Context and Technical issues first: Played the game on a serious manner for the first time, on the series X. No surprises but its an awful, ugly port that suffers from constant pop-ins and bugs, and generally dont improve the gameplay a whole lot. Definitely affected my rating and my feelings about the game.
The Game itself is fun enough, and Rockstar's writing and characters are great as usual, along with ridiculously fun (and unrealistic) missions and chaos. Though the game is very dated and have absurd amount of backtracking - some of it can be forgiven due to the game's age and some of it is just plain annoying.
The story is a mixed bag, though leaning to the positive side. while the characters are good and it keeps your interest for the most part, the pacing is all over the place, with long section where you feel like you barely made any progress for few missions - followed by one or two missions that progress the story a whole lot, really fast. This leads to another big problem and is that because a lot of the times things happen really quickly and they lose quite a bit of the impact, even if its supposed to be a big story moment. it doesn't help that the direction of the cutscenes and these events is also pretty subpar, sometimes it come down to lack of music in actual missions and big story events, sometimes its due to really boring presentation, etc - yes, a lot of it is due to the game age, but even then, there's old games that definitely make big story events Feel impactful, while here its mostly.. meh.
Overall it has a lot of fun moments, but it can feel like a chore to get through due to the outdated mission design and gameplay, and the weird story pacing brings the experience down further, and the "icing on the cake" - the terrible port just makes it borderline not worth investing your time, if the "Definitive Edition" is your only way to play.
The Game itself is fun enough, and Rockstar's writing and characters are great as usual, along with ridiculously fun (and unrealistic) missions and chaos. Though the game is very dated and have absurd amount of backtracking - some of it can be forgiven due to the game's age and some of it is just plain annoying.
The story is a mixed bag, though leaning to the positive side. while the characters are good and it keeps your interest for the most part, the pacing is all over the place, with long section where you feel like you barely made any progress for few missions - followed by one or two missions that progress the story a whole lot, really fast. This leads to another big problem and is that because a lot of the times things happen really quickly and they lose quite a bit of the impact, even if its supposed to be a big story moment. it doesn't help that the direction of the cutscenes and these events is also pretty subpar, sometimes it come down to lack of music in actual missions and big story events, sometimes its due to really boring presentation, etc - yes, a lot of it is due to the game age, but even then, there's old games that definitely make big story events Feel impactful, while here its mostly.. meh.
Overall it has a lot of fun moments, but it can feel like a chore to get through due to the outdated mission design and gameplay, and the weird story pacing brings the experience down further, and the "icing on the cake" - the terrible port just makes it borderline not worth investing your time, if the "Definitive Edition" is your only way to play.