Equipment · —
A protective vest that absorbs a full bar of incoming damage before health is touched — essential before any heavy GTA IV firefight.
Body Armor is a pickup and gear featured in the that serves primarily to protect the player's health from specific forms of damage, most notably gunfire. In most cases, body armor in the games is illustrated as a protective blue vest.
The body armor's primary function is to serve as padding for the player health, in effect extending the player's resilience to damage from gunfire, explosions and fire. The Body armor is a standard-issue item among law enforcement agencies, but also a rare sight among criminals.
In early top-down GTA games, armor in both (as well as Grand Theft Auto: London mission packs) and serves its intended purpose, adding 10 more hit points to the player's existing health, but provides no protection to the player when they fall from great heights, are run over by vehicles, or are beaten up by the police and arrested. Armor is most commonly found spawned in specific locations or crates, and, in the case of GTA 2, can also be acquired by crushing specific cars.
Body armor continued to be featured between and , undergoing several more changes. In all of its appearances, armor now offers nearly the same amount of hit points as the player's full health, doubling the player's resistance to damage. The armor hit points stayed the same until , where the armor is now a bar instead of hit points. In addition, armor can now pad injuries from falls, collisions with vehicles on foot, and even melee attacks; the armor in GTA San Andreas and GTA Vice City Stories is an exception, providing no protection to the player from falls, while the armor in provides no protection to melee attacks.
In addition to spawning in specific locales, body armor can also be purchased at stores that sell weapons, such as Ammu-Nation, as well as entering the Police/SWAT Enforcer trucks. Like the player's health, armor hit points between and GTA Vice City Stories (and GTA Advance) can typically be increased easily via side-missions (such as Vigilante), as well as 100% completion of the game.
The appearance of armor pickups has also changed significantly after GTA III. When included in GTA III, the pickup assumed the appearance of a shield icon; in subsequent games, however, the pickup is redesigned as a spinning vest, possibly to avoid confusion with the police bribe pickup.
Armor in and has been refashioned slightly out of realism. It no longer offers protection to falls, collisions with vehicles on foot, or melee attacks (including hand-to-hand combat and melee weapons), increasing the player's chances of death from these hazards. However, it may absorb damage when staying inside a broken helicopter on low altitudes (a higher altitude will not be enough to survive).
As expected, armor can be found lying about in specific points of the city (distinguishable by its red glow) as well as underground weapon dealers in GTA IV. Enforcer armored vans still provide the player some armor, but only gives the player roughly one third of the maximum amount.
