IGN's Vice City Legacy Review: the 2002 classic still holds up before GTA 6
On September 11, 2026, IGN published 'Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – The Legacy Review', the latest entry in a series where Luke Reilly replays every core GTA game before GTA VI arrives. The format deliberately carries no new score: the games are ranked through the series' old six-star wanted level instead. Vice City comes out of it as a game that still works in 2026, held up by its 1986 setting, i
Does Vice City hold up in 2026? IGN says yes
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is still worth playing almost a quarter of a century on, according to IGN. On September 11, 2026, the outlet published "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – The Legacy Review", written by reviews senior editor Luke Reilly on original PlayStation 2 hardware. His conclusion is blunt: the 2002 game "remains an irresistible experience in 2026" thanks to its unrivalled personality and style — and a soundtrack with few equals in the medium.
A retrospective series, not a re-review
The piece belongs to a wider IGN project: over the coming months, Reilly is replaying every core GTA game in the lead-up to GTA VI on November 19. These are not traditional re-reviews, and they ship without a new numeric score — the games are graded through the franchise's old six-star wanted level, a rough guide to where each entry lands in his personal ranking. Entries for the original Grand Theft Auto, GTA 2 and GTA III are already live.
What the PS2 classic gets right
Reilly is candid about how well the game has aged visually. "I'd honestly forgotten how great it was to look at, certainly by PS2 standards," he writes, singling out the sunsets, the glinting ocean and the way Tommy's clothes flap as he whips along on a motorcycle. Vice City is also the entry that widened the series' playground: motorcycles returned for the first time since the top-down era, aircraft became genuinely usable — choppers and a seaplane — and outfit changes, property purchases and an in-game map all arrived at once. Handling improved over GTA III too, with heavier cars and bikes tuned to slide aggressively into corners.
Tommy Vercetti changed how GTA tells stories
The bigger shift was narrative. Vice City benched the mute protagonist and gave its lead a voice, with Ray Liotta playing Tommy Vercetti — a man who arrives to take the city over rather than simply survive it. Around him, Rockstar assembled a cast of film and TV names that reads like a crime-drama credits roll: Tom Sizemore, Dennis Hopper, Burt Reynolds, William Fichtner, Robert Davi, Luis Guzmán, Gary Busey, Danny Trejo, Danny Dyer and Philip Michael Thomas as Lance Vance. The reverence for Miami Vice and Scarface is barely disguised — down to the Vice Squad detectives who arrive in Cheetahs at three stars.
The soundtrack argument
If one point dominates the review, it is the music. Vice City "weaponised licensed music" so effectively, Reilly argues, that it rewrote what certain songs mean to a generation of players: Broken Wings is inseparable from DJ Fernando Martinez, and a dirtbike chase through Washington Beach can land on 99 Luftballons without missing a beat. For him it is not just the best soundtrack in the GTA series — edging out San Andreas and Vice City Stories — but one of the best in games, full stop. He notes that Billie Jean was engineered to be the first song you hear behind the wheel, a detail later re-issues and remasters removed.
The parts that show their age
It is not an uncritical look. The auto-targeting remains a "love/hate" affair, capable of locking onto the allies you just drove to a shootout instead of the police in front of you. There are still no mid-mission checkpoints, though Vice City did add automated taxi rides back after a failure, cutting down on repetitive driving.
Why it matters ahead of GTA VI
Vice City was the first proper project from the newly rechristened Rockstar North, and its DNA — a voiced, ambitious protagonist, a cinematic crime-drama tone, weightier driving and a licensed soundtrack used as storytelling — is exactly what later GTA games, GTA VI included, built on. Reilly resists the idea that Vice City single-handedly invented 1980s nostalgia, pointing to films that got there first, but draws one distinction that matters: unlike a movie, the game let players inhabit the decade rather than watch it. GTA VI will be measured against that legacy when Leonida opens on November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
