and the Chuckle Brothers) and there's no way of confusing them from a graphical perspective. Likewise, the cars all look visually appealing and break apart realistically as you inevitably drive them to the bone. There is some graphical pop-up, but it's never distracting, and while the frame rate is consistent (I can only remember it dropping once in the multiplayer when a lot was going on) it doesn't feel like it ever breaks thirty frames per second, let alone the gaming nirvana of sixty. This doesn't actually matter a great deal though, as it's never game-breaking, and in a game with as much going on as this, you can forgive slight slowdown here and there. Interestingly, this is the first 360 title that looks almost better in standard rather than high definition. There's something about the murky blending of older television sets that fits nicely with the gritty crime setting, and the smooth feel of high-definition takes a little something away from it - though I wouldn't suggest you throw out your 40" Samsung for it (unless you plan to abandon it outside my front door, in which case I strongly encourage it.)

Sound has always been a splendid feature for the Grand Theft Auto series, dating back to the original niche classic. There are eighteen radio stations in the game, each playable from the car stereos and each with their own unique vibe to them. The game brilliantly manages to mix a familiar soundtrack (Smashing Pumpkins - 1979, Goldfrapp - Ooh La La) in with some more obscure material and some rather entertaining talk radio stations, which provide a great deal of material in their own right. These stations don't seem to repeat themselves like they did in earlier versions, so they always feel fresh, new and entertaining. Likewise, all the characters have unique voices, although they are some of the worst offenders of stereotyped voices since the "Where's me lucky charms" of Bioshock. One area that's disappointingly missing in this new version of the game that was present in the old Xbox edition is a custom radio soundtrack built up of your own music. It's a shame, but it's nothing that a patch can't sort out, and even without it you're not missing a great deal. I'm just bitter because I think a soundtrack of 'The Best of Chas and Dave' enhances any gang violence sim.

Within one mission of starting, Niko gains access to his mobile phone and alongside the many interesting options this presents is the ability to select Xbox Live multiplayer from the menu. While the multiplayer could be a prime candidate for 'tacked on extra', Rockstar have once again excelled and created an experience that has knocked Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4 temporarily off me and my friends' collective gaming radar. There are all sorts of modes available, from straight deathmatch to missions for groups of friends and team-based objectives to duke it out over. All offer their own unique charms, but the most impressive thing of all is how customisable the settings are - police and auto-aiming can all be switched on or off, traffic and pedestrian density can be varied, and the available weapons and parts of the city to be your playground is entirely up to you. The slight downside to this much choice is that you do see a high level of drop-out from other players when they that realise the settings aren't to their tastes, but if you have a big enough friends list then this much choice is a superb thing. The gameplay itself harks back to the original's top down delights in that it's hilarious and unpredictable, with several unforgettable moments. Where else can you back over someone in a stolen bus, while they try and shoot someone else trying to drive-by them? Where else can you take a group of friends across the river to a drugs bust in a helicopter, only to watch one of them jump out into the water? I've actually lost count of the number of times I've burst out laughing on Live recently, which probably has cost me some rep with the more serious players of the game. The popularity of the title has lead to the more, erm, 'lively' (read: nauseatingly immature) elements of the Live community coming out in force, but that's very much a case of GTA being a victim of its own success. Fortunately it's very easy to play just with your own friends, and the game has a party mode where you can invite contacts to do battle with other groups, brilliantly making the whole of Liberty City your lobby, meaning that the wait for other players is always as mad as a bag of spiders.

It's an encouraging sign when you have to think for more than thirty seconds to come up with any sort of criticism of a game. It's even better when you stare at a screen, straining your brain to come up with something two minutes later. Fortunately for my poor mistreated cranium (back on Brain Training with you young man), I have managed to come up with a couple of teeny, tiny points. The first is that the social aspects, while initially novel, get old pretty damn quickly. When you get a phone call from Brucie (not Forsythe) for the third time in as many hours asking you to go bowling, drinking or playing darts, it can get a little wearing. But then again, the decision to go along is entirely up to you and won't break the game in any way - unless you're some kind of obsessive-compulsive achievement seeker. The other is that the missions are still a little on the samey side after an extended play - after eighteen hours, with the novelty worn down, you do get a feeling of being burned out on the same type of missions.

But when your only real complaint is that a game has been lavished with so much attention that it's a bit on the long side, then it's fair to say that you must have a masterpiece in your hands, and that is most definitely the case with Grand Theft Auto IV. It's prettier, more detailed and more fun than ever before; it may have stuck to the same formula, but it's as effortlessly brilliant as ever. With a massive single player campaign (it tells you something that there's an achievement for completing the main missions in under thirty hours), the promise of exclusive Xbox downloadable missions and a hilarious and popular multiplayer offering to supplement your car-carnage itch, the game thoroughly deserves all the sales records it has broken. Buy it now, assuming you're over eighteen. And if you're not, get to work on building some kind of speed-ageing device so that you can enjoy this top-drawer gem as soon as possible.

Reviewed by Alan Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).