GTA 6 review scores: Metacritic, OpenCritic and every major review
There aren't any GTA 6 reviews yet, and any score you see before the embargo lifts is fake. This is the page that'll collect them, plus what's worth knowing until it does.
By Wes Calloway
As of 21 October there are no published reviews of Grand Theft Auto 6, no Metacritic score and no OpenCritic score. Rockstar hasn't announced when the review embargo lifts.
We'll list every major review and its score on this page as they go up, with the aggregate at the top. Until then, this is what we know about when they're coming, and how to read them once they do.
When reviews are expected
Reports say review copies go out before the end of October, which would give critics about three weeks. Rockstar's own history points to an embargo the day before launch: GTA 5 reviews went up on 16 September 2013 for a 17 September release, and Red Dead Redemption 2 reviews on 25 October 2018 for the 26th. Our embargo piece goes through every report and how reliable each one is.
If that pattern holds, expect a wave of reviews on 18 November, the day before the game unlocks. Nobody's confirmed the date or the hour yet.
We also don't know whether technical outlets get the same date as critics, or whether every outlet gets code at the same time.
Any score before then is fake
A game this size attracts invented reviews: screenshots of a Metacritic page with a number on it, a leaked magazine page, a score in a YouTube thumbnail. Until the embargo lifts, none of them is real. The tell's simple. A genuine review is published by the outlet itself, on its own site, at the same hour as everyone else's.
GTA 4, GTA 5 and Red Dead 2 set the bar
Three of Rockstar's open-world games sit among the highest-rated games ever made on the aggregators.
- Grand Theft Auto IV (2008): 98 on Metacritic.
- Grand Theft Auto V (2013): 97.
- Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018): 97.
Every review of GTA 6 is going to be measured against those, whether it says so or not. Anything below the mid-90s will get reported as a disappointment, and honestly that'd say more about the bar than about the game.
How Metacritic and OpenCritic differ
Metacritic weights its critics, and it doesn't publish the weights. OpenCritic shows a plain average of the reviews it counts, a Top Critic average, and the percentage of critics who recommend the game. When the two disagree by a point or two, that's usually why.
If you're deciding whether to buy, OpenCritic's recommend percentage is the more useful number, because one harsh outlier can't drag it around.
What to read the reviews for
You probably already know whether you're buying it. The reviews are still worth reading for the stuff trailers can't tell you.
- How it runs on a base PS5 and on Xbox Series S. Rockstar captured the launch trailer on a base PS5, and Digital Foundry found compromises there in August. Technical reviews usually land alongside the critics.
- How long the story is, and how much of Leonida it opens up early.
- What there is to do without GTA Online, since there's no online mode at launch.
- Bugs, which on a game this size are a question of how many, and never of whether.
We'll update this page the moment the first review is live.
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Sources
Keep reading
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