You’re probably not going to like Grand Theft Auto IV. Maybe not at first, anyway.

When you find out, for instance, that it won’t have airplanes, jetpacks, bicycles, an entire sprawling multi-city state to roam around, or many of the other little features San Andreas managed to cram onto a single DVD, your kneejerk reaction may be, “Well, that sucks.”

After all, the delightfully gluttonous excess of the last entry in the lightning-rod Grand Theft Auto series quickly and definitively raised our expectations for what can be jammed into an open-world experience.

But once you get past the bullet points and realize what Scottish studio Rockstar North is trying to do with the next-generation reboot of gaming’s most successful franchise — i.e., to make a “more realistic, more human experience” and next-gen–ify everything beyond just the graphics — you start to get it. And when you get it, your mind begins to reel at the possibilities.

We were given a 20-minute, highly controlled demonstration of an early build of the game being played in real time on Xbox 360. The session began with a look at your avatar, Eastern European import Niko Bellic, standing inside the Liberty City taxi depot of his cousin, Roman. Niko’s relative has lured him to the United States with promises of money, cars, and women, but in reality he’s in a world of trouble and needs his cousin’s help.

WELCOME BACK

Yes, GTA IV takes place in Liberty City. The series is returning to its 3D roots, but you won’t recognize anything you remember from its previous iteration. Whereas the Xbox Liberty City was a three-island metropolis loosely based on real-life New York City, Xbox 360’s present-day Liberty City sticks much closer to real-life Manhattan. It features a stunningly detailed five-part Big Apple standin with re-creations of such landmarks as the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the MetLife Building (sarcastically renamed the GetaLife building), and the Statue of Liberty (a.k.a. the Statue of Happiness), to name a few we were shown or told about.

“The influence is New York,” Rockstar told us matter-of-factly.

The virtual Manhattan is dubbed Algonquin in the new Liberty City, while all the boroughs — Bohan (the Bronx), Dukes (Queens), Broker (Brooklyn), and suburban Alderney (North Jersey) — are connected to this central hub by bridges. Together they comprise a land mass that is bigger than any of the three cities in San Andreas but smaller than the whole of the previous game’s Fake-ifornia.

But before you bemoan the shrinking real estate, ask yourself: Do we really need a sandbox world bigger than San Andreas? And more to the point: Do we want one?

After seeing GTA IV in motion, we’d wholeheartedly answer “no.” Bigger isn’t always better — a maxim Rockstar aims to prove by upping the ante on everything within the space they do have. While the square mileage may be down, the scale and detail are significantly up…both literally and figuratively.

IT’S ALIVE!

Seagulls. Cigarettes. Cell phones. They’re all ambient, tiny details that, when combined, lend a palpable sense of life to the dynamically lit, pixel-shaded collections of polygons that compose Liberty City’s faux New York. Head down to the docks and you’ll see bottom-heavy scavenger birds circling for food and cawing to whoever will listen. Trot down Broker’s streets in the post-dawn hours and you’ll see a variety of unique (read: not physically identical) pedestrians: one muttering about the cost of local real estate; another sitting in front of a townhouse tapping his foot to the beats flowing through his headphones; another yakking on his phone; and still another lighting up a smoke to try to take the sting out of the brisk morning air.

These subtleties extend to the architecture as well. Buildings aren’t merely flat, barren facades: They’re carefully crafted, impeccably lit members of the Liberty City neighborhood, each festooned with its own particular charms, such as a graffitilaced sign, a flowerpot, or an air conditioner lodged in the window.

The buildings also have an element of verticality never before seen in a sandbox series, and it adds a sense of scale to the environment that’s difficult to define. It’s almost as if the buildings are looming over you and leaning in your direction ever so slightly, like the city is interacting with you just as much as you’re toying around inside it. The Broker Bridge was perhaps the best example of this aspect in our demo. Though Rockstar didn’t bring Niko very close to it at all (let alone put him on it), it hung over the neighborhood in ominous fashion. The skyscrapers of the downtown Algonquin metropolis — which we got a look at only from the docks across the river — also gave this impression, even from afar. (The real-time reflection of the skyline in the water is incredible, by the way.)

GROWING UP

If you’re getting the sense that this is a much more serious, hardcore Grand Theft Auto than you remember, your instincts are correct. Throughout our demo, Rockstar expressed a commitment to exploring new territory, and they’re leaving the over-the-top parodies of classic films like Scarface and Goodfellas in the last generation, shifting GTA’s focus to a much darker tale about Niko and his life in the U.S.

“It’s a story about the American Dream,” Rockstar told us.

So will GTA’s wry comic element go the way of Betamax? Of course not. Though you shouldn’t expect Rampages, eating yourself to obesity, or having to pump iron at the gym, you’ll find the usual plethora of fake-ad-infused radio stations, goofy billboards, and high-speed hit-and-run fatalities. And in case you’re wondering, the series hasn’t regressed to water being fatal.

“It would be [ridiculous] if you couldn’t swim,” they told us with a straight face.

So you can tread water, and you can also, we were shown, enter more buildings than before. Making a left turn into a seemingly unassuming townhouse, Niko walked right inside, then around the living room, through the kitchen, and out a back door into an alley. It wasn’t a store, hideout, or otherwise game-ified “Yes, you can come in here!” structure. But our Rockstar tour guide just walked right in, leaving us to wonder just how many different interiors would be available to explore.

PIMP MY RIDE

No matter how Rockstar chooses to evolve the series, it simply wouldn’t be GTA without cars. We saw a rather run-of-the-mill complement of rides during our peek at Broker, including twodoor Civic-esque hatchbacks, the ubiquitous four-door boxey sedan, and a graffiti-decorated delivery truck. Their movements were made exponentially more realistic by the sequel’s new physics system. In short, each vehicle’s suspension reacted to the street below, just as it should. Tires bobbed down when beginning a downhill descent and retracted into the wheel well when going over a bump.

We also noted how, when Niko approached a parked sedan from behind in preparation to carjack it, an interface prompt appeared in the upper-left corner of the screen: “Press LB to open boot.” Boot, of course, is the British term for “trunk,” leading us to wonder just what we might be able to stash in the backs of our cars — weapons, bombs, kidnapped people? Or even more interestingly, what might we randomly discover in other people’s boo — er, trunks? For the moment, Rockstar isn’t saying.

Fortunately, we did get to see Niko jack that car, which happened to be locked. In previous GTAs, “locked” meant you simply couldn’t take the vehicle. In GTA IV, however, Niko puts his elbow through the driver’s window, opens the door from the inside, and then hotwires the ride and drives away. (Best we could tell, the gameplay sequence here was a simple single button-press, as opposed to a thumbstick twirl or Splinter Cell–style lockpick jiggle.)

Outside of the car, the aforementioned physics upgrade also enables Niko to stride more realistically, lean as he changes direction, and even climb telephone poles. Frankly, we’re not sure why Rockstar showed us this option, and they were coy about its gameplay possibilities, but they did mention that you could also clamber up fire escapes and jump from building to building — bringing to mind potential movie-esque chases and shootouts that take advantage of the aforementioned verticality.

CHANGE "IV" THE BETTER

By the end of our demo, IV's prospects were looking better and better. Even the smidgen of the new Liberty City we saw was clear evidence that the collective intelligence at Rockstar North has an exact, focused idea of what they want to do, what they need to do, and how to best go about doing it. They’re evolving and reinventing the genre they created, and though they’re sacrificing some of the nonsensical whimsy of the previous trilogy, one look at a billboard for an in-game movie called “I Slept With Your Mom” will make you laugh out loud — a reminder that Grand Theft Auto is still one of gaming’s smartest, funniest franchises…with or without a jetpack.