So much less than it could have been
There are a number of ideas in the game that would have made it an improvement over the first game. Unfortunately, these all fail to impress because of the poor production quality of the game.
Take the graphics. One of the most annoying example of how bad the graphics are would have to be the tanker trucks that seem to be all over NYC. Every tanker you see has the actual tank floating about six feet above the truck, until you get within a car length, when it pops back down.WHY there are hundreds of tankers driving through the streets of New York is a whole other question.
The AI in the game is absolutely abysmal. The criminals are okay, but your fellow officers seem to psychotic, blind, and incredibly stupid. More than once I've had a suspect I needed to bring in alive be shot down by five or six cops who seem to have gone into a berserker state. What's worse, I've managed to make the arrest, only to be shot down by the cops who don't seem to realize that I'm on their side.
Plus, you can expect to get thousands of "bad cop" points for running over all the pedestrians who run and dive into the street. Or, even more annoying, all the people who run into the side of the car when you've comandeered it and are just pulling away.
Add to that the game is dark, and I mean DARK. Brown and dark grey buildings against a perpetually overcast sky makes it almost impossible to tell where you are. The game DOES have a dynamic day/night cycle, but the city is so dark the only way to tell whether it's day or night is by whether or not Dojos and Gun Shops are open or not.
The gameplay suffers a lot from poor physics in the driving engine. The pit manuever is still usable in the game, but if manage to hit another vehicle at just the right point, it will spin wildly about and eventually come to a stop. It doesn't matter if you're hitting a bus a two door hatchback, the bus will lift off the ground and spin quickly four or five times before coming to a halt. More annoying still, after having gone through what would actually be an amazingly punishing experience, the suspects don't get out of the vehicle and surrender, they remain safely in the vehicle and shoot at you.