Overall, this is a pretty good book, and if I could, I'd probably give it 4 1/2 stars. But it's just not quite a 5.


Lacks any helpful information  Dec 31, 2010 By Daniel Saner
The guide unfortunately lacks any information that could help overcome the difficult spots in the game, or gain further insight into the missions or alternate paths to solve them.

Early chapters start out nicely by giving an overview of the game world and mechanics, and more in-depth introductions of the characters than the game's manual. The campaign walkthrough though, which makes up the majority of the guide's pages, mostly wastes a lot of time with giving turn-by-turn instructions on how to reach the different locations in town--completely unnecessary given that the game points out the destinations, includes both a printed and an in-game map, and that the maps are reprinted again for every mission in the guide itself. There are precious few combat spots where the guide gives viable strategies, but mostly it fails to give any information about the different possibilities of approaching a mission, or any of the numerous tricks that one inevitably learns when retrying missions several times. Most information from the mission walkthroughs could be gleaned from examining the maps and missions from a static map editor, and are not really helpful in actually playing the missions at all.

This edition of the guide does, in contrast to the one for the PC version which poorly treated the optional subquests, free ride, and free ride extreme modes on a meagre 2 pages combined, spend a little more time on the car theft missions and alternate game modes, but they still feel more like an afterthought.

The guide overall feels more like summary of the game's missions than an actual playing guide. Apart from giving an important hint for when you are really stuck on a mission in terms of not even knowing where to go next or what to try and do, I think the helpfulness of this guide is very limited.