GTA games ranked: every Grand Theft Auto game from worst to best

Updated Sep 28, 2026: All Metacritic scores re-checked today. We’ll add GTA 6 once its reviews are in after the Nov 19 launch.

Here are all the GTA games ranked by critics, worst to best, going by their Metacritic scores. The winner is Grand Theft Auto IV, which sits at 98 on PS3 and 98 on Xbox 360. That’s the highest score in the series, a point above both GTA V and GTA III. At the bottom is Grand Theft Auto 2 at 70. With GTA 6 landing Nov 19, 2026, it’s a good time to look at the bar Rockstar has to clear.

How we ranked them

This isn’t our personal ranking, and it isn’t us pretending we’ve replayed 13 games this month. It’s the critics’ ranking, and the rules are simple:

• One score per game: the Metacritic metascore for the platform the game launched on (or its main launch platform). We name the platform every time and link the exact Metacritic page.
• Ties: the game with the higher score on its next-best platform from the same era wins.
• No score, no rank: the original GTA and its London expansion don’t have metascores, so they get their own section instead of a made-up number.
• Scores were checked on Sep 28, 2026. Metacritic numbers can shift a point when old reviews get added or removed.

GTA games ranked at a glance

The full ranking, from worst to best

11. Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999): 70

The only mainline game in the 70s, at 70 on PlayStation (the only version Metacritic scores). DMA Design stuck with the top-down view but moved the action to “Anywhere City,” a retro-futuristic metropolis, and added a gang respect system: work for one crew and its rivals start shooting on sight. That idea never really left the series. Critics just weren’t wowed by the rest, and two years later GTA III made the whole top-down era feel ancient overnight.

10. GTA: Vice City Stories (2006): 86

86 on PSP. Rockstar Leeds went back to Vice City two years before Tommy Vercetti showed up, with Victor Vance building a criminal empire business by business. Getting a full neon-soaked Vice City on a handheld was a genuine flex. It just landed a notch below its PSP sibling, and the later PS2 port slid to 75, because a PSP game on a TV looked like, well, a PSP game on a TV.

9. GTA: Liberty City Stories (2005): 88

88 on PSP. This was the pitch that sold a lot of PSPs: the actual GTA III city, in your pocket. It’s a prequel starring Toni Cipriani, set three years before GTA III, and it added motorcycles to Liberty City. Same story as Vice City Stories on the PS2 port, which scored 78. Critics loved it as a handheld miracle, less as a console game.

8. GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony (2009): 89

89 on Xbox 360. The second GTA IV episode was the series remembering how to have fun. You play Luis Lopez, bodyguard to nightclub owner Tony Prince, and the whole thing leans into parachutes, explosive shotguns and nightclub chaos. It’s basically a bridge from GTA IV’s gloom to GTA V’s big-budget swagger. Losing a point to The Lost and Damned is about as close as this list gets.

7. GTA IV: The Lost and Damned (2009): 90

90 on Xbox 360, where it launched as downloadable content before reaching PS3 and PC in the Episodes from Liberty City package in 2010. It follows biker Johnny Klebitz and The Lost MC, and riding in formation with your crew was a small idea that made Liberty City feel new. The bigger deal: this is where Rockstar proved a GTA expansion could be a whole new story, not just extra missions.

6. GTA: Chinatown Wars (2009): 93

The most underrated game on this list, and the numbers back that up: 93 on Nintendo DS, which beats every other handheld GTA and both GTA IV episodes. Rockstar Leeds and Rockstar North brought back a top-down-style camera with a cel-shaded look, put you in the shoes of Triad heir Huang Lee, and built in a drug-trading side hustle that was both the game’s smartest system and its biggest controversy. It also got PSP and iOS versions, both at 90.

5. GTA: San Andreas (2004): 95

95 on PS2, tied with Vice City. It loses the tie-breaker because its Xbox and PC versions both scored 93, a point under Vice City’s PC score. Yes, that’s a technicality, and yes, the comments are going to hear about it. San Andreas is still the biggest swing of the PS2 era: three cities plus countryside, CJ’s story on Grove Street, and RPG-style stats where eating, working out and driving actually changed your character. So much of modern GTA started here.

4. GTA: Vice City (2002): 95

95 on PS2, with the PC version at 94. Rockstar followed GTA III just a year later with a 1986 Miami-inspired city, a fully voiced lead in Ray Liotta’s Tommy Vercetti, motorcycles, helicopters and property you could buy. And the ’80s soundtrack basically turned the radio into a main character. It matters extra right now, because GTA 6 is heading back to a modern-day Vice City (our GTA 6 map explainer breaks down the new version).

3. Grand Theft Auto III (2001): 97

97 on PS2. This is the one that changed everything. GTA III moved the series to full 3D and turned Liberty City into a living place you could drive, rob and cause chaos in however you wanted. Pretty much every open-world crime game since owes it something. It only drops to third on the tie-breaker: its later PC version scored 93, while GTA V held 97 on Xbox 360 too.

2. Grand Theft Auto V (2013): 97

97 on PS3 and 97 on Xbox 360, and it kept that 97 on PS4 and Xbox One. GTA V introduced three playable leads, Michael, Franklin and Trevor, with instant switching between them, plus heists built around planning and crew choices. Then GTA Online turned it into a live service that’s still going. Commercially, nothing touches it: Take-Two says it has sold in over 230 million units. Critics just gave GTA IV one extra point.

1. Grand Theft Auto IV (2008): 98

The critics’ pick, at 98 on PS3 and 98 on Xbox 360. It’s the only GTA that hits 98 anywhere. GTA IV rebuilt Liberty City for HD, gave cars and bodies real weight with its physics, added online multiplayer, and told the series’ most serious story through Niko Bellic, a war veteran chasing the American dream and finding something much bleaker. Players still argue about the heavy driving and the grey-brown palette. Critics in 2008 didn’t care. It’s the most grown-up GTA, and the reviews rewarded that.

The ones without a score: GTA (1997) and London 1969

The game that started it all, DMA Design’s top-down Grand Theft Auto, first launched in Europe in November 1997. It famously began life as a cops game called Race ‘n’ Chase before the team realized playing the criminals was way more fun. Its first mission pack, London 1969, moved the chaos to 1960s England in 1999. Both have Metacritic pages, but GTA and London 1969 show no metascore at all. So we’re not ranking them. Without them, though, none of the games above exist.

What about the Definitive Edition?

We left the 2021 remaster trilogy out of the main ranking because it’s a re-release, not a new game. But its scores tell a story. Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition sits at 54 on PS5, 56 on Xbox Series X, 49 on PC and 46 on Switch. The same three games scored between 95 and 97 the first time around. If it counted, it would be dead last by a mile.

Let’s be real: Rockstar hasn’t always treated its history well

The scores up top are incredible. The way Rockstar has handled the series between big releases? Less so.

• The Definitive Edition was a mess. The remasters, developed by Grove Street Games, launched on Nov 11, 2021, so broken that Rockstar publicly apologized a week later, admitting they “did not launch in a state that meets our own standards of quality.” Worse, the original versions had been pulled from digital stores before launch. Rockstar only brought them back to its PC store after the backlash.
• Thirteen years is a long time. GTA III to Vice City took one year. Vice City to San Andreas took two. GTA IV to V took five. GTA V to GTA 6 will be more than 13, and the new game slipped twice along the way, first to May 2026 and then to November 2026.
• GTA V got re-sold instead of replaced. The same 2013 game has shipped on three console generations. Critics noticed. The March 2022 PS5 and Xbox Series X|S version scored 81 and 79, the lowest of any GTA V release, because a new coat of paint on a nine-year-old game wasn’t a big event anymore.
• The handheld gems got left behind. Chinatown Wars outscored both GTA IV episodes, and the two Stories games cleared 85. None of them got anything close to the attention the PS2 trilogy got, even a botched version of it.

To be fair, Rockstar’s big releases keep hitting a level almost nobody else reaches. Seven of the 11 scored games here are at 90 or higher. When Rockstar makes a new GTA, critics show up. The trouble has mostly been with everything in between.

Where GTA 6 could land

GTA 6 launches Nov 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. To go straight to No. 1 on this list, it needs a 99, a number no GTA has ever hit on Metacritic. A 97 or 98 would put it next to the series’ best. Anything under 95 would honestly be a surprise, given the track record. For the price, preload and everything else, our GTA 6 release date hub is kept up to date, and PC players should check our GTA 6 PC explainer.

Here’s where the current No. 2 started, with Rockstar’s first GTA V trailer:

And the one everybody’s waiting on:

So where would you rank them? Is San Andreas losing to Vice City on a tie-breaker a crime, and does GTA IV really deserve the top spot over V? Tell us your top three in the comments.