Liberty City is a “living, breathing, world?”

Recently a lot of the reviews for GTA IV have called it a “living, breathing, world” and said things that amount to “the only limit is your imagination.” I like GTA IV, but that’s just ludicrous. The game is immersive and at times you do feel lost in the city, but then you bump up against the game’s limitations which are made all the more striking due to the contrast. You set up a trap so that your target will have no where to run, and yet once the mission starts everything you had set up has disappeared. You try to walk in a building only to find that the door doesn’t open and it’s simply a painted texture.

I’m not saying that I don’t understand why these limitations are there, because we’re simply not technically at a place where games can really have “a living, breathing, world.” It just seems like reviewers whether they work for enthusiast press like EGM or mainstream press like Time really shouldn’t overstate what the game is and is not because it will lessen the impact when they review a game that really does have a living, breathing, world because people will think back and remember that they said that about a game that quite simply didn’t have it.