Great and overrated. The best games in the series, 4 and 5 are great but still overrated. GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas are meh to okay and overrated. The only good 2D GTA imo is Chinatown Wars, the original ones get too repetitive too quickly.
A lot of journalists and people throw praise specifically at the gameplay, which while GTA4 and GTA5 have good gameplay for a GTA game, a better shooting system, better missions, etc, if you compare them to other competent third person shooters, they're really not that great. If you want to play with manual aiming, it's not smooth at all, the only thing that's really good is the auto aim. What about the open world. That's good, right? I honestly don't find the open world to be very good in GTA. Great, there's a helicopter, you can fly around and do nothing in the air. Great, you can parachute, wow, so fun. The only thing good to mess around with the open world is to just blow stuff up and do the side stuff.
There are other open world games that have better gameplay and missions specifically. Storyline might not be as good as GTA4, GTA5, and Chinatown Wars, but the gameplay is a whole hell of a lot better.
The Saboteur had an extremely fluid third person shooting system, great snap to cover system. Lots of missions throughout the game that can be completed with run and gun or stealth. Decent story. Large amount of side content after you finish the game.
Scarface the World is Yours uses the same auto aim mechanic that GTA4 does, except the game came out before GTA4 did. It also features a very fluid manual shooting mechanic and a meter that fills up the better you play allowing you to go into a rage mode for a short amount of time, infinite ammo, infinite health, and restores health each enemy you kill during that mode. Decent story, telling what happens if Tony was to survive the shootout, lose his fortune, then come back to get revenge. Large amount of side content after finishing the game plus endless amount of random missions kind of like the turf wars on Episodes From Liberty City, plus the drug running.
Just Cause 2. The storyline on this game is pretty terrible, driving in vehicles is available, but the physics are bad. The missions are decent. While I wouldn't rate this as good as GTA4 and 5 when it comes to actually playing through the single player, that's it. When it comes to screwing around with in the game world, the reason given when GTA fans tell you that's why they purchase each and every game, Just Cause 2 is better in that aspect. Just cause has better shooting, a world that's several times larger and better crafted than all GTA titles combined, many different types of vehicles from cars, jets, boats, airplanes, helicopters, etc, a parachute, a grappling hook gun to use the parachute to travel around, or latch any two items in the game together, or pull yourself up to anywhere in the game, grenades, remote mines, rocket launcher, an upgrade shop, fast travel to anywhere on the massive map, etc. If you want to blow stuff up, the amount of non storyline content scattered throughout the game is massive. Here's a montage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsXmLGlxcfM Also, if you have a PC, you can play in the Just Cause 2 world with friends through a mod.
Also, money is actually worth getting in the games listed above, as well as many other games. Most GTA games, you pretty much forget about the money as it's almost worthless. I think GTA5, Vice City Stories, and Chinatown Wars are the only games where having lots of money is good, because you can upgrade weapons, purchase homes or businesses, upgrade the businesses, etc.
