I gotta be honest, originally I was opposed to the game, as it does a lot of things differently compared to the original installment. But my, idk love is still to great a word, but friendship, grew with the time playing the game. The story is on par if not better than the original. The car acquiring system is several times better than the one in the original, while the driving is a lot worse imo. Police is both, more and less forgiving, depending what action. I feel that they are too quick to start shooting even for just speeding. On the other hand they do not care if you break half the traffic laws. The worst about the game is how finicky, pedantic and arbitrary it is about what it counts as crash. In the original game and partially even here you need to push cars out of your way because the AI has a dead brain moment and if you happen to have bad luck, the game thinks that you just caused a mayor crash and will alert the police. Additionally, while you can count on it, it's still very startling that the AI decides to continue driving/walking if it sees you driving towards it and just right before it would pass by without you hitting it, it decides to stop and you end up crashing into it. The car crash hell is only getting bigger by the cars being an uncontrollable mess that end up not gripping the ground if you are only thinking about taking a turn. While I hear that this seems to be somewhat realistic, I cant imagine to that degree. If the game had something like freeride as the original game did, I would probably play it a lot more than I use to, as many of the mechanics scream for such a system, the car acquiring, the police heat reduction, the shops. For the normal playthrough, there is almost no reason to do any of this, especially the shops, as you almost always have enough ammo. Its usually the times during the mission when you are nowhere near a shop that you need it the most, but then those shops are useless to begin with. Yes I guess the Jimmy DLC is making use of it, but who honestly plays those missions, as they are mostly just score and time based objectives, which are even imo too tightly designed. Oh, speaking of missions, some missions that take place in a separate part of the map or are at least unconnected to the city for the time of the mission, are usually way too big for the content that is in it, like the harbor having a large area, which only 1/10 has actual stuff you can interact with or can collect. And while I could complain a lot more about similar stuff, the game ends up still being not too shabby, though you can feel that it was released at a time when big studios started to give less crap about the people playing the game, and more that people buy em. And while its definetly not as bad as current big studio games, you can see the early symptoms.

I gotta be honest, originally I was opposed to the game, as it does a lot of things differently compared to the original installment. But my, idk love is still to great a word, but friendship, grew with the time playing the game. The story is on par if not better than the original. The car acquiring system is several times better than the one in the original, while the driving is a lot worse imo. Police is both, more and less forgiving, depending what action. I feel that they are too quick to start shooting even for just speeding. On the other hand they do not care if you break half the traffic laws. The worst about the game is how finicky, pedantic and arbitrary it is about what it counts as crash. In the original game and partially even here you need to push cars out of your way because the AI has a dead brain moment and if you happen to have bad luck, the game thinks that you just caused a mayor crash and will alert the police. Additionally, while you can count on it, it's still very startling that the AI decides to continue driving/walking if it sees you driving towards it and just right before it would pass by without you hitting it, it decides to stop and you end up crashing into it. The car crash hell is only getting bigger by the cars being an uncontrollable mess that end up not gripping the ground if you are only thinking about taking a turn. While I hear that this seems to be somewhat realistic, I cant imagine to that degree. If the game had something like freeride as the original game did, I would probably play it a lot more than I use to, as many of the mechanics scream for such a system, the car acquiring, the police heat reduction, the shops. For the normal playthrough, there is almost no reason to do any of this, especially the shops, as you almost always have enough ammo. Its usually the times during the mission when you are nowhere near a shop that you need it the most, but then those shops are useless to begin with. Yes I guess the Jimmy DLC is making use of it, but who honestly plays those missions, as they are mostly just score and time based objectives, which are even imo too tightly designed. Oh, speaking of missions, some missions that take place in a separate part of the map or are at least unconnected to the city for the time of the mission, are usually way too big for the content that is in it, like the harbor having a large area, which only 1/10 has actual stuff you can interact with or can collect. And while I could complain a lot more about similar stuff, the game ends up still being not too shabby, though you can feel that it was released at a time when big studios started to give less crap about the people playing the game, and more that people buy em. And while its definetly not as bad as current big studio games, you can see the early symptoms.