That One Level / Grand Theft Auto

You'll be wishing you had followed the damn train once you get through these tough Grand Theft Auto missions.

Grand Theft Auto V has enough of these to have its own page. For examples relating to Grand Theft Auto Online, click here.

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Grand Theft Auto (Classic), London 1961 and 1969

• Rasta Blasta (the second Vice City level) is notoriously difficult. Not only are the missions noticeably more difficult than the other five levels, you need to amass 5,000,000 points to complete it, the most in the game. It's both a Marathon Level and Checkpoint Starvation eventually kicks in because getting Game Over means you have to redo the entire level from the beginning.
• The London 1961 expansion has a lot of its missions as this, because unlike its London 1969 predecessor, you have a lot of driving missions with strict timers with very little room for error.

Grand Theft Auto III

• "Bomb da Base Act II" is commonly the first mission that's a stopgap to even veterans of the series. You have to have $100,000 before starting the mission. You have to snipe Colombian Cartel members on a cargo ship to get 8-Ball to blow it up, but thanks to Artificial Stupidity, he sometimes rushes in headfirst into Cartel gunfire, causing an immediate failure. There's an Adrenaline pickup close to where the mission takes place, provided the player remembers where it is. The good thing is that the player only has to pay the $100,000 once and not on every subsequent mission attempt.
• "Pay Day for Ray" can be a very hard mission, considering that it is not only a very strict timed mission, but you have to go to several pay phones far from each other around Staunton Island and the game doesn't feature any map to help you with that. The traffic spawns don't help either because sometimes a car can spawn at the wrong time and cause your vehicle to spin out, costing valuable time.
• "Silence the Sneak" has a lot of Fake Difficulty in the maligned grenade throwing system since it requires you to throw a grenade in a precise spot which is several stories above ground. It is even harder to accomplish on mobile devices. Aside from potentially forcing the player to waste a lot of grenades just to blow up the damn window, it can be very easy to get killed by the splash damage. And then there come the target himself (who is in a pretty fast Sentinel) and his two bodyguards which carry AK-47s. Oh, and you get a three star wanted level too, which means that many cop cars will try to obstruct you from completing the mission.
• "Waka-Gashira Wipeout!", in which you need to waste Kenji. The problem is that not only is he heavily guarded, but you have to kill him and his guards without ever leaving a car, rendering your body armor and any weapon other than Uzi useless in this mission. This does however become a lot easier when you realise that you can kill him using the splash damage of a rocket launcher through the roof below him, although one isn't normally accessible at that stage of the game. In the PS2 version, several NPCs had M16s, so if they spotted you first, your car was pretty much dead. This was toned down beginning with the PC port, where they have weaker weapons instead.
• "Escort Service" has you guard the Old Oriental Gentleman's armoured truck as it makes its way to Shoreside Vale from Staunton Island. Sounds easy, right? You and the van will get harassed by the Cartel cruisers filled with mooks wielding AK-47s, though they are the least of your problems. The true nightmare is the gunmen which are placed in such a way you will not be able to reach them with your Uzi before they attack, and they shoot very precisely, whittling the truck's health points down in no time at all. It also does not help that the truck takes a long detour through the underground tunnel, and the Colombians won't stop pursuing you even there.
• The "Espresso 2 Go!" mission requires you to go round the entirety of Liberty City destroying Colombian SPANK dealers posing as coffee sellers under a rather strict time limit. Along with the lack of a map, it is nearly impossible to hit all the espresso stands in time unless you look for them all first (they show up on the radar when you're close to one, but the timer only starts once you destroy the first one), which is very tiring. While part of the mission is in Saint Mark's, the Mafia only uses Uzis for this mission, making it a bit less difficult. Even more tedious is finding a good route because you will inevitably run out of time if you chose the wrong route after hitting a coffee stand.
• "S.A.M." is a mission in which you need to take down a plane using a rocket launcher. You have two options to do it, get a boat and take down the plane by the sea (which makes it very hard to aim, considering the distance and speed of the plane) or head straight to the landing strip in the airport, where several heavily armed mooks wait for you. After the plane is destroyed, your wanted level will raise to 4 stars and he will have to go back to the construction site with the heavily armed law enforcement after you. It may get a little easier after you get Ray Machowski's bullet-proof Patriot, but it's still a pretty hard mission.
• In the final mission, "The Exchange", you are stripped of all your weapons and dropped in a courtyard outnumbered and outgunned by Cartel members. Then you have to negotiate the wharf, which is a sniper alley, followed by shooting down a helicopter with a rocket launcher from a long distance away. If the chopper gets away, you start the whole mission over again, always stripped of your weapons at the start.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

• "The Driver", where you race against Hilary, is an utterly infuriating case of The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. This one little mission has spawned countless pages of text on GameFAQs explaining every theory and method in this world to beat it. It's technically optional, but everyone suffers through it anyway because you get $50,000 for the bank robbery, and $10,000 a day for completing the night club asset missions. Money that provides for powerful weapons and a comfortable cushion in the final mission where Sonny Forelli's men start robbing you blind while you chase after Lance to kill him. To give some background, you're setting up a bank heist and you need a good driver. No doubt you are one, but for the purpose of the story it needs to be someone other than you. That someone is Hillary, a very effeminate man with abandonment issues who insists that the only way he'll work for you is if you beat him in a race. Odd, but reasonable, right? Let us count the ways it screws you over.
  • Hilary gets a Sabre Turbo, a supercharged muscle car. You get a Sentinel, a slower, clunkier sedan. Unfortunately, you don't have a say in the matter. You have to drive the sedan. The only way you'll win in a straight race is if he crashes into something or spins out, but that's pretty much pure luck.
  • Not two blocks in, you get a two-star wanted rating for street racing, causing cops to spawn and get on your tail. And only your tail. They don't even see Hilary.
  • Due to game mechanics, normal traffic is dynamically spawned within 100 meters or so of your car. This does not apply to NPCs such as Hilary. If the distance between your car and Hilary's is great enough, you'll get bogged down in traffic while he has a clear road with no such obstacles, either allowing him to catch up (if he's behind you) or get yet further ahead (if he's in front of you).
  • And there's a glitch where you might fall straight through a bridge just before you cross the finish line. This is more likely to happen on the PlayStation 2 version, due to loading times. The same glitch can happen to Hilary if you're too far ahead of him, instantly failing the mission.
  • There is a trick to even out the odds where you can park a faster car or bike just far away enough from the starting point so it won't despawn and on the path of the race before you start the mission and switch to it mid-race.
• "Death Row", which is easily the most hated mission next to racing Hilary. To explain, you now know that Díaz is the one that messed up your deal at the beginning of the game. Tommy is content to wait it out, but Lance, like an idiot, jumps the gun and gets himself captured. You have to rescue him before he's beaten to death. You have to do this starting at the Malibu, while Lance is being held at the dump on the other side of the map. His remaining health is your timer, and starts right away. Sounds annoying yet? Good, because it gets worse. The dump is barricaded by mooks armed with automatic rifles and high-powered machine guns which will chew through even an armored Tommy or a helicopter if you do a flyover. They're positioned high up on cover to make killing them harder and more time-consuming. Once you rescue Lance, you have to get him to the hospital, which is when three sports cars with goons decide to chase you down. If you kill them all, a fourth car comes along, which also respawns (albeit slowly).
• "Shakedown". Right after you off Diaz and become the new boss, you have to go to the mall to smash store windows. The clock is set to five minutes... starting from your mansion! For reference, the mall is at the north end of the first island, and you start from the center island. A good driver with a fast car (which the house will provide) can get there within 1-2 minutes, leaving three minutes to kill everything in sight, but if you get bogged down you fail. There's a helicopter on the roof that can get you there even faster, but there's a chance that won't spawn, forcing some Save Scumming to get it.
• "Cop Land", where you dress up as cops and set up explosives at the mall. You can only drive to the mission in a cop car, with all other traffic in the area also being cop cars, and RIGHT after you set the explosives off, and despite wearing cop uniforms you IMMEDIATELY gain a five star wanted level and everyone zeroes in on you, somehow. Since you presumably don't have a regular car and the Pay 'N' Spray won't take a cop car, the point of the mission is to get back to the mansion from the other side of the island with a near full wanted level and survive. It's incredibly tough to do even in a fast, tough cop car. Did we mention this mission is only at the halfway point of the story mode? Adding to the frustration is that you need to keep Lance from getting killed, and he's relatively easy for the cops to kill. If all you needed to do was get yourself to safety, it would be significantly easier. There exists a resprayable Vice Cheetah parked somewhere in the PC versions onward, but if you don't know where it is or if you're playing on the PS2 original, you're out of luck.
• Love Juice. You start at the VRock HQ and have to head to a nearby location to meet a drug dealer. Upon meeting him, he then takes your money without giving you the product and runs, while a cutscene lets him escape on an incredibly fast PCJ-600 bike, while the game expects you to chase him down. If you aren't aware this is going to happen, you might not even be facing the right way, and you have about five seconds to follow him before the game declares the mission a failure. Once you take out the dealer, you get a call telling you to go and pick up Mercedes from her apartment to bring her to the gig before the band start playing. Once you pick her up, the game gives you an absurdly strict timer of only 1 minute and 20 seconds to get to the gig location. If you fail it (which you will if you don't know what's coming next), you do it all again. Chase down the dealer, pick up Mercedes, and drive like crazy to make it on time.
• "Stunt Boat Challenge" and "Checkpoint Charlie", both boat driving missions where you have to drive through a set number of checkpoints under a rather unforgiving time limit. The boat itself has pretty bad controls, with sensitive steering, slippery handling, and pitiful acceleration.
• Trojan Voodoo. Okay, get this: you start at Umberto's cafe and have to go on a mission to destroy a Haitian drug factory. This involves stealing a specific type of car (a Voodoo) and then driving it to the factory. But if the game happens to simply not spawn any Voodoos on the street, you're going to be stuck waiting for one to roll on by, or going to some unmarked locations where one can be known to spawn in order to steal it. Once you've gotten the car, you drive to a meeting point with some other Cubans, and then drive to the factory proper, which is full of Haitians with guns. You have to head inside, survive being shot, and place three bombs around the building. From the moment you plant the first bomb, you have exactly 45 seconds to plant the other two and make your escape. So, you run back out the way you came in, right? Wrong. Glancing at the minimap, it looks as if there's a way around the right side of the building, right? Wrong again. You have to go back to the closed gate, then do a 180, where you'll see a very small stairway tucked in on the left side, hidden by buildings and walls. Climb the stairway and it leads you to a roof. Run across the roof, and the game will trigger a cutscene showing the factory being destroyed, which ends the mission successfully.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

• One opening mission, "Sweet & Kendl," can be this. You're on a BMX... and must avoid a Voodoo full of Ballas who specifically target you. Not to mention that they have Submachine Guns — before you're even introduced to armor and weapons (barring Gameplay and Story Segregation). While not too bad, it's still a bit jarring for such an early mission.
• "OG Loc" features an annoying motorcycle chase, and the guy being chased not only shoots back (this is at the time where Ammu-Nation is still closed, thus you can't buy armor yet and your max health is still low), but also immune to damage. In the end you are even ambushed by his thugs. Thankfully at the end of the chase, you can kill him. You can blow up the bike, but you need a lot of SMG ammo to do that, and at this time, Ammu-Nation did not open yet and the one SMG pickup can only be slowly periodically picked up.
• "Wrong Side Of The Tracks". You're trying help Smoke gun down some Vagos on top of a train. The problem is that there isn't an indication that you need to stay at least another train's width apart from the train or Smoke can't hit them. Furthermore, you'll often find yourself smashed by a train coming the other way. The mission is rather trivial once you figure out the correct way of doing it but expect to hear "All we had to do was follow the damn train, CJ!" a lot until then.
• "Cesar Vialpando" is a mission where you have to bounce a lowrider to the rhythm of the music.The PC version switches the button to the numpads without any indication except that the numpad can be used to manually do hydraulic bounce outside of the minigame. And even if you guess you need to use the numpad to bounce the car, you'll probably fail the minigame thanks to an abysmal score the first couple of attempts, because the Up/Down commands are inverted.
• "Life's a Beach", another early mission. You have to impress a girl by dancing on the beach (read: playing a button-timing mini-game). Since this game pre-dated Guitar Hero (though notably came after DanceDanceRevolution), the concept of HDTV lag hadn't really hit the public consciousness yet. A lot of early adopters couldn't beat that mission. History repeated itself when the "Remastered" version was unwinnable for some, but thankfully since then a Good Bad Bug was discovered that allows it to be skipped.
• "Robbing Uncle Sam". You have to take a truck — which is very easy to tip over, incidentally — and Ryder down to the military area at Ocean Docks and then use a hard to maneuver forklift to get six crates into the back of the truck while Ryder stops the National Guard. Except Ryder is nothing but The Load — he can't hit soldiers standing less than six feet away from him so you have to keep stopping, getting out of the forklift and doing his job so he doesn't die and fail the mission for you. If you do manage to get all six crates on without Ryder dying, he then insists you drive as well. So then you have to drive this very easy to tip truck as you are pursued by two Humvee style military trucks with soldiers firing semi-automatics while Ryder tells you to beep the horn so he'll throw an explosive crate at the trucks. Except his aim is equally terrible and if it takes you too long to get to the lockup he'll either fall out of the truck or get shot by the soldiers, and you can't tell how much health he has this time because there is no gauge as there was for the section in the docks. Basically this mission would be orders of magnitude less difficult if Ryder had simply stayed at home. The real kicker is that before the mission starts properly Ryder brags about how no weekend soldiers are a match for him, and the thought that if you know the story of the game he's probably going to be running all the guns stolen on the job to rival gangs anyway. On a touchscreen device it's frustrating from beginning to end.
• There're two missions from Catalina which qualify:
  • The first is "Tanker Commander", in which you'll have to drive into the red marker outside of the Dillimore gas station to trigger a cutscene. Afterwards, you'll get in the cab with Catalina and back it directly into the trailer to attach it to the cab. Catalina knows a buyer in Flint County, which is quite a ways away from Dillimore. You have to be very careful when driving the tanker, because too sharp of a turn will detach the trailer which results in a mission failure. The two gas station attendants will pursue you and try to destroy the tanker; the trailer will explode if the health bar at the top-right quarter of the screen reaches zero. This can be hilariously easy if you hop out and cap them as soon as you've hitched up the tank, but first-time players may not think to do this because the game tends to alternate between "get back to your car or fail" or "fail because you left the car".
  • The other is "Local Liquor Store", primarily because the quadbike you're driving is very difficult to control. In this one, you are tracking down some guys (three of them) who robbed a liquor store, each of the robbers holds a briefcase full of money, so your job on the quadbike is to get Catalina close enough to gun them down. You can use your own SMG if you're carrying one, otherwise you're limited to driving. If the robbers get too far ahead the mission is a failure. You'll have to be especially careful on dirt roads, because if the rancher tips over, it will be nearly impossible to catch up with the bandits.
• The two Wu Zi Mu races in a car that has basically no traction on the dirt tracks that make up most of the courses. Unlike Zero's missions, these are not optional and definitely reduce San Andreas' replayability.
• "Photo Opportunity". To elaborate, this mission has you meet up with Cesar halfway across the map, tedious but not especially difficult. Where it starts to suck is when you have to drive his lowrider from the meeting point to Angel Pine, which means taking either a massive detour or taking the freeway. The kicker? The car is prone to rolling especially on hilly roads, and the freeway has a lot of speeding cars. Its saving grace is that there is no time limit at all.
• "Toreno's Last Flight" can be a nasty one. This mission has you chase down Mike Toreno's helicopter onto the freeway and shoot it down with a rocket launcher. Since you can't shoot rockets from vehicles, this means standing in the middle of the freeway with maniac AI traffic barreling towards you. Plus, the initial shootout at the helipad tends to draw police attention, so cops are also thrown into the mix. Good luck.
• Zero's first mission was truly frustrating—for a while, it made even the next two seem manageable—in that you stand on a roof, shooting down model bomber planes with a minigun so they don't get a chance to destroy Zero's transmitters. These little buggers just keep coming from every single direction and worse still, our pacifist "friend" Zero simply won't stop whining at you. Note that the PC version of Zero's first mission is really easy, for ironically the opposite reasons as why flight school is so much more difficult (precision aiming with a mouse is simpler).
  • And those are cake compared to "Supply Lines". You have to fly an RC plane around San Fierro gunning down five couriers that can spread through out the entire city if you don't know the exact routes they take and then land the plane on Zero's store. The catch is you have a ridiculously low amount of fuel to do it with. That mission's actually a lot easier in the post-Hot Coffee editions of the game. The problem with the original is that your fuel acted more as a time meter, i.e. draining even when you weren't accelerating. In later editions, this is fixed so that fuel is consumed only while you're holding the gas button, on top of tripling the amount of fuel you have, making the mission much more manageable. It's still by no means easy, however, since the plane is difficult to control - ironically, it's actually easier to land the plane some distance away from the courier and gun him down from the ground instead of trying to attack from the air. Even so, the mission is in itself also pointless. Zero insists that you use his model plane to take out the couriers, and admonishes you for failing at it, when you could have killed all of them in half the time if he just sent you out on foot.
• "Interdiction". You must protect the contraband helicopter from CIA choppers by shooting them down with a rocket launcher. The helicopters are very hard to hit since they constantly move around in addition to being faster than any other helicopter encountered in the game and you have very little time before the contraband helicopter is destroyed. Even when you do finally shoot down one of the enemy choppers, there's a good chance it'll fall right on top of you and kill you. And even if you sprint away from the crash, you'll probably still take some damage because the radius of the initial explosion from a helicopter crash is enormous. It's recommended that you grab the heat-seeking rocket launcher located nearby in Aldea Malvada before doing this mission as it'll make shooting down the choppers much easier.
• "Flight School". Hours upon hours upon god-damned hours at failing to pull off perfect barrel rolls and loop-de-loops, and it's necessary to continue the game. The worst part is that flight school starts off deceptively easy. The first two challenges involve simply taking off and landing the plane, respectively, and they're both really easy. But on the third challenge, flight school takes a steep nosedive into the depths of Hell. It's "Circle Airstrip", where you have to take off and fly from corona to corona, all while you're most likely wrestling with the wonky plane controls. It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to fly through the damn coronas - which are rather small targets - nigh-perfectly. And when you finish that one, guess what the next challenge is? You have to do the exact same thing, only when you're done you have to land the plane, which is incredibly easy for beginners to screw up. What fun! You CAN make all the flight school challenges a bit easier by just switching to first-person view, but it's still a huge pain in the ass.
  • Oh, and on PC even the first two missions are damn near impossible if you don't have a gamepad, due to the fact that the missions were built around an analog stick.
• And the Flight School missions are easy compared to the driving school missions, notably Burn and Lap.
  • Even Burn and Lap is easy compared to City Slicking. What makes City Slicking so damn difficult, you ask? Having to drive from the driving school to the car showroom across town and back. In just two minutes. Made all the more frustrating by the fact you'll have to dodge endless bouts of traffic on your way there, along with cars making turns at intersections. And that's not all! The car you're using has notoriously bad handling, which means you'll have to slow down a lot before making a turn or you'll fishtail out of control. And if that wasn't bad enough, this mission becomes a goddamn nightmare if you're going for 100% Completion, because you'll have to make it there and back in 1 minute and 40 seconds, without any damage on your car. Did we mention that you can never stop the car, and that giving in to your instinctive urge to brake when you see you're about to crash into something will count as a failure? Needless to say, this mission will cause a lot of broken controllers.
• "Highjack" is a bit of a pain, just because Cesar won't shut up. You have to ride along side a truck at just the right speed, and be RIGHT NEXT TO IT, and it's timed. Have fun.
• "Stowaway" requires the player to drive a motorbike into the back of a plane as it is taking off, with literally no pause between "mission starts" and "plane is moving". This would be difficult enough were it not for the fact that you have to run through a group of people shooting at you (and their boxes and cars in the way), but the plane dumps barrels periodically to make it even harder. Worse, there's no leeway. One mistake means you lose, because the plane only has to reach the end of the runway. On the early PC releases, there was an issue where frame rate would affect how fast the plane moved relative to you; basically the lower fps it is, the faster the plane is (usually this can be remedied by turning off frame limiter - which Rockstar warns the players against - and also lowering resolutions to the lowest possible).
• Before Stowaway, there's also "N.O.E.". There's a time limit, yes, and that's exactly why you want to finish that mission as soon as possible. The problem is, the Surface-To-Air Missiles surrounding the Restricted Area won't allow you to take the shortcut above the area even if you're just passing by. And that's only the SAMs. There's still the radar, which will detect your presence and will send the Hydra (a fighter jet) to hunt down your Rustler (mentioned above, it's only slightly better than the Dodo), and if you're unable to shake it off in time, that Hydra will fire missiles at you. And no, not only one missile, but possibly up to three at one time! And aside from the radar and SAMs, the area the player has to get to (Angel Pine) is surrounded by high trees and rocks, making it very difficult to keep below the radar without blowing the Rustler up. The best way to get this while avoiding the radar detection is taking a longer path above the ocean. There are many hills or canyons which will help concealing your presence as well. Although it may take longer, you can still actually finish the mission before the time expires.
• "High Noon" can get extremely infuriating, mostly because your target is driving a car twenty times tougher than it has any right to be while your dune buggy is prone to spinning out and/or flipping over on a whim. On top of that, the mission fails if he gets out of mini-map range, so you have to keep up on top of trying to stop him. And when you finally do manage to coax him out of the thing, he's got a Desert Eagle that can blow up your car if you've taken damage trying to get him out of his. You can alleviate the difficulty somewhat by popping his tires before he gets a chance to get in (you can reliably get the entire left side with a rifle), then watch as he flails about in a vain attempt to outrun you. Or just drop near the quest with a Jetpack, and lots of SMG ammo. As soon as mission starts, get the jetpack, and fire at will. A real cakewalk.
• A mission where you need to save Madd Dogg from killing himself would have him jump before you can save him (at the very beginning of the mission), and players literally would have to start over and hope the glitch didn't happen again. Worse is that the only confirmed reason why it happens is if you use the "pedestrians riot" cheat, which can't be turned off once you activate it unless you have a save from before doing so - and even without cheating at all it might happen to you anyway. The sole saving grace is that it's apparently rare enough that if you are forced to start over from the beginning, it most likely won't happen again when you make it back that far.
• "Freefall" can be frustrating beyond all comprehension, mostly due to the fact that you're screwed by the interface from the start. The short version is that you have to hijack a jet full of targets by jumping to it from a Dodo. The jet won't arrive until you find it up north, beyond the borders of the map. This means you only get a second or two or warning when you finally find it, which takes a while. Then you have to do a 180 degree turn without screwing up so you can fly through a ring just above its tail while going the same general direction. Your Dodo can barely outrun the jet, and that's if you have the advantage of being higher than it. You'll never catch it if you have to climb. This you have to do while struggling with very frustrating controls. Oh, and you have less than a minute to manage all this, because the jet counts as landed if it gets over the city. Then you have to kill all the bad guys on the plane, while forced into a first-person target mode that only lets you duck behind cover, and you can only use a pistol which takes several headshots just to waste one of them. This is one of those missions where cheating through various means may actually be preferable to doing it fairly, given how difficult it can be to pull off. The best part is that it's delightfully ridiculous. If the widely-touted "something new in every mission" pre-release prospect showed itself rather questioningly in any one mission, this would probably be it.
• "Cop Wheels". You have to steal four specific police motorcycles at designated spots in Las Venturas, and then load them onto the Packer that is driving around the city perimeter, all in under 12 minutes. Stealing any of the bikes will automatically give you one star on your wanted level, while killing the cop to get the bike will net you two stars and send the cops chasing after you. And since a couple of cops are scripted to get on the motorcycles and drive away in them for one reason or another, you'll have to chase after them unless you're fortunate enough to shoot them off their bikes. And there will be a lot of remote areas that the Packer will go through that will leave you stranded on foot without a vehicle, and traffic will decrease significantly if you have a wanted level. All you can do is pray that a vehicle (usually a car driven by the police chasing after you) will show up so that you can jack it and then head to the next motorcycle to steal it.
• Any mission where you are the driver and the passenger is the shooter, especially if it's on a motorcycle. By and large, they are all terrible shots.
• Any mission (especially the valet missions) which requires you to keep a vehicle at or near pristine condition. The game does not in any way encourage careful driving, and these missions are timed more often than not. That means you not only have to avoid hitting a single car on the way there, but do so while driving in the typical fashion because you simply won't make it in time otherwise. And that's not even getting into the fact that the car you're trying to keep intact can be difficult to drive, and the game actually counts scraping damage from driving up hills if you're moving too fast.
• Until you get the hang of them (and even then), flight missions are just awful. Helicopters are reasonably easy to fly around (except the Hunter, which is a lot more sensitive), but planes are horrible. One ding usually makes them catch fire, you have to do gimmicks like flying near ground level to dodge radar, and you have to successfully land the things when you're done (most of the time). If you haven't aced every flight school test, go back and do that first so you won't be totally driven up the wall. And you think the regular aircraft are tricky, try flying the Hydra, a fighter jet with hover jets that you can manipulate to hover in place. Luckily, it seems the developers realized that the Hydra controls were awkward and only force you to fly it for one mission.

Grand Theft Auto Advance

• "Smackdown", where you have to kill a total of ten Yardies (who are all Made of Iron, since they don't seem to take much damage from getting run over with a car) spread out across Shoreside Vale in less than 4 minutes. Think of this as the scaled-down counterpart of GTA III's Espresso-2-Go. And like that mission, you have no choice but to memorize every possible route, every twist and turn, in order to even get a chance at succeeding. Not only that, but this mission is at the point in the storyline where half of the city's gangs are out for your blood, lots of cops are patrolling the streets that will chase you if you collide into them or if they catch you stealing a car (which is bound to happen, since you'll most likely have to switch cars a lot during the mission to either reach the next target fast enough or speed over the grassy terrain around the roads). But at least this mission only takes place on one island, and the map shows you where all the gang members are so you that don't need to waste time searching for them.

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

• Any of Maria's missions. 90% of the time, the missions consist of her making you help her buy drugs, the buyers trying to screw you over in some way, and then you have to chase them down on a motorcycle. Keep in mind, you have to go top speed to keep up with them, which increases the likelihood that you'll crash into some other jackass who comes out of nowhere, which wastes even more time than usual because, again, you have to do so with a motorcycle, and when you crash into something, you are sent flying off of it.
• "Dead Meat" isn't that difficult, but it can really throw off inexperienced players. You have to stalk Giovanni Casa through a maze-like sawmill, using the game's (non-existent) sneaking mechanics to take Casa by surprise, all while some idiot constantly reveals your location.
• "The Portland Chainsaw Masquerade" will definitely give even the most seasoned GTA veterans trouble. For one, due to the awkward camera perspective that's unique to this mission, you can be blindsided by chainsaw-wielding mobsters. One slice of a chainsaw can easily leave you near critical health, even with full armor and health! If you get surrounded by them, you're dead, no matter what. Your best bet is to gather a lot of Uzi rounds, you're gonna need them.
• "False Idols" requires you to take out three characters who come from different vehicles, one of which is in a helicopter; another drives a bulletproof vehicle. They each have their own destinations, which requires memorization of their routes. You're guaranteed to fail the mission on your first time you play this game.
• "The Shoreside Redemption" requires you to drive to the courthouse with Salvatore Leone in a police van, all while you have enemies ramming your vehicle along the way. Thanks to No Fair Cheating, trying to cheat will cause a unique mission failed scenario that's only used in this mission.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories

• "Boomshine Blowout" is a Timed Mission inside a burning factory that is The Maze. Due to how wobbly the Forklift is, it's probable you come close to finishing it, only to get stuck behind something and fail.
• The ATV race in "When Funday Comes" is anything BUT fun. To better elaborate, you have to win a quadbike race around the trailer park against some rednecks. Which should be easy except that the quadbike handles horribly.
• "Jive Drive", which must wholly be blamed on the PSP's lack of a second analog stick. After a hair-raising drive to an abandoned lot, being shot at all the way there (thankfully this isn't terrible as your car has decent armor), you must survive a gauntlet of fire on you and your brother. Lance is useless with a gun and if he dies, WHOOPS, start over. The fact that you can't get a clear look around you with the PSP's limited control scheme is the main reason you will fail this mission.
• "Turn on, Tune in, Bug out". You have to destroy 6 police antennas, and with each one you destroy your wanted level goes up and using the Pay'N'Spray trick will only fix your car but not reduce your wanted level for this mission... that is until after you destroy all the antenna, which by then you have a nearly maxed out wanted level with the FBI on your tail as you try to get to the nearest spray shop. By the way, reducing your wanted level after the antennas are destroyed is mandatory, or else you fail the mission. And then to top it all off, you get a paltry $300 reward for all the ridiculously hard work.
• "Unfriendly Competition" is a MAJOR Difficulty Spike compared to missions before it, it's not too hard until you get to the swimming pool, which is absolutely crawling with enemies and has very little cover, making it insanely hard to kill all the enemies without getting killed yourself, and if you somehow survive you have to chase down and kill the last two guys using a quad-bike, which is very awkward to control and it's hard to drive and aim at the enemies at the same time.
• "High Wire". You're basically pulling an Escort Mission with cocaine crates using a huge magnet on the bottom of a helicopter for the first two thirds, and it seems like everything's normal, but then you hear this: "HELP! THE BIKERS ARE ON ME, I CAN'T GET THEM OFF!" and you must go after a moving car that has bikers constantly shooting at it with Sub-Machine Guns, making it move around erratically, in turn causing Fake Difficulty as you're attempting to drive down and collect the car. The BEST PART of this, you may ask? The car has an HP meter of sorts, and if the bikers hit it enough times (read:about 15 or so streams of bullets), it'll blow up and you'll have to start over from THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE MISSION. Have fun.
• If you thought picking up cargo containers and a gang car with a helicopter in "High Wire" was bad, you haven't seen "White Lies" yet. You have to follow Lance's helicopter in a hovercraft and collect cocaine that drops from his helicopter. This is easier said than done, considering that the hovercraft handles horribly.
• One of the final missions, "Light My Pyre". The mission begins with a highly annoying car chase that wouldn't be so bad, except you have to escort Lance, who is riding a motorcycle and seems to enjoy getting in your way (sometimes, even in your line of fire) and getting himself killed, which is a Game Over. Then, you have to fight through a small army of heavily armed, respawning goons to get around the back of a building and through a door. THEN, you have to fight Armando Mendez, who is wielding a flamethrower. If that weren't enough, you're forced to fight him in a disorienting top-down perspective — not to mention, his goons storm in and fight you, as if a man setting you on fire with a flamethrower wasn't enough. (This part is made almost laughably easy if you have a minigun with you, but if you don't...) And if you die? Back to the beginning. And if you do finish it? You find that Louise, the woman you went through all this hell to save, is dead. What fun! On top of that, the game does not leave you close to a vehicle at all, as the goons blow up Lance's Infernus in the cutscene, and Lance takes off in his Angel, leaving you to find a vehicle on the streets. There is a PCJ nearby that's ideal for the mission because you'll want to do drive-bys facing forward, but it's not readily apparent when you are scrambling to catch up with Lance. Your first few attempts on a blind playthrough will likely involve you carjacking a much slower vehicle and getting nowhere near the mansion as a result.

Grand Theft Auto IV

• Several levels have the potential to be this depending upon the player's skill with gunfighting or driving certain vehicles. The mission "No Way on the Subway" is spectacularly difficult as it requires riding a poorly handling motorbike while trying to shoot down two guys riding motorbikes, all while avoiding traffic (and, later, subway trains). Oh, and if you don't take out the bad guys fast enough you have to jump your bike off bridges, and if you don't know how to handle a bike in the air, it's sayonara.
• The motorcycle chase ones are the worst, because you'll usually fall off your bike from the slightest brush against any obstacle (at which point they'll invariably escape by the time you can get back on.) You will likely break your controller on the mission "I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots, And Your Motorcycle," in which you have to chase and gun down a professional stunt cyclist mob guy who starts the mission with a block's worth of lead on you, while the game throws every conceivable obstacle at you, up to and including trucks overturning right in front of you.
• Undress to Kill can be extremely annoying for beginners, especially if you don't know tricks like knifing the first strip club manager. Not to mention it's possible to get a Game-Breaking Bug where Playboy won't open up the next mandatory mission, The Holland Play, after completing Undress to Kill, making the story unwinnable.
• Any of Phil Bell's missions, but "Catch the Wave" in particular. Having to fight a couple dozen Russian drug runners with automatic weapons in a cramped building with only one entrance is bad enough. The fact that it's also an Escort Mission, and Phil happens to be a Leeroy Jenkins who frequently gets himself killed is what makes this mission so annoying^note A common strategy is position the truck in a certain way so Phil gets stuck in the door when he gets out, keeping him safe until you clean out the building.. The rest of the mission involves protecting Phil from attacking boats while trying to get to the safe point, and that isn't much easier.
• The Snow Storm. You have to retrieve a package of cocaine from an abandoned hospital while fighting a dozen or so gang members, but the confined spaces make it difficult to aim at the enemies without getting into their line of fire. After you get the cocaine, police special forces (NOOSE) storm the building, and the only way back to the streets is guarded by several police cars. You must push through their lines and escape a three star wanted level (meaning they aggressively ram you, keep shooting your car and have a helicopter). Since the mission takes place on Charge Island, there's only one bridge off, with heavy traffic going out and cops coming in. There is a lifesaving secret, in the form of a boat at the docks behind the hospital that can be used to easily escape the police, but finding it without a guide is unlikely.
• "Three Leaf Clover", despite its reputation, could be this due to not only multiple officers shooting you and the brothers, but the most of the NOOSE officers can kill you very easy with their rifles if you're not careful. To top it all off, after exiting the subway underground, you still must escape the 3-star police pursuit using a 4-door car and you must be quick to escape.
• Holland Nights. You have to make your way through a project building to get to a target on the roof, all while fighting off enemies. This part isn't that bad if you have good weapons, plenty of ammo and full health and armor on Niko, and they do give you a few health packs throughout the mission. But after finding your target (and either killing him or letting him go), you've got a 2-star wanted rating to shake, and have to escape the building while fighting off cops. And then, you have to lose the wanted rating (which may be even higher, depending on how many cops you killed in your escape) with them still on your tail. And if you die, you have to do the whole long mission again.
• "A Revenger's Tragedy". The mission is full of bottleneck moments. Most notably the part were you have to chase Dimitri's helicopter in a speed boat. Jacob will appear in an Annihilator to pick you up. You have a very limited window to board the Annihilator before Jacob hits the water and the timing can be so finicky at times that some people swear it's glitched.
• The finale mission definitely qualifies, not because it's difficult (as you'd expect it to be) but because regardless with option you take, the mission is extremely long, with no opportunity to save and no checkpoints. Both versions involve a very long car chase, then an intense gun battle, then a chase in the water or in the air, and then finally a footchase. Not to mention, during your first time of this finale, it's easy so mess up during the chase if you don't know the scripted sequences or signs of them. Both missions (depending on what console you're playing on) also include a Game-Breaking Bug involving the prompt for climbing into a helicopter being unable to work, rendering the mission unfinishable.

Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City

From Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned:

• "Buyer's Market", which comes close to The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard territory in terms of the amount of firepower Johnny has to overcome in order to survive. Made more vivid by the relatively easy "Blow Your Cover" level from GTA IV which is supposed to be the same mission but it's from a different perspective and in that one the player has backup, as well as a much less contested path. Fits the criteria for the trope as a number of players have complained about the level's difficulty on the boards (especially when compared to the GTA IV counterpart), while others have stated the mission isn't that difficult.

From Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony:

• "Going Deep". After a very long car ride, you have to fight off wave after wave of heavily armed, heavily armored NOOSE agents in a parking garage, and you only get partial body armor(if you enter a Stockade vehicle). And if any of the agents get close, they will tear your health bar to shreds. It's strongly advised you save some explosive shotgun ammo for this mission to make it less hair-pulling.
• Likewise, "In The Crosshairs", which involves fighting your way across several rooftops through an army of guys with automatic weapons and grenade launchers, fending off the occasional helicopter attack, and then jumping down a fire escape to street level, where there are yet more gun-toting goons, stealing the nearest car and driving away until the mission ends.
• "Caught With Your Pants Down". Yusuf has you acquire an APC, which, unfortunately for you, is suspended high above the city from a sky crane. He expects you to have the Improbable Aiming Skills needed to snipe the cables holding up the APC from a moving helicopter. When you finally do get past all that, you find that the APC is a bit of a letdown, seeing how it's not completely Immune to Bullets, and will take damage from Stuff Blowing Up too close to it, so you have to deliberately hold yourself back from going apeshit with it.
• Most of the helicopter missions tend to be like this considering the awkward handling of helicopters. In particular, "Sexy Time" could be this for many fans, as you have to aim downward and maintain both low altitude and distance to hit the boats that are running away, while dodging RPG fire. Because of these mechanics, it's very easy to crash the chopper into the ocean. In addition, the forums often have contradictory advice regarding how to deal with the mission. Many users have compared this to GTA: San Andreas' infamous (but optional) mission "Supply Lines".
• "Party's Over" is this to many people. Mainly because you're left with little cover, you must defeat more than four waves of enemies that can easily kill you should you make even the simplest of mistakes. And it IS possible for Gay Tony to die a bit easily.

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