This is definitely the first 3D GTA alright. It's an okay time, sound track is cool, I like the visuals, and even though the vehicle physics are awful, I actually enjoy driving around listening to the music. The missions are nothing special and imo are only hard due to design choices (likely due to limitations at the time), so much so that I couldn't help but think about how easy some of them would be in a modern GTA. Story kept me engagedish, I guess, not enough to finish the game tho, more on that later. Cops are pretty fucking annoying and the way you have to lose them is pretty annoying, you have to memorize where things are yourself, or pull up a map on the side. I ended up just using cheats to make my life easier and lose them as soon as it got too much. At best missions are eh, at worst they're tedious and annoying.

Which is why I abandoned this title, my game tweaked out and crashed causing me to lose like 3 hours of progress, and with all the above in mind it was not worth it to me to go thru it again for more mediocre gameplay when there's 4 other 3D GTAs for me to go through.

I can see why this one is the "black sheep" of the bunch. I don't think it's bad by any means, but I do think it's a step down from Dark Souls, which I enjoyed very much. It's been awhile since I played DS1, but the controls feel somehow more stiff? I also feel like a lot of encounters I was best of just circling around the enemy, not even rolling, but maybe that's an early game thing. Loot felt like it was nonexistent. Barely got any armor or weapons but I did get the same Hollowed gloves 50 times. I also think it kinda sucks there's an enemy respawn limit, I don't think that was a thing in DS1? I guess they didn't like people super over-leveling. Idk, it just didn't click with me, I was basically pushing myself to play it, just incase it gets to a point where I start to like it. I didn't have to do that with DS1, it had me hooked lowkey. DS2 isn't the only game I've done this with, and as a gamer, I need to not feel like I need to give every game a bunch of tries if it doesn't vibe with me. There's too many games out there to play to be doing that lol.

That said, I still may return to this one, and give it another go. I do wanna put DS1 on here, but I want to replay it first, so after that at some point most likely, but for now, I'm good on it.