Missing the most important aspect to any video game: Great gameplay. This game is definately overated by
The problem is that although the game has so many great features, the implementation of gameplay is just horrible.
For example, it is nice to have all of these vehicles to drive around, and a large gameplay map. But driving them is boring. And because you drive them almost as much as you play through the story, it is a significant problem.
Another example: the AI is atrocious. Taking on the AI is numb and firefights amount to nothing more than out-lasting enemies dead on with health. There is no duck and cover, no lean feature. It is just a all out slug fest as you shoot each other in the open. The AI all do pretty much the same thing and don't use cover or really show any cerebral action in the firefights. They pretty much just come at you and that is it.
Yet another example of flawed design is the respawning of enemies that so many have complained about. If the AI was fun to pick off, this wouldn't be so severe of a short coming. But the guard areas you clear, are packed within minutes of clearing em out. Very poorly done.
Another example of poor design choice is having people randomly chase you down in cars. They basically have no AI except to ram into you and jump out of their cars to engage. No intelligence at all. It is down right boring.
A minor complaint is the dialog with ingame characters. For some reason they just quickly rattle off their dialog as though there is no period between their sentences. The voice acting is good, but the dialog is blurted out very quickly and seems very unnatural.
The mission get boring after about 10 hours of gameplay. They all pretty much play out similarly.
There are some excellent qualities to this game such as the environment, the ambient sounds of interaction and the the gameplay world. Also the sound of the weapons is top notch.
The amount of different weapons is superb too.
Graphics are fantastic as well.
But the game falls flat in so many areas mentioned above that it is hard to really enjoy what you are doing. The designers technically created a game with some serious potential, but they completely dropped the ball on implementation and gameplay mechanics. The AI is so boring too.
A shame really. As stated, this game is very ambitious, technically phenomenal, but some of the biggest flaws are in areas that are fundamentally crucial to having a great game: gameplay.