Going through a GTA games ranked list is a trip through nearly three decades of experiments, innovation, big ambition, and even bigger success. Rockstar’s genre-defining action game series had a rough beginning before it made the rest of the games industry sit up and take notice, and it influenced nearly every non-linear sandbox game afterward in some measure. Not every GTA game lived up to the reputation Rockstar created for itself, though, namely the portable spinoffs that saw GTA spinning its wheels instead of pushing ahead.
GTA Liberty CIty Stories
The problem with the handheld Stories prequels is that, while they do tell a tale of what happened before the main game took place, they don’t really change what you’re actually doing in Liberty City – or in Vice City, for that matter. Liberty City Stories isn’t necessarily a bad GTA game, but it is overly familiar to the point where it feels stale.
The series’ usual grittiness and cruelty get stretched to ridiculous proportions in Liberty City Stories as well. Blowing up an entire neighborhood for just a few thousand dollars? That’s just psychopathic behavior.
GTA Advance
GTA Vice City Stories
Vice City Stories has the same problems as Liberty City Stories. Sure, the story itself is fine enough, but the missions are just standard GTA fare. It’s a decent experience on a handheld, though, where you can dip in for a short session and leave before it gets boring, and VC Stories featured surprisingly good multiplayer support. You could play with several friends and pick from nearly a dozen modes.
GTA 1
The first GTA deserves some mention for how groundbreaking it was at the time. Here was an action game that put you in the bad guys’ shoes and gave you free rein – well, freer than most PS1 games at the time – to do what you wanted. It’s clunky and doesn’t look particularly good, so revisiting it now feels like a chore more than actual enjoyment.
GTA 2
GTA 2 looks better and plays more smoothly than the first GTA, though it doesn’t really do much to push the series forward. There’s hardly any story. The whole point is just committing crimes, and while that’s fine for some, it does get pretty old after a while.
GTA 3
GTA 3 was a milestone not just for the series, but for video games in general. Rockstar made one of the first non-linear sandbox games and absolutely knocked it out of the park. Liberty City – Rockstar’s take on New York – is crammed with quests and activities, and while the story isn’t exactly a narrative achievement, it was still a step up from the first two games.
GTA Chinatown Wars
Rockstar finally took a more ambitious whack at portable GTA with Chinatown Wars. Rather than just making GTA-but-smaller, Rockstar created a brand-new world and story told from the viewpoint of a Triad member, Huang Lee, and even adopted a fresh approach for the art style. The DS version even made smart use of the touchscreen, which is more than you can say for a lot of DS games.
Where the GBA version’s top-down perspective felt like a limitation, Chinatown Wars actually uses it to support interesting gameplay. Chinatown Wars feels like a proper new GTA, and while we likely won’t see anything like it again, I’m holding out hope Rockstar does something like it at some point.
GTA Vice City
Vice City was a big step forward for the franchise and cemented much of what we expect from the series. You play as Tony in a twisted rags-to-riches story, as he arrives in Vice City determined to make his mark. There’s the usual crimes and acts of pettiness, but Vice City shakes up how you approach it all. The structure is almost completely non-linear, and Vice City has so much for you to do – pizza deliveries, unhinged car stunts, major heists, you name it. It definitely shows its age now, with clunky controls and crummy visuals, but it’s still a pretty big deal.
GTA 4
GTA 4 is in a bit of a weird place. As the first of the series in the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation, it suffered from some awkwardness and glitches. It also has one of the series’ best stories and does one of the strongest jobs of actually living up to Rockstar’s claims that GTA is meant to hold a dark mirror to American society. GTA 4 follows Nico, an immigrant struggling to adjust to his new life. The city is bigger than ever, and unlike a lot of open-world games, GTA 4 doesn’t struggle under the weight of its size. The city is worth exploring.
Rockstar improved even further with GTA 4’s expansions, with better storytelling, a broader variety of missions, and a sense of exuberant ridiculousness that’s just fun to play.
GTA San Andreas
San Andreas takes everything that made Vice City good and turns it into something even better. Protagonist CJ Johnson is more interesting than Tony, and so is the city he calls home. It’s bigger, with more – and more interesting – things to do, and better still, it was a completely seamless open world.
San Andreas also gives you more control over how your character turns out as well. A unique RPG system that almost seems more at home in Red Dead Redemption had CJ change depending on how he ate and how active he was. The characters and story are better than the GTA that came before, and unlike a lot of older GTA games, San Andreas actually still holds up pretty well now.
GTA V
There’s a good reason GTA 5 is still selling ridiculously well, over 10 years and two console generations after it launched. Rockstar took every lesson and successful experiment and threw them in GTA V, threw in an impressive range of creative new ideas, and topped it off with a massive online expansion that’s essentially a separate game in its own right. Rockstar tells GTA 5’s story from three perspectives this time, a first for the series, and they all manage to bring something interesting and worthwhile to the narrative. It’d be easy to fumble so many different story threads, especially for a developer used to focusing on just one tale, but they end up merging in a surprisingly satisfying way by the end.
Los Santos – Rockstar’s version of LA – is, bigger and denser than anything that came before, and Rockstar still managed to somehow make good use of all that space. The character and activity variety is stronger than ever, and while it’ll take you a long time to actually see it all, it’s typically worth the effort.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
