5 reasons to play the underrated GTA Liberty City Stories

GTA Liberty City Stories is a pretty underrated game within its own series. After all, the entire Grand Theft Auto franchise is full of hit classics and masterpieces that gamers still love today. It would only stand to reason that this 2005 title would still be fun to experience in the modern era. Not everybody will like it, but an audience of gamers might wish to play it for the first time.

This article will cover various aspects of GTA Liberty City Stories that might intrigue some people. How a person wishes to play this game would be up to them. The title is available on mobile devices and the PS2, PS3, and PSP.

There were rumors of a PC port via some NVIDIA leaks, but no new developments have occurred since 2021.

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective.

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Looking for a game to play? Here are five reasons to try out the underrated GTA Liberty City Stories

1) Fun, classic charm

Fans of old-school games may like this title (Image via Rockstar Games)

Anybody who enjoys the other early 2000s to mid-2000s Grand Theft Auto games will likely find GTA Liberty City Stories fun. It's a Grand Theft Auto III prequel, except with much more refined controls. For example, you can now bail out of your car while moving.

Likewise, GTA Liberty City Stories has motorcycles, more clothes, and far fewer frustrating features than its sequel. HowLongToBeat.com states that the average completion time for the former game is 14 hours, while completionists could expect to invest 39.5 hours.

That's plenty of potential fun to be had with the classic Grand Theft Auto formula that's far less prevalent in modern games like Grand Theft Auto Online, which has an entirely different end goal and physics.

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2) No shortage of content

Toni Cipriani can do plenty of side activities in his own game (Image via Rockstar Games)

This was briefly touched upon in the previous point, but it's worth reiterating here. There is plenty of stuff to do in GTA Liberty City Stories. Apart from the main plot, players could also do the following activities:

• All familiar vehicle missions: Vigilante, Paramedic, Firefighter, and Taxi Driver are all here.
• Avenging Angels: Eliminate criminals similar to the Vigilante vehicle mission.
• Car-azy Car Give Away: Deliver 16 vehicles to Love Media.
• Noodle Punk: Deliver noodles.
• See the Sight Before Your Flight: Let tourists take photos of Liberty City.
• Slash TV: Survive against NPCs using Chainsaws.
• Trash Dash: Use a Trashmaster to collect garbage

The above list is just some of the varied content to remember. On a related note, gamers could also try to collect all 100 Hidden Packages scattered throughout the map to unlock various rewards.

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3) Memorable gameplay and story

It plays well relative to other games in its era (Image via Rockstar Games)

Without spoiling too much about the lore, GTA Liberty City Stories is a solid game where the protagonist Toni Cipriani works his way up the Leone family. Some people try to betray him, including his own mother. However, he ends up on top since players should already know he's alive when Grand Theft Auto III takes place three years after this game.

The gameplay isn't as refined as GTA San Andreas, but it's on par with the other 3D Universe titles.

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4) Gritty atmosphere

Who knows how many people died in Bringing the House Down (Image via Rockstar Games)

While GTA Liberty City Stories isn't as dark visually as Grand Theft Auto III, the former game has more messed up missions. Examples of such content include the following:

• Dead Meat: Eliminate Giovanni Casca and distribute his meat to his deli.
• The Morgue Party Candidate: Steal a corpse for Donald Love to eat.
• Bringing the House Down: Bomb an entire island into ruins.

Other protagonists within the series would never do some of these missions. Toni Cipriani doesn't seem too bad personality-wise, yet it says a lot about his character that he has no quarrels about committing domestic terrorism just for his mafia.

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5) It was the best-selling PSP game in history

GTA Liberty City Stories sold approximately 8 million copies for the PSP, which makes it the most successful PSP video game in history. If you still have this handheld console somewhere, then playing this classic title on it might be fun for you.

Of course, GTA Liberty City Stories is available on other platforms, too, such as the:

• PS2
• PS3
• Android
• iOS (although it was removed in some territories)

One underrated thing worth noting is that this game had local multiplayer, which was pretty neat. However, finding somebody else to play it with you would be difficult due to the game's age and somewhat limited accessibility.

It's crazy to think such records would be dwarfed by later games in the series, like how Grand Theft Auto 5 sold over 180 million copies worldwide.