GTA Vice City Made Escaping Cop Land The Biggest Thrill

It was supposed to be an easy job. Get in, set the detonators, get out, get paid. But now, with seemingly every fed in the state on my tail, it’s clear that Cop Land, one of GTA Vice City’s mid-game missions, is anything but an easy job.

You very possibly don’t like Cop Land. In fact, you might hate it . It is fiddly, easily failed, and messing up will send you right back to the start of its four-objective gauntlet. It requires wrangling the police’s uncooperative AI routines and infiltrating enemy territory, all while babysitting your partner in crime, Lance Vance. Oh, and you also have to survive a five-star wanted level chase through the city. It’s like the escort quest from hell… and it’s sort of brilliant.

To understand why something so frustrating can still be genuinely fantastic, we first need to rewind the clock. When Vice City arrived in late 2002, it made the earlier games – even the genre-defining GTA 3 that had launched just a year prior – look like primitive toys. It achieved its lofty ambition through a variety of avenues: a bigger, more interesting city; a wider variety of vehicles; a property management system; a better-written story; and, of course, a totally impeccable ‘80s vibe.

Arguably more interesting, if less even in its execution, was Vice City’s ambition to deliver more complex mission design than its predecessors. Until this point, GTA typically sent you out to achieve a single violent objective before flashing up the Mission Complete card and showering you with money. Vice City does admittedly have plenty of those, especially during its opening act, but as Tommy Vercetti’s journey takes him into the big leagues, the missions ask more and more of you, to varying degrees of success. One of the best examples of this ambition is Cop Land, which takes you on a journey of rapidly escalating stakes across the city’s Vice Point neighborhood.

Cop Land is the final mission in the Vercetti Estate arc. Tommy has just had notorious gangster Ricardo Diaz rubbed out of existence, and now he runs the most powerful criminal enterprise in the city. But things are far from rosy: with Diaz gone, many of the crime lord’s former business associates are refusing to pay protection money to the new guy in charge. Tommy sets out to intimidate his “clients” over a couple of missions, killing other gang members attempting to muscle in on his turf, as well as shattering the storefronts of the businesses that refuse to pay for protection. It’s a chain of missions with thematic consistency and escalating stakes – something Vice City’s older siblings can’t really boast about.

Unfortunately, a few broken windows won’t intimidate the owner of a coffee shop in the North Point Mall, so one of Tommy’s guys sets up a bomb to torch the place. But the wiring is cooked, and the mall is now locked down by the bomb squad. To destroy the evidence and save their new empire from crumbling before it’s even begun, Tommy and Lance have no other option than sneaking into cop land and detonating the bomb themselves.

To say the mall is “crawling with cops” is a bit of an understatement. The entire top-half of the Vice Point district becomes overrun with them, replacing all pedestrians and traffic with hordes of beat cops and lines of police cruisers. It’s an impressive use of asset switching to create a tense environment; the whole north tip of the island is now an impregnable fortress manned by doughnut munchers.

To get inside the mall, Tommy and Lance are going to have to disguise themselves as cops. This is the mission’s first objective, but in an impressive display of how dedicated Rockstar was to making Vice City feel like an authentic place where you could do whatever you wanted, you can completely ignore what you’re supposed to do and waltz into the mall wearing your Hawaiian shirt. You will face a wall of armed cops given full authority to open fire thanks to the five-star wanted level you trigger by trespassing the crime scene, so this is tantamount to suicide, but the fact that you can attempt it makes Vice City feel genuinely freeform and impressively reactive.

To see the mission through properly, you’ll need to acquire a couple of police uniforms, a process that demands you lure two officers into a garage so that you can beat them up and steal their clothes. Thankfully, the mall’s lockdown means there are more cops than you’ll ever need literally down the road from your lock-up. Frustratingly, actually getting them to give up their clothes is as fun as rubbing pepper spray in your eyes.

Since you need two uniforms, you need two cops to follow you into the garage. That means incurring more than a single wanted star, as minor crimes typically only send one officer after you. But causing a little more mayhem will dispatch multiple police cars to your location, which almost always screech to a halt right in front of the lock-up, preventing the garage door from shutting. If the door can’t drop, the cutscene that nets you the uniforms won’t trigger. Your only option is to endure the chaos as you reverse cars out of the driveway and encourage cops to follow you into the garage rather than take potshots at you from the other side of the street. You’re completely at the mercy of the police’s AI routines, making for a challenge that feels almost random – you could smoothly swipe the uniforms on the first attempt, or end up in a frustrating cycle of deaths and arrests.

With your disguises secured, you can move on to the next objective and approach the bomb. So long as you don’t do anything stupid, you can calmly walk through the mall to the coffee shop and step into the highlighted zone to fix the explosives. After that, it should just be a case of driving away from the scene.

In yet another example of your crew’s questionable talent for crime, the bomb is on a five-second fuse. Tommy and Lance are barely clear of the blast radius before the cafe is blown to smithereens (a detonation that permanently scars the map, a Rockstar trick that began in GTA 3 ). Very obviously the perpetrators of this very serious crime, the pair must now escape every cop in cop land, who have all suddenly become very trigger-happy thanks to the five-star wanted level you’ve earned for dabbling in activities adjacent to domestic terrorism.

Five stars is Vice City’s second-highest wanted level. It turns the police practically feral, completely disregarding any sense of road responsibility or personal safety in their pursuit of you. They use their cars not so much as battering rams, but as V6-powered homing missiles. So long as justice is served, they really don’t care about the cost.

But it’s not just the police who now stand in your way: SWAT teams are deployed across the city, arriving in armoured vans and rappelling from helicopters. The FBI also give chase in their armoured SUVs, their men armed with automatic weaponry. Getting out alive ain’t gonna be easy, so you’ve got to think about the escape before you even set one foot in the building.

Where you park your car before entering the mall is surprisingly vital to your success. The obvious place is at the mall’s main streetside door, but the coffee shop is on the opposite side of the shopping centre, so when the shit hits the fan, you’ll have to fight through a legion of armed officers to reach your getaway wheels. That’s why the smart decision is to park in the side alley that runs along the south side of the mall – you can actually leave your car right outside the exit that’s closest to the coffee shop. Post-detonation, you’ll be barely 10 yards away from your ticket out of here.

There’s another good reason to park by the south entrance. The alley contains arguably the most useful pick-up for this scenario: the Bribe, which lowers your wanted level by one star. That’ll take you down to four stars, removing the FBI from the hunt. It’s a canny placement from Rockstar, allowing anyone who spends a few minutes scoping out the joint to gain an almost immediate advantage in the mission’s final objective of escaping back to the Vercetti Estate.

But there’s still work to do: you need to survive the car chase home. Well, I say you – anyone who has a decent handle on Vice City’s driving will likely have little issue making it to Starfish Island, especially considering the most direct route back to the Vercetti Estate passes by a second Bribe, hidden where the road forks near the Vice Point Penthouse. But neither the route nor wanted level is the real issue here; your Achilles heel is Lance, who’s effectively a dead man’s switch for the mission failed screen.

If Lance snuffs it, it’s all over – go directly back to your last save, do not pass Go, do not collect the police uniforms that already took you five attempts to steal. And Lance is really, really good at dying. You’re fighting against the tinderbox that is two PS2-era AI systems grinding against each other – Lance’s primitive pathfinding means he can only barely follow you, and the “stop at all costs” aggression of the police means he’s constantly pulled into firefights he has no hope of winning. Your only option is to get him into a car as soon as possible and pray to god that the cops don’t shunt you off the road; if you ever need to switch cars, Lance is a guaranteed goner, either from the explosion of your wreck or the relentless gunfire that hails down as you hijack new wheels.

Ensure Lance survives the final chase and you’ll be rewarded with $10,000 and – more importantly – a regular income. You’ve successfully set up a protection ring, and money will gradually trickle in from your many clients for the remainder of the campaign. But the real reward is the satisfaction of completing one of the game’s most ambitious, flawed missions.

Vice City saw Rockstar’s first experiments in highly scripted, multi-stage missions. Today, these are the norm – it’s impossible to imagine GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 without their cinematic heists and dramatically escalating events. But the origins of these missions was a messy affair, as Rockstar suffered through the pain of making them work in a city sandbox that had previously been the stage for quests typically no more complicated than “drive to point X to kill person Y”. Cop Land is one of those awkward missions – it’s impossible to call it a triumph considering the fiddly nature of securing those uniforms and escorting Lance out of the hot zone.

But while some consider it one of the worst GTA missions ever, Cop Land often finds itself on lists of Vice City’s best moments, and it’s not hard to see why. Fooling the police with stolen uniforms is a singular high, and the against-all-odds escape is a car chase for the history books. It’s also a mission that embraces the many possibilities of an open world – you can completely bypass the car chase finale by parking a helicopter next to the mall and taking to the skies the moment things heat up. Cop Land is a brilliant example of Vice City at its most ambitious, and a reminder of why Rockstar’s groundbreaking PS2 era was so important for the entire medium.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.