Finished tonight, I give it a 9.75 out of 10. I have a couple of problems though that can get annoying in how you play the game technical wise and some design stuff.
Technical wise, it bothers me there is a lot of delays and babysitting for relatively meaningless things. Like if you screw up a mission and you have to start over, you might have to drive a car 5 minutes to get to the bulk of what the mission actually is. They need to implement checkpoints where you can go back to the part where you fucked up, or near it, instead of doing long ass drives. Also it gets old calling a taxi or driving to get around the city, setting a checkpoint, or so on. Yeah, its more "Realistic" that someone is in the back of the taxi, or you have to call someone first to get you to take you somewhere, but why can't you just simply goto the map, pick the point where you want to go, then you're there? Less realistic? Sure. But also much less of a pain in the ass. They need to implement better ways of traversing the map and traveling instead of constantly setting checkpoints and getting taxis or driving.
Design wise, you don't feel much connection with some of the people around you, or the city around you. Like for example, the empire state building, statue of liberty, metlife building, times square, etc, etc ... I've never even interacted with these places. The only I even came across in the game I noticed was Times Square, and that was just zooming across to get somewhere. You have all these landmarks and cool places in the games you've been showing all over previews, and they're not even interacted with. You can look at them, that's basically it. And you have to go out of your way to even look at them, you don't come across them in missions or anything. Why not design a mission where you run a turret in the middle of times square taking out a huge mob war and are shooting out the stock ticker and shit? Or chase after a guy as the New Years Ball drops or something? There's no connection the the places in this game. Same with most of the people, you tend to just do missions with them and that's it. The rest of the time you're babysitting to make sure they don't get pissed at you to get relatively worthless benefits.
Maybe too much griping for a game I thought was really good, and was hell of a lot addicted to for almost the past two weeks its been out, its minor mostly but its things that would seem to be really easy to fix in the future.
