19 Racing games like Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City that you should try

Tighter and more focused than the open worlds that followed it, with a compact city you learn by heart rather than by map marker. Driving carries most of the game. The shooting has aged badly — no proper cover, stiff aiming — and missions restart from the beginning, which turns a late failure into a long redo.

A physics sandbox first and a shooter a distant second. The grapple and parachute let you chain traversal indefinitely, and most of the fun comes from improvising with them rather than from any mission. Expect repetition: the island is enormous but the objectives recycle a handful of templates, and the story is barely present.

The first outing for the grapple-and-parachute traversal the series became known for, though far cruder here — the hook is limited and stunt-jumping between vehicles is the main trick. The island is large and mostly empty, missions repeat a handful of templates, and the driving physics are loose enough that chases become guesswork.

A tightly linear crime story set in a 1940s and 50s American city, more interested in Vito's decade than in filling a map with icons — the world is a backdrop for the narrative, not a checklist. The writing and period detail are why people still recommend it. This original SKU is the problem: it is a 32-bit build that crashes and stutters badly on current Windows, and the Definitive Edition exists.

New Bordeaux and its period soundtrack are exceptional, and the story handles race and its era with more seriousness than the genre usually manages. Driving feels heavy and right. The structure undercuts all of it — the same racket-clearing loop repeats across every district, and the mission variety runs out long before the map does.

The largest of the PS2-era entries by a distance: three cities, countryside between them, and systems the series never repeated — stat training, gang territory, vehicle variety from bikes to planes. It is also the most uneven. Mission difficulty spikes without warning, and the RPG-ish stat grind sits oddly against the pace of everything else.

The entry most fans point to: an open city with genuine variety in activities, co-op through the entire campaign, and a tone that swings between crude comedy and surprisingly dark story beats. The PC port is the problem — it shipped badly and still needs community patches to run properly, which is a real barrier before you start.

The one that established the template: a 3D open city with radio stations, missions on call and free roaming between them. Historically it matters enormously. It has aged the hardest of the era — no mission checkpoints, no map markers for much of it, a silent protagonist, and shooting that amounts to auto-aim and hoping.

id Software shooting at its most precise, wrapped in a wasteland that mostly exists to connect combat arenas. The gunfeel and enemy animation still hold up. Everything around it is weaker: driving sections pad the runtime, the world is a hub-and-spoke rather than open, and it ends abruptly enough that many players assume they missed a final act.

Crash Time 2 is a mission-based open-world driving game developed by Synetic. You are one of the officers of a fictional Cobra 11 police unit. The players are free to explore the open world or just complete the missions.

Driving is where the series always delivered, and the handling here is heavy and satisfying in a way most open-world games skip. The 1978-to-2006 time jump changes the whole city halfway through, which is a strong structural idea. On-foot sections and shooting are stiff and unwelcome, and the difficulty spikes without warning.

Welcome to the Ultimate Expedition! Journey over grueling mountains, hazardous swamps, and bone-dry deserts on a distant world far from civilization - it is just you, your fellow adventurers and the amazing, jet-powered hover-buggy you built yourself.