This review contains spoilers
Yeah, I don't know about this one. Rockstar writers seem like they were torn between several approaches to Max as a character and the setting as a whole. On the one hand, they wanted to add to his character new layers of self-awareness and weight given his previous failures as well as an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion, where he's pretty much given up and given in to his alcoholism. On the other, they fill his mouth with so many cheesy one-liners that I got could barely keep up rolling my eyes at them. The writers tried to include some commentary about the excesses of the police force, impunity of the officers as well as the overwhelming power wielded by the richest citizens that are all exacerbated by the poverty in the region. Then, those same writers develop a moronic subplot involving organ harvesting that almost undoes everything good mentioned in the previous sentence. Another example: game depicts in horrifying detail the abuse experienced by the poorest Brazilians from said police officers. At the same time, it revels in showing every little gory detail when Max finishes a shootout by unloading a full clip into an enemy's head. What is the point of this?
Moving on to the gameplay, it is both incredibly fun and incredibly frustrating. Fun, because Max expanded his move set which made the combat more fluid (even if I disagree with the decision to include cover-based shooting, I tried to omit that whenever I could). Frustrating, because often we are only allowed to actually play the game in short bursts. The number of cutscenes is overwhelming and there are numerous instances of the game allowing you to control Max for 30 seconds or so and then skipping to another cutscene. This completely destroys any feeling of momentum that can be built during one of the longer combat sequences, e.g. the famous airport shootout. Sure, the music's great, the graphics hold up very well over a decade later, some of the animations are still impressive. But this feels more like Rockstar wanting to keep the old fans happy and at the same time looking for a new direction asking "do you like this perhaps?" and in the end delivering a product that feels disjointed.
Moving on to the gameplay, it is both incredibly fun and incredibly frustrating. Fun, because Max expanded his move set which made the combat more fluid (even if I disagree with the decision to include cover-based shooting, I tried to omit that whenever I could). Frustrating, because often we are only allowed to actually play the game in short bursts. The number of cutscenes is overwhelming and there are numerous instances of the game allowing you to control Max for 30 seconds or so and then skipping to another cutscene. This completely destroys any feeling of momentum that can be built during one of the longer combat sequences, e.g. the famous airport shootout. Sure, the music's great, the graphics hold up very well over a decade later, some of the animations are still impressive. But this feels more like Rockstar wanting to keep the old fans happy and at the same time looking for a new direction asking "do you like this perhaps?" and in the end delivering a product that feels disjointed.