Grand Theft Auto meets Seventh Generation Counsels, and it's just awesome.
One of the most noticeable added features of the game is the improved graphics, particularly of the city. The game takes place in Liberty City, but this time Liberty City is much larger than it is in GTA 3 and looks more like modern day New York City. The City also has changed the names of its major island divisions and added a section known as Alderney city that is supposed to look like New Jersey. Another big feature is the combat system, basically the system enhances hand-to-hand fighting by allowing the ability to duck and counter attack and enhances the shooting by allowing your player to take cover and to shoot from cover (which is pretty much a necessity as shooting with out taking cover can lead to getting killed quickly).
some other added/new features are:
1. Your characters actually have fingers (rather than just hands as in the previous games) and little things like burgers and stuff in the hands actually show up when you buy one.
2. The police wanted level system has been slightly changed. You still have the six star wanted level scenario, however you won't get the military on you, only the FBI at the highest level. Also the police system utilizes an area that appears on the map as a circle that changes colors from blue to red (similar to the search radius in the "Scarface the World Is Yours" game), if you get out of that area without any police seeing you, you lose your wanted levels, but if seen by a cop, the search radius will be adjusted to be closer to your location. Also, you can lose wanted levels by going into a Pay 'N Spray, but unlike in previous games, you won't lose the wanted levels if the police see you enter it.
3. This game (at least on the Xbox 360) has the ability to autosave. It will automatically save once you beat a mission, meaning you don't have to worry about finding a safe house to save in, which can be a pain, especially when you just beat a mission and have to go somewhere in a hurry (that happened once to my cousin and I, we beat a mission on Vice City and we had to go to a restaurant to eat and his parents kept telling us to hurry because I think they had reservations and it was taking us a while to find and get to the nearest safe house).
4. The ability to take a cab to a destination. You can take a cab to any destination by riding in the cab and setting a destination on the map. While traveling there you can sit in the cab and look out the windows to see the view, or you can tell the driver to hurry up or you can even skip directly to your destination (Similar to San Andreas' "Trip Skip" in a way) for extra cost.
Also the storyline in this game is the deepest and richest in a GTA game yet. Basically you are Niko Bellic, a guy from Eastern Europe who fought in the Bosnian war and got messed up emotionally by it. After working for an Eastern European crimeboss named Ray Bulgarin somewhere in the Baltic Sea, Niko comes to Liberty City after being invited there by his cousin, Roman Bellic who lives there. Niko also has an ulterior motive for coming to Liberty City: during the war, Niko's army unit was betrayed and massacred, him and two other members where the only survivors- one of the survivors is the traitor, Niko believes the traitor is hiding in Liberty City and goes there to get revenge. An interesting new feature in this Grand Theft Auto game's storyline is the ability, in certain missions to choose whether to kill or not kill a certain character or sometimes whether to kill one character or another and stuff like that which can influence events in the storyline, however I don't want to say to much so as not to spoil anything.
Overall this is a very good game, and it should occupy a good amount of time just to beat the main story missions. The graphics are a leap ahead of previous GTA games. Safe to say, this is one game that will be remembered for years and maybe even decades.