With Grand Theft Auto VI currently scheduled to launch on November 19, it feels like a good time to look back at the missions that made Rockstar’s crime saga such a cultural juggernaut.
Grand Theft Auto has given us hundreds of missions over the years, spanning everything from carefully planned bank robberies to using remote-controlled toys to ruin someone’s day. Some were groundbreaking, some were spectacular and some merely traumatised an entire generation of children who couldn’t fly a tiny helicopter properly. I’m still not over it.
But which are the best Grand Theft Auto missions ever made?
For this list, I’m considering the single-player GTA games from Grand Theft Auto III onward, including expansions and spin-offs. GTA Online isn’t included because its enormous collection of multiplayer heists and missions really deserves a separate list which I’ll probably never write because I’m lazy like that. And I’m skipping the first two games purely because they’re so different from modern GTA.
Naturally, massive spoilers follow. Most of GTA’s greatest missions involve killing someone important, finishing a game or both. You have been warned.
And it goes without saying, this is a subjective list. If you don’t like it, drop your own one in the comments.
1. Three Leaf Clover – Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto V may have built much of its campaign around elaborate heists, but none of them quite managed to surpass GTA IV’s Three Leaf Clover.
Niko joins Packie, Derrick and Michael McReary to rob the Bank of Liberty in Algonquin. There are no lengthy preparation missions, crew selections or equipment choices. Packie simply tells Niko to wear a suit and suddenly you’re walking into a bank with an assault rifle and several deeply dysfunctional Irishmen.
Naturally, everything goes wrong. That’s what you get for including the Irish in things.
The robbery descends into chaos when one of the hostages fights back, leaving the surviving crew to battle through Liberty City’s streets as seemingly every police officer in America converges on them. The escape continues underground through the subway before ending with a frantic attempt to lose the remaining cops.
The influence of Michael Mann’s Heat is obvious, but Three Leaf Clover has enough personality of its own to avoid feeling like a simple recreation. The McReary brothers’ constant bickering, the escalating violence and GTA IV’s weighty gunplay combine to create an outstanding set piece.
There’s even a cameo from Luis Lopez, the future protagonist of The Ballad of Gay Tony, lying among the bank’s hostages. Unfortunately, shooting him doesn’t prevent the expansion from happening. Rockstar thought of everything.
2. End of the Line – Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
After travelling across an entire state, building businesses, robbing casinos, stealing a jetpack and somehow becoming involved in government conspiracies, CJ’s story ends exactly where it began: Grove Street.
Los Santos has erupted into riots following the acquittal of corrupt police officer Frank Tenpenny. Cars are exploding, people are fighting in the streets and the entire city appears to be attempting a world-record speedrun of societal collapse.
Against this backdrop, CJ and Sweet launch their final attack on Big Smoke’s crack fortress. CJ steals a SWAT tank to smash through the entrance, fights through several heavily defended floors and finally confronts his former friend.
Even that isn’t the end. Tenpenny arrives, steals Smoke’s money and sets the building ablaze, forcing CJ to escape before chasing him through Los Santos. Sweet winds up hanging from the back of Tenpenny’s fire truck, CJ races underneath to catch him and the whole thing ends with Tenpenny crashing into Grove Street.
End of the Line feels like Rockstar trying to spend every remaining dollar of the development budget in one sitting. It’s enormous, emotional and gloriously excessive—a fitting conclusion to one of gaming’s greatest journeys.
3. The Paleto Score – Grand Theft Auto V
The Paleto Score begins with Michael, Trevor and a hired gun robbing a small-town bank. That sounds relatively sensible by GTA standards. Then they walk out wearing heavy armour and carrying miniguns, and shit gets real, real fast.
What follows is less of a police shootout and more of a small-scale war. Michael and Trevor slowly march through Paleto Bay, shredding police cars, destroying helicopters and soaking up bullets while bags of stolen money gradually lose cash whenever they’re hit. The local police prove unexpectedly capable, prompting the military to arrive with soldiers and armoured vehicles.
Franklin eventually rescues the others using a bulldozer as an improvised escape vehicle, because the concept of a normal getaway car was far outside of Franklin’s scope.
The Paleto Score makes excellent use of GTA V’s character-switching mechanic, bouncing between the crew as the situation becomes increasingly absurd. It doesn’t offer the freedom of some of the game’s other heists, but it compensates with sheer spectacle.
Few GTA missions deliver such an overwhelming sense of power. For several glorious minutes, you aren’t escaping from the police—the police are attempting to survive you.
4. Keep Your Friends Close… – Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Tommy Vercetti spends most of Vice City building a criminal empire, acquiring businesses and establishing himself as the most powerful man in the city. Unfortunately, success also brings two things: enemies and friends who suddenly decide they’d rather have your money.
Sonny Forelli arrives in Vice City to collect what he believes he’s owed, only for Tommy to discover that Lance Vance has betrayed him. What follows is a huge battle through the Vercetti Estate as Forelli’s men attempt to steal the cash from Tommy’s safe.
Tommy fights his way through the mansion, pursues Lance onto the roof and eventually returns to the main hall for a final confrontation with Sonny. By the time the shooting stops, both men are dead and Tommy has finally severed his connection to the Forelli family.
The entire sequence is a massive homage to Scarface, right down to Tommy defending his extravagant mansion from an army of heavily armed criminals. More importantly, it completes his transformation from Forelli errand boy to the undisputed king of Vice City.
Trusting Lance was probably Tommy’s biggest mistake, although to be fair, betrayal appears to be an occupational requirement for anyone living in fictional 1980s Miami.
5. Breaking the Bank at Caligula’s – Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Long before GTA V made heists the centrepiece of an entire campaign, San Andreas let CJ rob Caligula’s Casino.
The heist requires considerably more preparation than simply grabbing a gun and shouting at the nearest cashier. CJ obtains blueprints, steals police motorcycles and an armoured van, acquires a casino employee’s keycard and sabotages a hydroelectric dam to cut the building’s power.
When the robbery finally begins, CJ sneaks through the darkened casino using night-vision goggles, releases gas into the ventilation system, opens the service entrance for Woozie’s crew and helps blast into the vault. Naturally, Zero’s rival Berkley interferes with the plan, alerting the Mafia and triggering a massive shootout.
The remaining crew escapes in an armoured van while CJ acts as a decoy, fights his way to the roof and parachutes to safety.
Breaking the Bank at Caligula’s was remarkably ambitious for a 2004 game. It gives the preparation missions a genuine sense of purpose and delivers a lengthy, varied payoff involving stealth, explosives, gunfights and a dramatic escape.
It’s essentially Ocean’s Eleven if Danny Ocean settled every complication with an assault rifle.
6. The Big Score – Grand Theft Auto V
The Union Depository job is the heist Michael and Trevor have spent their entire criminal careers dreaming about: an enormous reserve of gold sitting beneath Los Santos, protected by enough security to make stealing it seem completely unreasonable.
Obviously, they steal it anyway.
The Big Score offers two substantially different approaches. The subtle plan involves hijacking armoured vehicles, disguising the crew as security and quietly removing the gold before transferring it into modified getaway cars. The obvious approach uses a massive drill to break into the vault from below before helicopters carry the gold away.
Neither method remains peaceful for very long.
The heist brings together GTA V’s crew-selection system, preparation missions and character switching for one enormous final payday. Earlier decisions also matter, as skilled surviving crew members can return and demand less money than expensive professionals.
There are arguably more exciting individual missions in GTA V, but none offers the same sense of culmination. After spending the game chasing smaller scores, the crew finally pulls off the impossible and steals enough gold to make retirement seem almost plausible.
Admittedly, retirement tends to last roughly seven minutes in the GTA universe, but it’s a nice thought.
7. Black Project – Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
CJ has already done plenty of strange things by the time The Truth asks him to investigate a mysterious government project. Even so, infiltrating a military base to steal a jetpack represents a significant escalation.
Black Project sends CJ into Area 69, San Andreas’ legally distinct version of Area 51. You can quietly eliminate the guards and destroy the searchlights or immediately trigger the alarm and start shooting everyone, which is stealth in the sense that nobody can report seeing you if nobody survives.
Once inside, CJ fights through the underground facility, disables its defences and discovers that the terrifying secret government project is a jetpack.
A working jetpack.
The final escape sees CJ flying out of the facility with soldiers firing at him, completing San Andreas’ transformation from relatively grounded gang drama into an episode of the X-Files, if the X-Files were allowed to use a certain word a lot.
Black Project offers stealth, exploration, gunfights and one of the best rewards in the entire series. It’s utterly ridiculous, but San Andreas commits to the idea so confidently that you simply accept CJ can operate experimental military equipment without any training.
Presumably, it’s covered by the same licence that lets him fly passenger jets.
8. Just Business – Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
San Andreas again? Yup. Because it’s the best GTA game. Big Smoke’s business dealings rarely go smoothly, although that might be because his preferred negotiation technique involves CJ and several hundred rounds of ammunition.
Just Business begins with CJ rescuing Smoke from a meeting with the Russian Mafia inside an atrium. After fighting through the building, the pair escape on a motorcycle, with Smoke driving while CJ hangs off the back and shoots at their pursuers.
The resulting chase tears through Los Santos as Russian gangsters attack from cars and motorcycles. A huge truck eventually joins the pursuit, crashing down into the city’s flood-control channel in an obvious tribute to the famous chase from Terminator 2.
The sequence is heavily scripted and largely on rails, but it remains one of the most exciting missions in San Andreas. Vehicles explode, enemies leap between moving trucks and Big Smoke somehow keeps the bike upright while CJ acts as a human rear-facing turret.
It was a spectacular demonstration of what the PlayStation 2-era GTA games could do, and it still holds up as a superbly paced action sequence.
It also marks one of the few occasions where Big Smoke orders something that isn’t enough food to sustain a small nation.
9. Dropping In – Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
The Ballad of Gay Tony brought some much-needed colour and lunacy to GTA IV’s bleak Liberty City, and few missions demonstrate that better than Dropping In.
Luis Lopez is hired to assassinate Marki Ashvilli, owner of the Liberty City Rampage hockey team. Rather than entering the building through the front door like someone burdened by common sense, Luis jumps from a helicopter and parachutes onto its roof.
He then fights his way down through the building, eventually confronting Ashvilli in his office and throwing him through a window. Luis follows him out, opens another parachute and lands on a moving truck.
It’s completely fucking stupid.
It’s also excellent.
Dropping In takes a basic assassination and turns it into a tightly paced Hollywood set piece, using The Ballad of Gay Tony’s parachuting mechanics to create a mission that moves vertically through an entire skyscraper.
The target could probably have been killed far more easily with a sniper rifle from across the street, but that wouldn’t have ended with Luis landing on a moving vehicle. Sometimes style is more important than basic logistical efficiency.
10. The Exchange – Grand Theft Auto III
GTA III’s final mission is brutally difficult, mechanically awkward and entirely lacking in checkpoints. It is also one of the earliest demonstrations of Rockstar’s ability to create a blockbuster finale inside an open world.
Catalina kidnaps Maria and demands a $500,000 ransom. Claude arrives at the exchange with the money, only to be betrayed and left to die. He escapes, pursues Catalina to Cochrane Dam and fights through an army of Colombian Cartel members to rescue Maria.
Catalina attempts to escape in a helicopter, prompting Claude to grab a rocket launcher and blow it out of the sky. After Maria is rescued, the credits begin with her talking incessantly before a single gunshot suddenly silences her.
Whether Claude actually shoots Maria or merely fires the gun to make her stop talking remains deliberately unclear. Either interpretation feels plausible for a protagonist whose primary method of communication is murder.
The Exchange is primitive compared to the vast, multi-stage finales Rockstar would later produce, but its DNA is visible throughout the series. It established the template: a betrayal, an army of enemies, a frantic chase and one enormous explosion to finish everything.
And yes, replaying the entire mission because Catalina’s helicopter killed you was absolutely miserable. We suffered so future GTA players could have checkpoints. Gits.
Honourable Mentions
Narrowing hundreds of GTA missions down to ten inevitably means leaving out some excellent contenders. Rub Out, The Job, Reuniting the Families, Minor Turbulence, Museum Piece, The Third Way, Publicity Tour and The Ballad of Gay Tony’s Departure Time all came close.
Wrong Side of the Tracks deserves recognition for giving the internet one of gaming’s most enduring quotes, while Demolition Man and Supply Lines deserve recognition for collectively raising the blood pressure of an entire generation.
But being memorable isn’t always the same as being good.
These ten missions represent Grand Theft Auto at its best: ambitious, cinematic, funny, violent and frequently very stupid. Whether GTA VI can produce something capable of joining—or topping—this list remains to be seen.
Until then, tell me which mission I’ve criminally overlooked. Or don’t – I’m not your mum.
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