For a while, Grand Theft Auto IV game is nothing but the extremely authored, slow-paced and dialogue-heavy saga of two Eastern European immigrants who work at a taxi service in a facsimile New York City. They have girlfriends and gambling debts, they get shit-faced drunk and sober up to heartfelt emails from Niko’s mother. The premise sounds like it belongs to a sitcom or an arthouse movie, but of course Grand Theft Auto is a series about blowing up cop cars with rocket launchers in a sprawling urban world. In this game you shop for clothes and take girls out bowling along a very narrow story path.

For hours, the game doesn’t make you do anything illegal or even put a gun into your hands. This is not Grand Theft Auto. It’s better.

Duncan at Hit Self-Destruct brings to the fore a long-standing issue with the Grand Theft Auto series: the environments keep getting more realistic, while the plotlines and gameplay stay as cartoony as ever. (Cartoony being a nicer word than, say, graphically violent.)