Desert Storm Mod Turns GTA IV Into Spec Ops: The Line

If you were always curious to know how Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City would look covered from gutter to skyline in sand, well a new mod lets you experiment with that very concept. Presumably taking obvious inspiration from 2K's latest third-person shooter, Spec Ops: The Line, the Desert Storm mod drapes Liberty City in a curtain of sand reaching the very top of some skyscrapers.

In Spec Ops: The Line the sand and sand storms that cover Dubai play an integral character in helping tell a very gruesome and dark story about the horrors of war. It's pretty much a current day video game rendition of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

For GTA IV, the sand is more-so a cool looking gimmick that gives you a crazy new way to interact with the environment and potentially sets the stage for future mods, potentially even a Spec Ops mod that might see you fighting off insurgents and defectors while scaling steep sand slopes.

For now, you can see how Liberty City looks covered in sand and what it would be like to take some offroad vehicles through a tour of the city.

The map mod apparently works with all versions of GTA IV, so you shouldn't have to worry about the whole upgrading and downgrading thing that was required to run some mods in case you had the Steam rendition. But since this isn't a complete total conversion, there's a lot less work involved with turning GTA IV into a more Westernized look of Spec Ops: The Line.

You can download the Desert Storm mod right now by heading on over to the GTA 4 Mods Website, or you can check out more awesome videos of mods and maps for Rockstar's prime-time open-world action title, by visiting Insanegaz's channel on YouTube.