BradyGames Guide: GTA IV

A sizeable, colourful tome at just under 290 pages, this certainly looks the part. The sections are colour-coded and have a coloured tab at the edge of each page to make it easy to quickly find the section you want.

I should mention at this point that I did not use the Main Story Walkthrough section, because I have not completed the main story yet and didn’t want any spoilers of what was ahead. I did take a look at the sections for the parts of the story I had completed, though. These were nicely laid out, with objectives clearly marked and some nice accompanying screenshots to break up the monotony of the text. There are also small map sections with the locations of the objectives and nearby weapon, health, and armour pickups clearly marked on them – a useful feature.

The map section at the back is divided into sections for Alderney, Algonquin and Bohan/Dukes/Broker. Each section is further split, with maps showing Points of Interest (Restaurants, Safehouses etc.), Pickups (Weapons, Health and Armour) and finally, the reason I come to guides like this: Flying Rats and Unique Stunt Jumps. The first two types only have the maps, but the FR/USJ maps also come with short text descriptions and accompanying screenshots. In principle, this is great; in execution, however, it falls down a little at this stage. There are 20-24 entries on each page and this means the screenshots are just too small. A lot of the time it’s hard to make out where the target is, even with the added circle, and some of the screenshots are confusing or taken from an angle where you wouldn’t normally be looking for a pigeon. Making the screenshots a little bit bigger would have reduced the confusion greatly. Apart from this niggle, however, they’re very useful, and I had no trouble locating most of the pigeons and all of the stunt jumps with them.

The very last part of the book is a large foldout, containing a map showing all the odd job locations, and additional tables showing what’s required to attain that elusive “100% completion” achievement. On the reverse of this is a GTA IV poster.