It’s almost time. After more than a decade since Grand Theft Auto 5 was released, GTA 6 is mere days away from launching on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. To mark the auspicious occasion, we’re looking back on the critical legacy of the Grand Theft Auto series.
With plenty of installments boasting Metacritic scores in the high 90s, GTA 6 has an exceptionally high bar to meet. That said, the series has had occasional growing pains over the years, even if true stinkers are a rarity among Rockstar Games’ back catalog. These are the top 10 GTA games of all time, ranked according to their Metacritic scores.
A note on methodology: This list doesn’t include expansions like GTA 4’s Ballad of Gay Tony, and it doesn’t include GTA Online. (There aren’t many actual reviews for the latter, because it’s an evolving, always-on experience.) It also doesn’t include the first three games in the series — GTA, GTA London 1969, and GTA London 1961 — again because there aren’t enough reviews for them to have a Metacritic score. Finally, we’re not counting ports, either. This ranking is determined by the scores on their original release platforms. Where there’s a tie, and there are a couple in this list, we’ll give the edge to the game with more reviews.
10
GTA Advance (2004)
Metacritic score: 68
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Alternately called Grand Theft Auto Advance or simply Grand Theft Auto, this GBA game is actually a top-down prequel to GTA 3 that’s set in Liberty City, rather than a remake or remaster of the first game. In a review for Eurogamer, Kristan Reed noted it felt out of step with the new direction of the series. “It’s just not the Grand Theft Auto experience most people will be gunning for, and certainly not for this price, not a chance in hell.”
In a recent retrospective, Polygon’s Josh Broadwell said that this rare bum note for the series is more fun to talk about than it is to play, but GTA Advance was also a vital stepping stone for the future of the series: “You’ve got your street races, firefighting missions, vigilante missions, all the stuff Rockstar loaded in modern GTA. Just in a much smaller, choppier package with worse radio stations. Those details may seem trivial, but Rockstar soon learned they were hugely important to its audience.”
9
Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999)
Metacritic score: 70
Platform: PC, PS2
This top-down sequel was characterized as a mixed bag by critics, who largely considered it to be more of the same as the original Grand Theft Auto. Reviews praised the soundtrack and early loyalty system, but the controls and overall gameplay left many players cold.
IGN’s Jeremy Dunham dismissed GTA 2 as “a rental at best” given its “shoddy play mechanics.” Writing for Gamespot, Jeff Gerstmann observed, “The graphics have been redone, the music is different, there is a slew of new weapons, the mission structure is a bit more complex, and the city feels a bit more alive. But at its core, GTA 2 is the same old game.” At this point, the prospect of GTA being a multi-billion-dollar franchise and a global pop-culture phenomenon was nowhere in sight.
8
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (2006)
Metacritic score: 86
Platform: PSP
Welcome to Miami! This prequel to 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City centers around the former soldier Vic Vance and his attempts to build up a criminal empire with his brother Lance in early ‘80s Vice City. Critics generally enjoyed the empire-building mechanics, but by this point felt the core GTA gameplay was getting long in the tooth. In an otherwise glowing 90-point review for 1UP.com, Kames Ransom-Wiley saidsaid, “It’s a shame Rockstar chose not to fix obvious flaws that have been called out repeatedly, but the weight of the total experience more than counterbalances this disappointment.”
7
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (2005)
Metacritic score: 88
Platform: PSP
This first installment of the Stories subseries follows GTA 3 side character Toni Cipriani’s (yes, Toni with an I) efforts to rise through the ranks of the Leone crime family, getting caught up in a power struggle between the NYC-inspired city’s Mafia organisations. Gamespot’s Jeff Gerstmann said the game was a technical showcase for Sony’s handheld console, even if the story was a little bit lacking: “It’s really pretty amazing that GTA: Liberty City Stories manages to cram in so much of the GTA experience that you’re used to seeing on consoles. While the game is definitely a fine technical achievement and one of the best PSP games to date, the dull storyline and basic mission design do bring the whole thing down a bit.”
Meanwhile, IGN’s Juan Castro praised the abundance of optional activities, and hinted at the low-pressure sandbox experience that would become a staple of open-world GTA. “There’s so much to see and do that finishing the main story portion leaves around 60% of the game to experience. Just driving around the city and taking in the sights packs about as much fun as most full-fledged games.”
6
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (2009)
Metacritic score: 93
Platform: Nintendo DS
A hybrid of the series’ original top-down presentation and its later open-world mechanics, Chinatown Wars follows Huang Lee’s journey to recover a stolen sword that was given to him by his late father, which sees him get caught up in a clash between Liberty City’s Triads. It drew widespread praise on launch, including from AV Club, who said, “the Nintendo DS may have forced Rockstar’s hand. There’s just no room for hours of talk-radio banality or stand-up routines. So Chinatown Wars sticks to the basics: police chases and kill-crazy rampages.”
Elsewhere, in a perfect-score review, Eurogamer’s Tom Bramwell called the game “a triumph, not just in terms of bringing a difficult game to a new platform intact, but because it actually improves it in the process, and demonstrates a mastery of DS form and function.”
5
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002)
Metacritic score: 95
Platform: PS2
We’re in the big leagues, now. This glamorous ‘80s tale marked the first of many visits to Rockstar’s Miami-inspired locale, and traces Tommy Vercetti’s rise to underworld power after he’s released from prison and caught up in a drug deal gone wrong. Reviewers praised its more detailed open world compared to GTA 3, the freeform approach to gameplay, and the music. As has been the case throughout the series’ history, though, the controls and mission design were cited as areas for improvement.
The Official US PlayStation Magazine deemed Vice City “the PS2’s defining title,” while a reviewer for Maxim magazine (holy 2002!) said, “You’ll be sold the second you get into a gang bang with the song “Beat It” playing in the background. It just doesn’t get any better than that.” The kicker of Eurogamer’s review sums up the consensus of the time: “Do yourselves a large favour and buy this game, or as Rockstar once advocated, steal it.”
4
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004)
Metacritic score: 95
Platform: PS2
Ah shit, here we go again. San Andreas follows Carl “CJ” Johnson, a former gangster who returns home following his mother’s murder and works to bring his gang back to its old glory. PSM2, now part of GamesRadar, called it “the single most complete, unique, universe in console history” after Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and “the best entertainment console gaming can offer.” It earned a perfect score from Game Informer, whose reviewer Andrew Reiner breathlessly said, “This is more than a game. This is entertainment at its best.”
The New York Times’ Charles Herold wasn’t quite so impressed, giving the sequel a stingy three out of five stars, due to what he describes as an illusion of openness: “It would feel truer to the game’s open environmental design if you could have more general goals: kill an enemy when and how you like; raise money for an objective through any method available; challenge random people to races.” He’s not wrong, actually. And this sounds quite a lot like what we’ll be able to do in GTA 6.
3
Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001)
Metacritic score: 97
Platform: PS2
Twenty-five years later, the massive impact of GTA 3 can’t be overstated. It established the foundation for open-world gaming, and made a compelling case for video games as a mature artistic medium for grown-ups. It follows silent protagonist Claude, who becomes entangled in the underworld in Liberty City while on a quest for revenge against his ex-girlfriend. Eurogamer’s Tom Bramwell called it a “luscious, sprawling epic of a game and one of the most complete experiences I have ever encountered. If this is what I’ve waited a year to see on my PS2, then I would have waited ten.”
“The makers of Grand Theft Auto 3 have created a complete videogame experience like few, if any, before it,” IGN’s Doug Perry noted in a near-perfect 9.6 out of 10 review. “The game is absolutely, insanely good, and is truly one of the best titles of the year, on PlayStation 2, or on any system.”
2
Grand Theft Auto 5 (2013)
Metacritic score: 97
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360
Taking players back to Los Angeles-inspired San Andreas, GTA 5 divides the story between three protagonists — Michael, Franklin, and Trevor. By and large, critics loved the multiple perspectives and praised the evolution in mission design. It became the second-ever game to get a perfect score from Japan’s venerable gaming magazine Famitsu. (The first was Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.) Writing for IGN, Keza McDonald called it “a preposterously enjoyable video game, but also an intelligent and sharp-tongued satire of contemporary America. It represents a refinement of everything that GTA 4 brought to the table five years ago.”
US Gamer’s Mike Williams offered a more measured perspective, anticipating some later critiques of the game: “If you’re absolutely opposed to torture, or you need a positive woman character in your game, Grand Theft Auto 5 is a complete non-starter.” Polygon’s Chris Plante felt a similar ambivalence, noting that “there are more interesting female characters on Grand Theft Auto 5‘s disc art than there are in Grand Theft Auto 5.” Rockstar seems to have taken this criticism to heart given Lucia’s co-protagonist status in GTA 6; it remains to be seen how well the notoriously “edgy” studio will pull it off.
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1
Grand Theft Auto 4 (2008)
Metacritic score: 98
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360
GTA 4 follows Eastern European migrant Niko Bellic’s journey toward the American Dream. After hearing his cousin Roman boast about his lavish lifestyle, Niko arrives in Liberty City to find him mired in gambling debt in a shithole apartment. It doesn’t take long before he’s tangled up with the Russian mafia. And the Irish mafia. And the Italian one, too.
Reviewers showered praise on New York-inspired open-world design, including Seth Schiesel of The New York Times, who called the city ” the real star” of the game. In a review for Computer and Video Games, Andy Robinson wrote: “In scope and scale, Liberty City is utterly unmatched. There’s seamless integration of interior and exterior (indoors doesn’t look like blurry boxes anymore) which is [GTA 4‘s] most significant jump over San Andreas.”
They also really liked Niko, and enjoyed the darker, deeper, and less satirical tone of his story. “Rather than try to out-do the Crackdowns and the Saints Rows of the world with bigger land masses and more missions, Rockstar went the other way, and managed to craft an amazingly impactful story and weave it into an open-world game in an incredibly meaningful way — all without losing the heart and soul of what makes Grand Theft Auto so popular in the first place, said Gerstmann in Giant Bomb’s review. “The end result is absolutely masterful and absolutely worth your time and money.”
Over time, it’s Niko’s affecting tale that’s given GTA 4 the edge over some very stiff competition. As Polygon’s Josh Broadwell noted in an October 2026 retrospective, “Niko’s story has no happy ending. Sure, he comes out on top and his place in Liberty City’s underworld is secured. This isn’t the life he wanted, though, and no amount of glitz and glamor can make up for what he’s lost.” Can Jason and Lucia’s tale top the all-time GOAT? We won’t have to wait much longer to find out.
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