First, the nutshell. Its pretty damn good and worth it if you're a gurps fan.

Now, the details.

The good news is that it's streamlined. The new autofire rules are a joy compared to the old ones and much easier, faster and believable. Rules for shotguns make a tremendous amount of sense, even the odd bit about shotgun blasts hitting at extremely close range makes sense.

(Basically, if a shotgun blast hits at extreme close range, it's treated as a single shot doing damage that's increased by a certain factor. HOWEVER the target's Damage resistance is increased by the same factor to represent that while a lot of pellets close together do more damage, the individual pellet is no better at penetrating armor, hence the armor value in increased to reflect this and keep a close range shotgun blast from becoming too effective vs. armor.)

The atuomatic rules basicsally give you a bonus to hit if you're firing a lot of shots, and your success roll tells you how many shots out of the burst hit. Basically, you roll to hit, if you succeed look at the weapon's recoil and divide your margain of success by the recoil to determine extra hits. So if you fire burst of 6 shots from an automatic weapon that has a recoil of 2, and you need to roll 12 or less to hit and roll a 7, you get one hit plus 2 extras since the margain of success, 5, divided by the recoil of 2 equals 2.5, rounded down to 2.

Skills now are all based on statistics, as are skill costs. Other than that they're still handled the same way as gurps third edition did for the most part.

Statistics are mostly the same tho costs have changed. Strength has been radically altered now, in that the amount you can lift goes up by a quadratic factor rather than in a linear fashion. Also St is now divided into strikeing strength and hitting strength, so a weightlifter can't necessarily punch more effectively than someone else, and someone trained to strike effectively can't necessarily lift great weights.

St is now cheaper to buy for large creatures, and more expensive for smaller ones.

Will and Perception are still based on IQ (BOO!) but easier to modify. (YAY!)

Success rolls still use critical success and failures, but npw the margain of success matters a lot more than it did before.

Some new things have been added to streamline things. Now, there's the 'affliction' rules which allow for attacks that don't do normal damage. Thus, for example, a taser might afflict someone with temporary paralysis and/or stunning, teargas might afflict someone with temporary blindness, etc. All in all the affliction rules can be used to represent magic curses, stun hits from energy weapons or effects of gas. It has a lot of limits and advantages to tailor it to various forms, like magic, gas, etc.

Some details have been lost. For example, the rules for PD are now gone, replaces with a flat +3 to all active defenses. Also very detailed hit locations and special damage rules for every location and attack type are much less detailed than in third edition.

As an example of lost detail, hollowpoint bullets fired from pistols and SMGs no longer have to roll to expand due to limited velocity. Oh well, it was a minor point and most people probably hated it.

The new color art is no big deal, I preferred the old B&W art myself. Also the artist can't seem to do facial expressions very well as one female character drawn quite frequently seems to have fewer facial expressions that the talentless "actress" Jeri Ryan.

There were some missing things, tho. I'd have liked more critical hit tables, like a seperate one for melee criticals and shooting criticals. Also kore examples of the effects of critical hits on certain attacks would have been nice.

Some people may like the new infinite earths setting in the back of the second book. I don't.

Asides from that, it's still GUPRS, and still lives up to SJG's usual high standards of quality.

You need both books to really run things, as the first covers character creation and the second covers combat and other details. All in all it's a solid product that will have an errata sheet soon, no bdoubt, but it's a worthy member of the Gurps line.