
✓ Same family of open-world action games: adventure storytelling, shooter and first-person shooting
≠ Stands apart with racing gameplay, sandbox freedom and third-person shooting, while skipping historical setting
The largest of the PS2-era entries by a distance: three cities, countryside between them, and systems the series never repeated — stat training, gang territory, vehicle variety from bikes to planes. It is also the most uneven. Mission difficulty spikes without warning, and the RPG-ish stat grind sits oddly against the pace of everything else.



