The beautiful, detailed city I expected is there. But I have to deal with a lot of absolute **** to unlock it all.
As for the missions, they suck. I never ever look forward to them. A lot of them are just too easy, drive here, shoot this, drive there, done. On the other hand, some missions are so difficult it's not challenging but absolutely irritating. Here's what JUST happened to me. I literally have to shoot my way out to the street, with pretty much the entire military shooting at me. There are two allies holding guns next to me, doing absolutely NOTHING while I watch cops magically appear on the other side of a door and shoot me. What the **** Sometimes it's just frustratingly hard, half the time there is actually a glitch that makes missions impossible to complete.
On top of that, you can't start a mission from any checkpoint. You have to go all the way back, drive through traffic, deal with moronic drivers, get all the way to the mission, so that you can start it ALL OVER again. Usually the entire mission is incredibly easy until one point where a ton of cops is just dumped in, meaning you have to do the boring part over and over until you can literally take out an entire swat team, multiple police fleets and dodge a helicopter single handedly.
Now a lot of people complain about the game running horribly. My computer is really good, so I don't have too much trouble. At the same time, I can't set the features like draw distance to full, but I doubt anyone could. You can adjust draw distance, detail distance, shadow density and car density. If you max them out, the game just won't run. But you can choose which is your priority. While the game runs okay, it has been crashing every two hours of gameplay. I can still play, but I never know when my mission will suddenly become my desktop.
My overall problem with the game is that it needed a lot more testing. There are lots of issues people have running the game, like frequent crashes, that should have been looked into. Missions should have been tweaked to be less relentless.
The city in the game is really beautiful, too bad I have this massive chore to deal with before I can really explore it. Pretty soon I'm gonna start blowing up all my contacts cause it really sucks getting a call to go bowling while I'm chasing someone.