My brother picked it up after work yesterday, and we played some last night. So far it's okay. Neither of us care for the vehicle handling. Whenever we try to take a corner, the cars always do this action movie car swerve that spins almost all the way around, making it virtually impossible to hang corners smoothly during chases. The character also seems to run much slower than previous GTA characters and takes too long walking up/down stairs and climbing over things. A real pain when people are after you. We like being able to just free roam and have run in a GTA game, but that's made more difficult now because to enter cheats you have to dial numbers on the cell phone, and the game doesn't pause when you do that, so it's impossible to clear your wanted meter when cops are shooting at you unless you're a super fast dialer.
Visually, the game is just mind-blowing. I especially love the RPG explosions, and the way the screen goes to a stylized slow-motion black-and-white when your character gets killed. Some of the stuff you can watch on TV is hysterical.
I guess it'll take some getting used to, but so far I think it's just okay. The previous ones, especially San Andreas, are still tops for me.
