Unlike its predecessors, this is an open-world Third-Person Shooter, and it's the Grand Theft Auto I never knew I wanted. What kind of mayhem can you cause in Grand Theft Auto? Rob a convenience store? Steal a cop car? Pay for some fun with women of the night? Yawn. How about driving a truck to an enemy outpost, driving that truck THROUGH the outpost, taking out walls until they damage it enough to blow it up, causing it to take out even more of the building. Finish it off with your sledgehammer, blast enemy troops until they get mad enough to send armored personnel carriers, shoot the guy firing at you from the turret on top, hijack the thing, and drive off with his corpse flapping in the breeze like some eye-catching gimmick you'd see at a used car lot.
You get to pick targets and blow them up, so the destruction element of this series is finally worth something. You collect salvage to buy upgrades and new weapons, including some crazy new arms, and there are plenty of side missions. You're waging a war, but as a one-man army; no troop placement orbabysitting, like a Strategy game would have. The game lets you go about things however you like, and there are plenty of ways to victory. Mars is beautiful in this game, and you finally get to explore it; the different regions are surprisingly diverse, and occasionally haunting. You're not going to care about the characters, story, or soundtrack, but if you care more about fun and gameplay, that won't matter. Even if you don't like the first 2 games, you might want to give this a try.