Sure, that's if you take it as an open world game in which to have fun. And yeah, it's alright for that, it's just stuff like Just Cause 2 and Saints Row the Third are way better at it. If we take the main storyline it creates a massive disconnect, and that's what I dislike.
Here's what I mean. In the best GTA game ever, Vice City, you controlled a psychopath maniac called Tommy Vercetti. Tommy stealing an old man's car at gunpoint, driving off with it and murdering several prostitutes made PERFECT SENSE for his character. He was mental!
Now, in GTA4, you have Niko Bellic. What Rockstar tried to do with GTA4 was created a more rounded, multifaceted character, and it didn't work. Having Niko be all TOTES EMOSH about SRS THINGS U GUISE just didn't work,because they created a disconnect between Bellic's character in the storyline and what you the player could make him do. Basically, having someone so morally upstanding is massively hypocritical in a game in which running over pedestrians is pretty much what the series invented.
THAT'S why GTA4 was poor, and thusly blown out of the water by SR3. GTA is set in a world which is deliberately fantastical; no real world would have you kill thirty people in a drive by motorbike explosive shotgun murder and then five minutes later be totally forgotten about 'cause you ran away from the police far enough. And yet, they're forcing the worst parts of living with the real world upon you in huge parts of the storyline. Saints Row 3 took seriousness and threw it out of the window, down fifty stories and shattered it onto the pavement below. Whilst I think that's going a little far - in order for something to be light-hearted and fun it needs to have some contrast, after all - it's a **** sight better than GTA4. As an exercise in creating a game world and production and coding and graphics and scale and all that bollocks, GTA4 is breathtaking. As a game, it is soulless, because it lost sight of exactly what made it fun.