Yeah but I can explain some of those things for SR3.
1. The story is short because Respect no longer is needed for missions so a few hours of minigames are taken out. There is no need to grind on minigames for Respect after a few missions so the game may be shorter from that. The story is pretty interesting and has some good parts and lots of action. It may be short like I have heard (Don't flame don't have the game yet but have heard a bit about it) and the story is linear rather than picking a gang to fight. They may have also cut the story because they wanted it to be more of a playground and thankfully they kept the gangs and Olegs once you beat em :) Also there are co-op gamemodes which are alot of fun. yes, you fight gimps weilding carrots.
2. Customization is still in depth you can modify cars, weapons, and theres even a love appeal slider. Though my friend did say the clothes can't combine in some ways now.
3. Multiplayer was removed because it was bad in SR2. Co-op was kept because alot of people played it and had alot more fun playing with their buddies in an open world. (As for gamemodes whored mode is a forgetpile of zombies, furries, gimps and other stuff attacking you)
I do kinda hate that the weapons kinda lack a few (No revolvers? :c) but they make up for it in upgrades and some special ones too( RC car, drone, shark shotgun, squid launcher, carrot, etc.)
About the cheat thing, don't worry they didn't take away all the cheats and it adds since people would probably cheat their way through the game and they made cheats stop achievements. Also it's only 3$ Not much but it's only for Never dieing and some other stuff and with no death the game can get boring IMO cause theres no challenge and no need to worry about hiding from bullets. The cheats still got some great stuff like making every citizen a zombie or furries and buring them all.
Im really looking forward to Christmas when I get it, I'll have to see for myself what it's like since we all have opinions on this game but Im really looking forward to messing with the AWESOME button and richarding around in SP and CO-OP.