Got to play for a few hours last night
I am up to Act 1 Mission 3, The mission after the Birthday party.
I started doing side missions because what J4mes said will most likely be pretty accurate.
IDK about the driving though. Its not "bad" but its not good. Some cars do handle differently, but the sports car that you get in the first mission fucking sucked to drive. It took me, no joke, 40 minutes or so, to get away from the cops. I ended up taking out fences, gates, pedestrians and pretty much everything. About 20 minutes in, I ditched to a blue minivan and was able to escape for the most part pretty quickly, but I had so many "stars" by then that the helicopters were tailing me. I finally ditched and went for a swim under a bridge, and then after waiting did the cops go away.
Moral of the story: Swim if you want to get away from cops easily.
Also, the first vigilante mission is hysterical, I ended up doing three of them, and even if the "victim" of the crime dies, but you still beat up the attacker, you win the mission. So stay in cover until the person is dead, then go up and beat the crap out of the bad guy.
Its pretty obvious that they didn't' think this game through all the way, which I expected as Ubisoft likes to split their games between like 30 design houses