YMMV / Grand Theft Auto 2

• Anti-Climax Boss: All of the bosses, once the player has completed all of the missions. They come without reinforcements despite not being especially strong in any way - thus, the final mission of each level is just to kill three random enemies as they come.
• Complete Monster: The promotional short film (link): Claude Speed, depicted here as a sociopathic crime-addict instead of a mute thug, orchestrates conflict between the gangs of Anywhere City to get ahead. A mercenary, drug dealer, and murderer with no allegiance to his bosses, Claude works for the Russian mob and the Yakuza, manipulating events so that both gangs massacre each other in a bloody shootout. Claude can only smile at the chaos and carnage he's responsible for, and ends his day by trying to break into a car, his thirst for crime still not quenched.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Flamethrower, which is effectively a One-Hit Kill against anything unfortunate enough to be touched by its stream of hot death, though it's not all that useful against vehicles. Of course, its raw killing power becomes much less funny once it gets turned against you; thus, it's a pretty good idea not to let the Scientists' respect meter bottom out if you have anything important to do on their turf unless you enjoy fighting against a small army of Demonic Spiders.
  • Expeditious executions. They give a flat 100k points for accomplishing it, and you can do it easily by finding a boxed-in area with civvies, honking your car's horn to scare them against the wall, then manipulating the camera to spawn more without despawning the ones that are panicking. Rinse and repeat a few times, drive a horizontal line across them, and bam, free 100k. Even better, it doesn't attract the cops until your second or third time doing it, depending on how skilled you are.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "Hot Dog Homicide" is, possibly the most messed-up mission in the whole GTA franchise. It requires the player to deliver a bus full of Hare Krishnas to a hot dog factory, and you're forced to watch them get turned into meat, all while listening to their cries and screams of pain as they are ground alive. Some even try to escape, but the Russians shoot them dead before they can even make a move. Then, the player is tasked with delivering a van full of hot dogs made out of human meat to a diner. It gets even worse in the PC version, where the player have to take a bus full of innocent pedestrians instead of gang members!
  • If you have an Electrogun or Flamethrower, you can turn criminals, mob-bosses, and even pedestrians into charred skeletons. Even worse when you set a person on fire at a rail station, they get electrocuted on the rails while still on fire.
• Scrappy Weapon: This game introduces the shotgun to the GTA franchise. Although the weapon has fast bullets and good stopping power, it is woefully undone by being a Short-Range Shotgun with a range that doesn't even reach the end of the default POV distance, and a criminally low fire rate, as unlike in later GTA titles where you could outrun and swing around your shotgun towards any threats with ease using a targeting control, in GTA 2 you are limited to only firing at what is right in front of you, and being required that you stand still and make slow turns in order to aim the gun properly, rendering it nearly useless against any enemies that were armed with longer-ranged weapons and any police officer that chased you down. You would be better off using the flamethrower or a machine gun in these types of scenarios.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The game is a minor step down over Grand Theft Auto due to the advent of the save feature, and each city containing only one level as opposed to two, including That One Level Rasta Blasta.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • "Toucan Pie" is similar to "Siberian Khatru" by Yes.
  • "Surf City" is similar to "Wipe Out" by The Surfaris.
• That One Sidequest: Kill Frenzies, the equivalent of rampages in later games, in the PC version. They aren't particularly hard in the first district, but become one of the hardest challenges in the whole GTA franchise once you reach the second district. They start requiring killing cops or destroying cop cars instead of civilians or regular vehicles, which not only is more dangerous but also more annoying since usually there aren't enough cops chasing you (and therefore you'll run out of time) and even using the debug keys to zoom out will not help, as the game will only spawn a fixed amount of people and vehicles on the screen at all times. Besides, there's a notable Game-Breaking Bug that permanently corrupts your savegame after completing a Kill Frenzy activated by entering a vehicle initially placed on a trailer. The only known player who has proved to have completed all of them did so through different exploits and glitches.
  • Even worse, Kill Frenzies are the only reliable means of earning extra lives. It's all too common to find yourself in a situation where you're down to your last life, try to complete a Kill Frenzy to gain another, and lose said last life in the process.
  • It should be noted that according to the GTA Wiki, as opposed to the PC release where your wanted meter on the second district only went up by five points, in the Playstation release (That came out five days before the PC) it could go up to six points so that you could fight lots of military vehicles and personnel (as opposed to sparse Special Agents) that would be more appropriate for killing within in the time given, especially if you were to use an invisibility item during said Frenzy. Thus, it is possible that the reason for the change might have been a design oversight that the developers never got around to considering during post-production before the PC port was released.

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