GTA IV Actually Discourages Attacking Police

I've been a huge fan of the GTA series ever since GTA 3 came out. It is a genuinely fun game which gives you your money's worth of entertainment. The plots have been good and the missions are hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard that you'll wanna stop playing. I've always gotten a little amusement from the people who claim that games like GTA encourage violence, particularly violence towards law enforcement. As of today, I'm about 50% done with the game, and have concluded. GTA IV actually discourages violence towards the police!

I know this sounds crazy, and I know that the game itself centers around violent and criminal behavior...but hear me out. To give you some background, here's how the wanted level system works in GTA. You can get stars, each of which on a scale of 0 through 6 which roughly translates to "how pissed are the police." The more overt your criminal activity, the more stars you get. One or two stars are pretty easy to evade. At three it starts to get hard. Four or more, and I wish you luck getting away alive.

Throughout the game there are plenty of "kill the bad guys, steal their stuff, get away clean" missions. Usually the police will show up shortly after the "steal the stuff" with two stars. Here's the thing, the moment you do anything violent towards the police, the stars jump up to three or four. This makes escape much more annoying. The path of least resistance is nearly always to just get in a vehicle and get away as fast as possible. Forget shooting the police, just get away and get away fast.

The bottom line of this is that you tend to be much more successful in the game if you just avoid the police instead of trying to brute force your way through them and killing all in your way.