GTA 3 is one of the most influential games of all time, and the natural bridge between the experimental late 90s/early 2000s push for realistic, breathing worlds (as seen in shenmue, majora's mask, driver) and the current model of open-world video games. it's also really frustratingly designed and pretty shallow. the first thing veterans of the franchise will notice when playing GTA 3 is that this game is tough. like, really tough. but the odd thing about the difficulty is that it feels almost unintentional, or at least not fully thought through. very frequently this game will throw you in disadvantageous positions, which is fine, but they're disadvantageous because the lock-on sucks, or because traffic is fucking you over, or because pedestrians spawn in inopportune places. the biggest issue w this game's difficulty, by far, is how random it is. i played this on an emulator with save states at the start of missions, so i didn't have to rebuy all my weapons and trek back across the city, and playing that way makes the completely random traffic spawns very transparent. you can do the same mission 20 times and get fucked over in completely different places for completely different reasons every time, it's just not a great feeling. just for some examples of missions i felt were particularly bad about this; big'n'veiny is excruciating because the traffic will frequently get in the way of magazine drops, espresso 2 go is quite bad because pedestrians will frequently stand in front of the stalls you're meant to destroy and if you slow down for them you can no longer destroy the stalls, trial by fire is based entirely around random pedestrian spawns which means you're at the mercy of rng, so on and so forth. the later games have smarter traffic systems and don't design their missions with timeframes as tight as these, so clearly rockstar learned, but i can't really fathom why they did it this way other than to waste your time and draw out the playtime. it's very funny how the best weapon in this game, by far, is the sniper, not because it does the most damage, but just because it allows you to bypass the frustratingly unclear lock on system. when you're forced to use lock-on for encounters, the game doesn't really feel skill expressive at all, it sort of just feels like you're beating your head against the wall and holding down fire until you win or lose. the only exception i can think of to this would be in the final mission, where you have to strategize a bit about what order to take down gang members in and what pathing to take to do so, but it still doesn't really make the lock-on feel fun, it just makes everything around the shooting feel tighter and more engaging.
when it comes to delivering on a lifelike world with tons of freedom, GTA 3 is a step forward and a step back compared to other games from it's time. yes, you have the typical issues you'd expect to see in an open world game from this era (small map, repeated voice lines, etc), but the actual city itself still feels fairly plausible, even if it is less than 3 square miles in size. there's a lot of thought put into little details here, like the way newspapers fly around, or the fact that some of the stores actually close depending on the day and night cycle. driving also feels like a breeze, i love how the cars feel in this game, and the most fun i had was definitely just going fast and exploring the city. gta 3 doesn't really deliver on freedom in this environment, though. unfortunately in this game there's never a point where you have access to every island and are safe to roam around in them. almost as soon as you get to staunton island, most of portland becomes off-limits because the mafia aggros you and can wipe almost all cars in seconds. as soon as you get to the third island, you're still aggro'd there. i can understand what they were going for, making the underworld of liberty city gradually become more unfriendly as you're forced to cut ties with more of it, but i don't really think there's any good reason why it should be this way still after the campaign has ended. why have all this detail put into the world if i can't sit back and take it in?
also, writing isn't exactly a strong point of gta as a franchise in my experience, but this game has especially weak dialogue and story. the plot more or less doesn't exist until you're almost done with it, for most of the game you're just doing jobs aimlessly until the game sort of tries to throw in a revenge plot at the end. i wouldn't be too disappointed by this aspect if the characters were interesting or the writing was funny, but pretty much all of the characters are stereotypes or stock crime movie characters, and the writing is neither ridiculous enough to play well as satire nor serious enough to be engaging dramatically. the writing feels especially dumb when it can't even bother to be a little accurate about the ethnic groups it's portraying. like, i get that they're trying to be irreverent and satirical, not accurate, but some basic understanding about the difference between japanese and chinese people beyond "honor" would be nice. still cool how unnecessarily star-studded this cast is, though.
btw more gta games should have a classical station, it actually fits the tone really well