The 10 Most Iconic Vice City Missions, Ranked
From the bank job to the mall shootout to Keep Your Friends Close — the ten Grand Theft Auto: Vice City missions every fan can quote on cue.
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From the bank job to the mall shootout to Keep Your Friends Close — the ten Grand Theft Auto: Vice City missions every fan can quote on cue.
Three Leaf Clover, Snow Storm, Holland Nights — the ten Grand Theft Auto IV missions every fan can quote on cue, and why each one still works.
GTA V's optional Strangers and Freaks side missions add 60+ hours of content and some of the campaign's best-written setpieces. Here's the ranking.
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Eighteen years after release, Three Leaf Clover remains the high-water mark of Rockstar mission design — a *Heat*-influenced bank heist with one of the best foot chases in any game.
Vice City has approximately 60 main-story missions — half as many as San Andreas, slightly fewer than GTA V. Twenty-two years on, ten of them remain canonical: still quoted in retrospectives, still replayed for individual setpieces, still cited as defining moments in 3D-era Rockstar mission design.
The closing mission. Sonny Forelli arrives at the Vercetti Estate to collect Tommy's debt; Lance Vance is revealed as the betrayer; Tommy fights through the entire mansion to reach Sonny. Multi-stage: the foyer, the upper floors, the basement confrontation. One of the longest single missions Rockstar has ever shipped, and the campaign's emotional climax — Lance dies, then Sonny dies, leaving Tommy alone with the empire.
The Diaz mansion takeover. Tommy and Lance fly in via Sea Sparrow, take the Vercetti Estate (then-Diaz Estate), kill Diaz on the upper floor. The mission's structure — flying entry, multi-floor mansion combat, key character kill — is the template for almost every later Rockstar takeover sequence (San Andreas's "End of the Line," GTA V's mansion missions).
Vice City's bank-heist mission. Tommy assembles a four-person crew, takes a bank in Downtown, escapes through a chase. The mission is the first proper crew-heist in any GTA — predating San Andreas's casino heist by two years and GTA V's heist sequences by eleven. Required for full property completion (the Malibu Club).
The Forelli boat sequence. Tommy defends a Vercetti shipping operation against a Forelli attack on the Viceport docks. The setpiece is one of the first proper waterborne combat missions in any GTA — boats on boats, with mounted machine guns. Defines what GTA boat combat would look like for the next two decades.
Strike at Print Works. Tommy disrupts a labor strike at the Print Works property, defending it from the strikers. The mission is short but represents the asset-property attack-mechanic Vice City uses repeatedly — once you own a property, missions periodically defend it from external attackers. The system carries forward into San Andreas's territory wars and beyond.
Tommy rescues Lance Vance from the Cubans (or Haitians, depending on your faction allegiance). Mid-game mission that establishes the Vance brothers' loyalty arc. The Cuban / Haitian alternate mission paths are one of Vice City's only branching mission elements.
The RC plane mission at the construction site. Tommy uses a remote-controlled aircraft to plant explosives across an under-construction high-rise. The mission is famously frustrating — the RC controls are imprecise, the timing is tight, restart penalties are punishing. The "RC mission" template returns in GTA V (Trevor's RC plane sequences).
The PCJ-600 motorcycle stunt mission. Tommy uses a building's elevator and the bike's jumping physics to perform a series of building-to-building jumps across Vice Point. The reliance on physics-based traversal is unusual for VC — most missions are gunplay or driving, not stunt-based — and the mission is widely cited as one of the best PSP / iOS reimplementations because the touch controls handle the bike well.
The chopper-mounted machine gun sequence. Tommy and Lance fly across Vice Point eliminating Mendez-aligned operations from a Maverick. The mission's title is a Vietnam War reference, and the combat style — passenger-side mounted MG from a flying chopper — is novel for 2002.
Maria Latore-style late-game mission where Tommy collects protection money from across the Empire. Drives across the entire map to multiple locations, fighting at each. The mission is iconic for being systematically repetitive — Rockstar's deliberate showcase of Tommy as the established crime boss, a tonal beat you don't get elsewhere in the campaign.
Several VC mission patterns became series fixtures:
For per-mission detail pages, see the Vice City missions database. For the Tommy Vercetti arc that ties them together, see Tommy Vercetti: Vice City's Ray Liotta Lead.
