There is some variety in the types of missions, but not much. Most missions are hit missions, but there are also some that involve vehicle chases, robbery, protection, intimidation, gang wars, or combinations of the different types.  The controls for all these different types boil down to shooting and driving.

The actual mission structure of the game is stupid. Often to start a mission you have to drive somewhere to get the task, then you have to drive somewhere else to get something needed for the job, then you have to go complete the job, then you have to get away. In the majority of missions if you die at any point in the mission you have to start all over. Only a few of the missions include checkpoints. This is one of the most frustrating and outdated features of any game I have played recently.

This would not be so frustrating if the game play was more fun. The controls are an improvement from Grand Theft Auto games on the original Xbox, but they are still bad. Shooting relies very much on auto-targeting and staying behind cover. Switching between auto-targets does not work very well; you have to fight the game to change from the guy it wants you to shoot. You can free-aim but it is not much better and is even harder to switch rapidly. To top all this off, moving between cover is also annoying. Niko will too easily stick to objects, often when you do not want him to. You will find him taking cover on the wrong side of a wall far too much.

The driving controls are alright, but not great. Different cars have noticeably different handling, weight, and acceleration. Still, none of them control as well as an average race game. This is a problem for a game were you spend a significant amount of time driving. There is also another problem with driving missions. Sometimes they are pre-scripted, you have to follow a bad guy to a certain location and then chase him on foot. Other times they are not, you can stop the bad guy before he gets away from you. You are not always told at the beginning of a driving mission what kind it is. You could unload clip after clip into the back of a nemesis’s head to no effect because it is pre-scripted.

Despite all my problems with the game play I can concede it has some plusses. Sometimes that 15 minute drive to the meat of the mission allowed me to rethink my strategy. Once I decided to take out two carloads of people with two rockets; another time I decided to kill the gang boss with a sniper rifle. I had previously been approaching both of those missions as out and out firefights. If I had restarted from a checkpoint I might have not thought of those strategies.  Indeed, glancing at message boards and faqs it seems there are multiple ways to approach many missions.