Is it actually GTA on mobile?
Closer than anything else has managed. And I say that having spent the last few days in Rooklyn rather than reading about it. Cars, weapons, chaos, a city that reacts when you start something. The bones are all there.
Gang Wars
The best thing in it, and the reason I keep opening the app.
Territory is not decoration here. Districts you hold generate income, districts you lose cost you standing, and rival crews come for both. That turns a lot of the map into contested ground rather than scenery you drive through on the way to a mission marker. It is where the game stops feeling like a single-player crime story with online bolted on and starts feeling like something with stakes.
The Stuff Around It
There is a lot, and it arrives quickly.
- Weapons across enough categories that loadouts matter, with customisation on top.
- Cars from supercars to armoured trucks, collectable and moddable, and the driving holds up on a touchscreen better than it has any right to.
- Co-op heists built around crew coordination rather than four people shooting the same room.
- Street racing, plus PvP through Allstar Arena, Taxi Takeover, Fight of the Bites and Treasure Rush.
- Director’s Mode, a video capture tool, which seems a strange inclusion until you see how much footage the game generates on its own.
Combat gives you soft-lock or manual aim, so it does not force the mobile shortcut on you. Free roam runs a notoriety system that punishes players who spend all evening ruining other people’s sessions.
Why It Works On a Phone
The chaotic anything-can-happen quality is the hardest part of an open world to get right, and mobile versions usually lose it first because the systems get thinned out to fit.
This one keeps it. You set off to do one thing, something else starts, and forty minutes later you are somewhere you did not plan to be. That feeling is the whole appeal of the genre and it survives the move to a touchscreen intact.
Where It Comes From
Worth knowing, because the Gangstar name on the box is doing less work than you might assume.
Joy Workshop built it, Gameloft licensed the brand, and Level Infinite publishes it, which puts it under Tencent’s global label alongside PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings. It started life in October 2024 as Codename: Crime Vice Open World and only became a Gangstar game shortly before release. The last mainline entry, New Orleans, came out in 2017.
Setting is Rooklyn, near future, run by a corporation called Orarra, and you pick from four factions at signup: The Family, The Ghosts, O-Rage and Jersey Boyz.
The Catch
It soft launched on 20 August across Southeast Asia, South Asia, MENA, LATAM and Central and Eastern Europe. Not the UK, not the US, not Western Europe. If you are reading this from London you cannot download it yet.
It is also free to play with in-app purchases and a currency top-up storefront, which brings up the one thing no review published this week can answer honestly, mine included.
Three days is not long enough to judge a live-service economy. The questions that decide whether these games are worth your months rather than your weekend are all thirty-day questions:
- Does progression slow to a crawl once the launch rewards run out?
- Do the PvP modes stay fair when the heavy spenders have geared up?
- Do the empire systems start gating upgrades behind timers you can pay to skip?
Right now, none of that has bitten. The moment-to-moment game is genuinely good, the gang wars are the real draw, and 30 million people pre-registered for a reason.
I will come back to it in a month and tell you whether it held.
