The story is extremely tongue-in-cheek, the voice acting pretty atypical, but the action and carnage is top notch. If you liked the first game, I can confidently say you'll like the second one as much, if not more. In any case, I'm enjoying it a lot more than I enjoyed GTA4, and actually playing it a lot more than the other game I bought around the same time, Spore (the space stage is a terrific pain in the ass). At the very least, Pandemic could have increased the reporting time from more than seven seconds so you might actually be able to do something about it. There's no way around this, including disguises or jamming vehicles, besides killing everyone right off the bat. My biggest peeve is with the "reporting in" system, in which a faction member's soldiers will report in your misdeeds to their boss and thus ruin your reputation with them. The world's fully destructible (right down to those oil refineries and the Amazon Rain Forest), and the actual combat mechanic is good enough for its purposes (I hate to make the comparison again, but the shooting is leaps and bounds over GTA4, which is good because it's a crucial part of the game). Pandemic got one thing right: unlike the increasingly-moronic decision-makers at Rockstar, they got it in their head to include Checkpoints in all the missions. There's a lot more of a diversity of missions, and the game is at least as good looking as GTA4. The online co-op is a lot of fun, but, like many aspects of the game, rather buggy. I personally enjoy it a good deal (well worth my $60 US), but I would give it about a 8 out of 10.