gta5 ruined it for me

I agree with all your points there.

But I also have to add just cos it's an open world game, I don't understand the comparison to GTA V.
It's like apples and oranges.

The graphics are "dull" and "drab", but I feel they added to the tone the game is going for.
GTA was set in a fictional LA and has that Rockstar humour. So of course it'll be "lighter", etc.
Watchdogs is meant to be a bit grittier, darker, drab, etc. I don't think a bight, sunny setting would have carried the tone of the game at all.

But I 100% agree on the vehicle handling. It's terrible. All the cars feel so light with no weight to them. The all slide like rally cars, the steering is way too loose and the camera waves about behind the car way too wildly...and there is no sensitivity settings for the driving, there is for looking but not for driving.

My biggest gripe is the missions as they offer little variety and end up becoming stale fast.

Still, it's a good game. But it could and should have been so much better, especially after the delays.
Still you said you only played it for an hour...with a game this big and hour is nothing. An hour and you've not seen much of what the game offers.
That's like watching 30 seconds of a 2 hour movie and claiming you didn't like it.

One thing I do think is great in this game are the police chases and the many different and inventive ways to avoid/lose police.
I purposely get into police chases as getting out of them is so much fun.
In terms of a game of this ilk, best police chases so far.

However, much like one of Ubisoft's other franchises, Assassin's Creed. The first game was lacking and suffered repetitive missions but they more than made up for it with the sequel.
So I hope they take any criticism on board for a Watchdogs 2 and work on it. Cos as I said, it's a good game with some great ideas behind it..but it's not quite there to stand up against the better games out there yet.

And so, God came forth and proclaimed widescreen is the best.
Sony 16:9

To compare to gta5 i think cant be helped because while driving in watchdogs i was like man handling is crap gta better.
Looking at the city i was like gta better etc etc
And i owned it for 2 days and got up to the bit where you get hacked and got to find him.
The game was glitching a lot too.
Also im assasins creed fan but since like a.c.r ubisoft have a habit of making the first bits of their games excellent then you get poor missions and becomes repetive fast
.with the exception of far cry and splinter cell series all ubisofts games become boring fast and repeat themselves. Well you got prince of persia.
The hacking i was already bored with.
Big disappointment watchdogs was for me . And i knew watchdogs would be repetitive so i sold it and ended up getting red dead uncharted 3 and far cry 3 back for 16 pounds..

Not sure about the PS3 version but I was playing it the other day on PS4 while my brother was playing GTA V on PS3 and the graphics are so much better in Watch Dogs. Car handling is tough but once you get use to it it's fine.

It's the other way around for me. I'm a PC guy so I got to play GTAV just now and it is so disappointing. I don't really like the look of it, it's all cartoony, the character faces are dead and in the cutscenes they still adopt that signature GTA motion capture style that makes them look like apes. Character handling is just maddening, the char is so slow and clumsy and if he gets knocked down it takes him forever to get up. Car physics is still the best but handling cars on PC is a pain in the s (steers too much on a single hit of a key). In my opinion WD beats GTAV in all of these departments.
But the main way WD ruined GTAV for me is the dialogue. I never expected much from dialogue and voice acting in games so I was really impressed by writing and acting in WD (except for T-Bone and The Rat characters that really look like they came straight from GTA world). After that GTAV dialogue seems so ridiculous and contrived and there's so much of it - they keep yapping and yapping it's so annoying.
Don't get me wrong, i'm a huge GTA fan. To this day GTA3 is my number 1 favorite game, but for me it all went downhill since then. I think this was the last GTA game I bought. Hopefully WD will grow into a great franchise though.