Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars stands apart from the rest of the series thanks to its top-down view and art style, both born of its original destination on the Nintendo DS with its touchscreen and dual displays. Playing as Huang Lee, the player untangles the triads' family disputes in Liberty City, while the game offers a unique drug-dealing system built around tracking black-market prices across districts, along with minigames like hot-wiring a stolen car or mixing explosives that have no equivalent in the series' main 3D entries.

Precisely because it was built with touch controls in mind from the start, Chinatown Wars is a mobile version that works surprisingly naturally on a phone - the minigames are designed directly for a finger on the screen, and the top-down view also removes the camera and aiming problems that plague the series' other mobile ports of the 3D entries. It's less a conversion with compromises and more an adaptation of controls that were always a natural fit for mobile.

Here too Rockstar offers the game as a paid one-time purchase with no ads or microtransactions, matching the rest of its mobile ports. The combination of a smaller scope with tighter design and controls tailored to touch makes Chinatown Wars arguably the best-playing mobile GTA game of them all, even though its visuals - comic-book cel shading - lean more toward stylization than the main series' realistic graphics.

Why play it: Recommended for players seeking a GTA experience built directly for touch controls without the frustration of a virtual joystick, with unique minigames and a drug trade found nowhere else in the series.