GTA 6 NEWS · THE FINAL LEGACY REVIEW
IGN’s Final Legacy Review Crowns GTA 5 the Peak of the Series — “At Least for the Next Few Weeks”
Twenty-seven days before Grand Theft Auto 6 lands, IGN has published the final entry in its year-long Legacy Review series — and the verdict is a coronation with a countdown clock bolted to it. Luke Reilly, who has spent 2026 replaying every core Grand Theft Auto game ahead of the November 19 launch, closes the project with Grand Theft Auto V and a ruling that will surprise absolutely nobody who has watched the last 13 years of gaming unfold: GTA 5 is, in his words, “the peak of the series. At least for the next few weeks, that is.” That asterisk is doing Olympic-level lifting. Because the subtext of the entire exercise — replaying the whole franchise’s history immediately before its next chapter arrives — is the question every GTA 6 fan is already asking: can anything, even GTA 6 itself, realistically top a game that shipped 230 million copies?
What Happened: IGN Finished Its GTA Replay Marathon, and the Crown Went to Los Santos
Quick context on the project itself. Reilly’s Legacy Reviews are not traditional re-reviews — no new IGN scores, no Metacritic bookkeeping. They’re replays of every core GTA game in the lead-up to GTA 6, re-examining what made each one remarkable at the time it shipped, ranked on a six-star scale of long-term love. We covered the GTA III entry back in August, when the series reminded everyone why the 2001 classic is the template GTA 6 is built on. The series has since worked through Vice City, San Andreas, and GTA IV — and now it ends where the modern era began: GTA 5, “a game so nice, they released it thrice.”
The numbers Reilly leads with remain absurd: 13 years, three console generations, 230 million copies, and over $10 billion in revenue — figures that put GTA 5 in a commercial conversation with Minecraft and, depending on your criteria, roughly 200 different versions of Tetris, and nothing else. As he notes, the numbers explain the scale but not the why. Why does a game from 2013 still sell more copies every few months than most games total in a lifetime? His answer, essentially: the weather.
That’s not a joke — it’s the through-line of the whole review. Where GTA IV’s Liberty City was dense, compact, and relentlessly urban, GTA V’s Los Santos sprawled: a sun-bleached San Andreas landscape of crisp shadows and gleaming bodywork, split into dozens of districts that blend seamlessly from Vinewood Hills mansions to Vespucci’s ageing beach backalleys to the graffiti-tagged struggle of South Los Santos, with desert, forest, and mountains beyond the city limits. The map is more than twice the size of GTA: San Andreas in its entirety — a stat that doubles as a tribute to how special San Andreas was. And after 13 years, Reilly writes he’s still noticing storefronts, signs, and subtleties he’s never overtly seen before. His term for the technique: immersion through accumulation. Thousands of small, authentic details that individually vanish, and collectively make a city feel so normal you stop noticing how remarkable it is.
Then there’s the structural innovation the series will be remembered for: three protagonists. Michael De Santa, the retired criminal going stir-crazy in suburban comfort; Franklin Clinton, the small-time hustler chasing one real payday; and Trevor Philips, the volatile wildcard who used to pull jobs with Michael. Switching between them is near-instantaneous — a brief zoom out and back in, dropping you into whatever that character happens to be doing at that moment, “which may well be dropping a man off a bridge.” The review is careful to give GTA IV’s expansions credit as the first draft of the idea (Niko, Johnny, and Luis each carried a Liberty City story), but GTA V made the trio live simultaneously in one world, and used them to drag you across every corner of the map.
The mission design gets its own victory lap. Checkpoints — introduced in The Ballad of Gay Tony — killed the series’ most punishing habit of restarting failed missions from scratch, which in turn freed Rockstar to make missions longer, wilder, and built around heists as the campaign’s central pillar: the fan-favourite Three Leaf Clover bank job from GTA IV, scaled up into elaborate multi-approach scores with planning and preparation phases. Driving became grippier and more approachable, the weapon wheel (Red Dead-style) let you carry an arsenal you never lose, and the sound design still gets called out — guns that bark, bullets that thunk into car panels.
The 2013 Context That Aged Into Prophecy
The review’s most striking stretch is autobiographical. Reilly conducted the world’s first hands-on with GTA 5 two weeks before its September 17, 2013 launch, on hardware — Xbox 360 and PS3 — that was already two months from retirement. His verdict at the time: “never mind November; the next generation will start when Rockstar says it does.” Revisiting that line 13 years later, he argues it wasn’t hyperbole: GTA 5 launched as the last great statement of its generation, then loomed over the next one, and then the one after that, to the tune of 230 million copies. The ports, he writes, remain the benchmark for open-world action-driving games. It’s hard to read that paragraph in October 2026 and not feel the deja vu. A Rockstar open world is about to arrive on consoles now in the back half of their cycle — and once again, the game is expected to make the hardware feel like the footnote.
And then the verdict, in full: GTA 5 is “preposterously future-proof,” combining an enormous, extraordinarily detailed world, three compelling protagonists, thrilling varied missions and heists, and the foundation for a multiplayer phenomenon that is “simply a whole separate discussion.” But Reilly cops to his own bias: he’s “too emotionally attached” to the PS2 pair of Vice City and San Andreas — the style and soundtracks of those period-piece classics — to place anything above them. Still: “there are very few games I’ve played more than GTA V.” The crown goes to Los Santos. Conditionally. Temporarily.
What This Means for GTA 6
First: the handover is now official, and it’s Rockstar beating Rockstar. The entire Legacy Review project was a ten-month drumroll, and it ends by defining the benchmark GTA 6 has to clear: not Cyberpunk, not any rival’s open world — Rockstar’s own 230-million-selling phenomenon, still perched at the top of the mountain a full console era later. That’s the stakes conversation we’ve been having all year in our GTA 6 vs GTA 5 comparison breakdown, and Reilly’s “at least for the next few weeks” is the cleanest one-line summary of it you’ll read anywhere.
Second — and this is the delicious part for a Vice City site — the emotional champion is still Vice City. Strip away the sales math and the engineering superlatives, and the review’s heart says the same thing ours does: the PS2-era Vice City, with its style and its soundtrack, remains the series’ soul. GTA 6 is, quite literally, a return to that city — rebuilt, re-imagined, and arriving with the weight of the entire franchise behind it. Reilly couldn’t rank 2013’s Los Santos above 2002’s Vice City. November 19 is Rockstar’s chance to settle the question in Vice City’s favor with a game that has both the soul and the 230-million-copy pedigree.
Third: GTA 5’s long tail is still twitching, right up to the end. The game being crowned “peak of the series” this week is the same game that had its canon ending officially confirmed this month, the same game whose scrapped Liberty City DLC just leaked, and the same game the community keeps renovating — our own coverage of the working hot dog vendors mod and the rest of the mod scene is essentially a documentary about fans refusing to let go. If you’re using these last weeks to run your own Legacy Review, our reuniting-the-families replay guide and things-to-do-while-waiting-for-GTA-6 list have you covered.
So that’s how the era ends: not with a slide into irrelevance, but with a 13-year-old game still holding the crown, a reviewer openly admitting his heart lives in Vice City, and 27 days on the clock before Rockstar ships its own rebuttal. IGN’s full Legacy Review series — GTA, GTA 2, III, Vice City, San Andreas, IV, and now V — is worth reading end to end as a launch-week companion. And when the throne changes hands on November 19, you’ll want to be there for it: pre-order GTA 6 for PS5 on Amazon or lock in the Xbox Series X|S version here.
The king is dead-ish. Long live the king — check back in 27 days.
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Related reading: GTA III at 25 — the Legacy Review that explains why GTA 6 exists · GTA 6 vs GTA 5: every confirmed difference · GTA 5’s canon ending is official — Deathwish won · The scrapped Liberty City DLC leak · Things to do while waiting for GTA 6