Gotta admit that when I first started playing this I wasn't that impressed. Just seemed like another GTA. After playing it for a few hours though I've decided it actually rather awesome.
i have felt that a lot of the GTA games were simply just minor tweaks and add on's of the first 3D version GTA 3.
therefore they basically just added, fixed stuff, etc but never made any real progress in terms of the leap GTA 3 was from previous GTA's.
i suppose that's why they called them vice city and san andreas rather than GTA 4 or GTA 5.
but when GTA 4 came, it felt again just an improved version of GTA 3.
GTA 5 on the other hand feels like it has been made from scratch, a whole new fresh breath of air, nothing feels like it's been re-used.
especially with the whole car spawn system of old gta's where when you were in a certain car, the game loaded the same car or cars of that category everywhere.
this game i feel is what GTA 4 should have been and taken them to that next level.
saint's row i feel has just turned to complete turd now, there's not much you can say that's wrong with this GTA, in fact i'm amazed it's working on the ps3's limited hardware so well.
the only way I see it becoming better now is allowing you to go inside every single building of the game, maybe need to make the map a lot smaller, then release DLC's which make the map bigger to pull something like that off, or even using photo's and real images as textures in the next gen GTA 6 so everything looks like it is actually real.