Salvation is available in Anywhere City. It just isn’t free.
That gag underpins the single biggest quality-of-life addition in Grand Theft Auto 2: pull up at the nearest church, part with some in-game cash, and the almighty keeps a record of how far you’ve come. It’s blunt and it’s funny, and it’s a real step up from the first game, which made you begin again from zero every single time.
This is instalment two of a playthrough back across the main Grand Theft Auto titles in the run-up to Grand Theft Auto 6. They aren’t conventional re-reviews and there’s no score out of 10 attached, since judging games released several hardware generations back by 2026 standards would be a stacked deck. What I’m after is a fresh look at what made each GTA stand out at launch, what it pulled off, what it handed down to the series, and how enjoyable it remains. When the series is done, GTA’s old six-star wanted level should give you a rough idea of where each game ranks in my long-term affection for the franchise.
A sequel that argues with its own box art
Arriving as the 20th century wound down, GTA 2 kept the top-down mayhem that turned its predecessor into a hit. What it discarded was the recognisable, present-day backdrop of the first game, trading it for a vague slice of the near future: Anywhere City, USA, a stylised retro-futuristic sprawl crawling with gangs, presided over by a megacorporation, and home to more Elvis Presley’s per capita than anywhere short of Graceland.
Was the swap a success? That question, unlike the city’s supply of Elvis impersonators, needs a bit more conversation.
The trouble is that the game doesn’t seem to know what it is. Set aside the fact that it neither looks nor plays like the original for a moment. It’s also at odds with its own box art and its own intro movie, which is full of period ’90s cars and set in an unmistakable New York. Back in 1999 I gave up on GTA 2 in short order, and that mismatch was very much part of the reason. It played like a completely separate product from everything that preceded it, right down to the FMV intro it had literally just used to set the tone. That’s a genuinely strange thing for a game to do to itself. I never lasted long enough at the time to register how much smoother it is to actually play.
The fixes that actually matter
Saving grabs the attention, and it points to something bigger: GTA 2 has a slightly better grasp that it’s a PC and home console release. Come the back half of the ’90s, big mission-driven action games had mostly abandoned the merciless arcade rule of restarting from nothing each session with a handful of lives. DMA Design moved with the times, but only a little. Score-driven progression remains. So do the tightly capped lives. The difficulty is still brutal. Saving is simply a safety net the first game never handed you.
The health bar may matter more. For anyone attempting to clear missions without cheating, that extra buffer does more heavy lifting than saving does. Health runs on a 10-point scale, five hearts that can each be split in two, a world away from the first GTA, where you’re permanently down to your last scrap of life and one hit ends you. Tank controls make evading gunfire punishingly awkward in both titles. The difference is that here you can eat the error and keep going.
The camera has also shed a lot of its jank. There’s still a wobble while driving, but it follows vehicles far more cleanly. Cars straighten themselves out at speed, so settling into a lane or switching across one no longer requires frantic jabs at the d-pad.
There’s also less clutter to catch on. Viewed from straight overhead, depth is hard to convey, which makes it difficult to work out what’s fixed in place and what isn’t. GTA 2 dodges that entirely by making narrow objects such as light poles invisible to cars. Realistic it is not. But it puts an end to the endless collisions that dragged on the original’s momentum.
Molotovs, dual pistols and a gun that makes skeletons
Vehicles can now be kitted out with weapons and gadgets: machine guns, mines, oil slick traps. The on-foot arsenal has more than doubled in size. There are throwables such as grenades and Molotovs, a silenced SMG that keeps nearby NPCs oblivious, a shotgun for tight spaces, twin pistols to crank up the John Woo energy, and a futuristic electro gun that will saute suckers into skeletons.
That electro gun can latch onto several targets simultaneously, which is a neat flourish. The subtler improvement, though, is a light auto-aim assist, something GTA 1 badly lacked, and it takes the sting out of combat regardless of what you’ve got equipped.
Where it loses me
The refinements are genuine. The atmosphere still doesn’t click.
Blending ’40s and ’50s automobiles with a crime-soaked, near-future corporate dystopia is a stylistic decision, and I appreciate that it’s intentional. It simply doesn’t win me over. That stretch of car history is something I adore, and I love sliding around corners in Mafia and LA Noire, but here the vehicles look ridiculous and never mesh with the world around them.
The original GTA lets you identify cars at a glance because they mirror real ones and each looks its own way. GTA 2 fields over 60 vehicles, an awful lot of which blur together, and not one of them evokes anything iconic. They’re car caricatures. I’d take the first game’s realism every time.
The maps run into the same problem. Anywhere City is carved into three districts: the Downtown Sector, the Residential Sector and the Industrial Sector. Visually GTA 2 is crisper than its muddier forerunner, and that cleaner look arguably ages better of the two. The PC release even ships with daytime and night-time variants of every area. Yet aside from perhaps the Residential Sector, the most varied of the trio, Anywhere City carries a flatness the original’s cities avoided.
What does work for me is how busy and hostile it feels, with muggers, carjackers and gang members roaming the pavements as an ever-present hazard. Even so, it lacks the character of Liberty City, San Andreas or Vice City, however crude those early versions were.
The 350-horsepower elephant in the room
Perhaps my judgement is coloured by the fact that my hours in those maps massively outnumber my time in Anywhere City. But something larger was happening in 1999, and it tips the scales at 3,500 pounds and puts out 350 horsepower.
Driver reached PlayStation across European territories in June 1999, roughly five months ahead of GTA 2. There’s no on-foot element to it, so the two aren’t directly comparable, but it’s a fully 3D open-world car chase classic that instantly became something close to my favourite game ever made. The future had been shown to me. GTA 2 stood no chance of pulling me back.
The 3D action-driving surge was already building. Angel Studios had put Midtown Madness on PC, the studio that would go on to make Midnight Club, Smuggler’s Run and Red Dead Redemption. Trailing Driver came Urban Chaos from Mucky Foot, ambitious but rough, landing on PC in late 1999 and PlayStation in early 2000 with rudimentary driving and third-person action. A PlayStation-only Driver follow-up arrived in late 2000, now allowing you to step out of a car and take a different one. World’s Scariest Police Chases in June 2001 vanished almost without notice, reaching PS1 after the PS2 was already out, though it was a surprisingly solid open-world driving game for such dated hardware.
However you frame it, GTA 2 turned up a buck short and a dimension behind to make that first wave.
The series wasn’t going to play second fiddle for much longer. But that’s a subject for the next entry.
The verdict from 2026
Coming back to it now, I have far more respect for what GTA 2 repaired than I ever afforded it as a teenager in 1999. Driving improved. Shooting improved. Those are real, welcome gains.
I just can’t work up any excitement for the retro-futuristic setting. Irritating isn’t quite the word for it, but as the king of rock and roll would put it, it just ain’t satisfactioning me.