Yup. Definitely a very large step up from the first entry. In every conceivable way imaginable. Graphics, scale of lunacy, scale of missions, cast, range of weapons and vehicles, and most important of all, the size of the sandbox. My god, the size of the sandbox. If I recall correctly, it was 30 km square. Definitely sounds right. While this gives a huge space to play in, it also means that you spend a very large portion of the game just travelling (mostly in helicopters) because again, fast travel options are quite limited.

That was the only real problem I had though because apart from that it was a lot of fun. Mostly due to the sheer lunacy of most of the operations like hijacking planes and vehicles while moving. And the ability to jump between vehicles to hijack them and the grappling hook that lets you move across terrain an a huge speed, climb things instantly, hijack vehicles and people and much much more. Lots of fun all round, but as with most games like this, there were quite a few duller filler missions. Would have preferred more insane epic ones. Also, I bought loads of DLC for this in the forms of special vehicles and guns but couldn't really use it much because I had to keep buying it again in game, the ammo runs out quickly and you have to keep re-buying the special guns and the average life of a vehicles in this game (even special ones) is about 49 seconds. Never mind the negatives. So much positives. So much madness. So much action and so much grappling.