GTA: Liberty City Stories

App Store Editors’ Notes

Great For What it’s Worth

For a game that is under $10 and ported to a phone platform, this game over performs. This is an underrated entry into a much beloved franchise, and delivers a nostalgic experience within Liberty City. With over 50 vehicles, many special outfits, and an expansive storyline, it is baffling that people complaining are taking for granted the fact that this is a fully fledged GTA title that functions on a mobile phone. Another reviewer mentioned they purchased this game after GTA 3 DE was removed from Netflix, and I cannot emphasize enough that Liberty City Stories is not a remastered or definitive edition, but rather a port of the original 2005 PSP title. Although the game can be dated and clunky often times, the amount of content and fun that you can have within this pocket sized GTA game is beyond impressive. The performance of the game is outstanding on more modern iPhones such as the 14, and features controller support which I would highly recommend for smoother gameplay. The touch screen control scheme still offers more accessibility for those who don’t own gamepads or are traveling. All in all, I think most of the bad reviews here are from people who don’t understand or appreciate the original 3D era GTA titles, and or folks who played the game for maybe 10 minutes and didn’t give it enough of a chance.

Crashing crashing crashing.

I am running the latest IOS for iPhone 7plus. I had no issues with “Calm Before the Storm” glitching or crashing, however after getting to the second island and doing a ton of missions, it decided to crash after I completed the last mission for Leon McAffrey and received a call from Donald Love to go meet him. The “D” appeared back on the map - then it mysteriously disappeared, and I can’t complete anything else. Only icons that are showing are the Church bell, gun shops and my apartments. I can’t even do the Church Confessional missions, the app just closes. So now I’m stuck with money and guns and nothing to do except drive around and listen to Reni talk about nipple clamps (not I don’t love her commentary, but still.) I saved my game to the Social Club slot. I deleted the app and re-installed it and still no luck. The game was fun and brought back the memories from when I had it on my PSP... now it’s just a big disappointment. I have no issues with bugs or crashes with San Andreas on my iPhone, but this game is so frustrating. I am giving three stars in hopes that this can be fixed with some kind of update and because the game is fun - until it crashes. Edit: Bugs/Crashes are gone, I am updating my review two years later but hey, why not. Five stars for a great nostalgic game!

Slight heating issues

It plays decently, and it's just as fun as I remember it on the PS2, though I tend to recall the colors being a whole lot more dazzling on there. While the sun glare is still very much present in this game, I think graphically speaking, the game was way more impressive on the consoles back then [obviously, seeing as this is a mobile port after all]. Unlike III, Vice City, and San Andreas however, this one has yet to be fully optimizied for the M1 computers, so you may or may not face issues regarding performance or crahses. I'm experiencing significant heating, as it takes roughly 50% of the GPU while playing, which is extremely unnecessary. It shouldn't require that much horse power. An optimization patch/update should hopefully fix this issue. Lastly, for anyone choosing to play this on their computers, this has no mouse & keyboard support, so you need a controller in order to play the game properly, preferbaly a licensed one that can support the game all the way through the end.

Amazing graphics, in settings bugs

This game is beautiful, from the graphics to the mechanics. It almost feels like I have this massive CPU on my phone; by how well the game is well run. However, there’s a lot of little/big things that need to change. For example, if the game is so greatly defined on graphics and gameplay, there should definitely be more in-game settings. There’s really only three options, besides the restore function. There should definitely be an auto save option. Which it definitely needs considering if and when this game crashes, everything you did 5 min prior to the crash, is non existent. Another flaw this game carries is when you fail a mission, you aren’t given the option to restart it, not even to your last “checkpoint” or a retry function. If you fail, you have to die, in order to get the taxi to restart your mission… and last but not least, the screen view position. How is it that your analog sensitivity is synced with the view position? I have to slide my finger in the center of the screen a hundred times, to get him to look 90 degrees. If I turn up the sensitivity, my movement analog then gets altered as well. That needs to change too. I think it’s something we deserve considering we have to download the app, than make a in-game purchase to play. Other than that, this game is 90% well put.

Crashes a lot

I loved playing this game on the PS2, and so when I saw this included with the Rockstar Games Collection, I was excited to play this game on the go. However, when I was halfway through the Portland missions, the cutscenes froze up about 25% of the time, and I’d have to restart the app, but at least I can skip them. When I unlocked Stantoun Island - or is it Stantuon, I forgot how to spell it - the cutscene freezes disappeared, but now the game crashes about every few minutes. It’s never crashed during any missions - yet - but it would happen by just driving around in free mode. Normally I would get 2-3 missions done before the game crashes. It’s not impossible to deal with this, but it definitely takes up much more of my time then it normally would. Thank god there’s an autosave feature, which saves my progress directly after every mainline mission, BUT it doesn’t save anything if you’re collecting hidden packages or doing any of the side missions, like the car collecting side mission for Donald Love, and that’s really annoying to deal with. For example, I once had delivered 12 of the 16 cars I needed for that mission, and when I tried to find the 13th car, the game crashed and I had to restart from square 1. I even lost about 5 hidden packages when that happened. I also had 3 attempts just trying to get the last car delivered and making it to my safehouse to save, because it crashed the first 2 times, but at least since I saved before I didn’t have to do everything all over again. I haven’t unlocked Shoreside Vale yet, so I’m not sure if everything will magically fix itself if everything in the map is unlocked, but so far, despite many of the missions being a lot of fun, this game is really hard to go through.

Beautiful Game

This game was really well done 5/5 with a great story, good characters, and intensely beautiful remastered graphics. I love the 60 fps which makes the gameplay amazing, the things that you can do in the game are endless, the outfits are really cool. I think the superhero outfit is suppose to reference the marvel superhero "Daredevil" because the outfit is mostly yellow which daredevil's suit used to be yellow, the outfit has a holster which sticks would fit inside since Daredevil uses sticks, the outfit has a letter on the chest which Daredevil has 2 D's on his chest, the outfit's mask has the mouth uncovered exactly like Daredevil's mask, the outfit's model is exactly like Daredevil's ,but except missing the horns, and Daredevil is in New York while this game is set in Liberty City which is coincidently based off New York. Overall this game is a masterpiece, it is better than GTA 3, and I recommend buying this if you want to experience what a masterpiece feels like in the palm of your hands.

Great game.

This game is very good if you own a new device. If you play on a iPad 2 or something like that it runs like garbage. Once you do the game you can do side missions or get hidden packages. Only one complaint is there is no multiplayer, on the psp there was and it was fun. Could free rom,race,and pvp. So in a update or even vice city story's you could add this in. Even if it is just local, online would be amazing, just playing that hunter mode or playing around. Can't wait for it. I would play that all day. Thanks for reading. That is why the Mobile games where so fun. If you had someone to play with you could do a lot of things, kinda like gta online. Bluetooth or even lan is great. Made them special for having a real multiplayer where we can move where ever unlike gta sa where your stuck on one screen and have to be near each other. Adds hours of game play to a already fun game.

Played all the gtas on mobile, this is my honest review

Compared to the other gtas available on here, this one is bad. The story is kind of dry and boring but that’s not the issue, it’s the way the game plays and is designed physics wise. Leeds just did a bad job here, here are my issues: The physics are completely different and not in a good way, this guy cannot jump over anything!! The cars are lifeless and just bad to drive. Glad to have motorcycles, but you fall off for any little thing!! They made the cops run really fast?? And they go hard just for a 1 star!! The drive by controls are extremely bad, it was done right in the others but here it’s just not comfortable to use. Next thing is, the stumbling!! Every time you get hit you stumble backwards which makes you stuck in a loop of hit stumble hit stumble, the melee is a nightmare because of it. An NPC could literally mess you up unless you jump out of the way, and when doing that, the camera bugs the F out!! The characters and story are boring and honestly stupid. The radio stations are extremely lame, the talk show station is funny as always but extremely short, like 10 mins of content? I believe it’s only 6 songs per station smh. GTA III is a much better experience gameplay wise, I don’t understand why this is so much worse. The graphics are great though, but bugs make it lose its luster. Overall, the physics of the game ruin the experience. But being that it’s a GTA it’s still somewhat entertaining. 2.5/5. Just get the main trilogy first, luckily this is only $7 so it’s not a huge loss.