GTA Advance takes place in Liberty City, the stomping grounds of GTA III. The story puts you in the role of a guy named Mike. When the game opens, you and another guy named Vinnie are getting ready to skip town with a bunch of money. But the escape goes bad and Vinnie is a victim of a car bomb. So Mike sets out to find Vinnie's killers and make them all pay. Along the way, you'll go on a lot of pretty standard missions, including taking out specific enemies, blowing up a building, checkpoint racing, and picking up and dropping off hookers, and so on. The story is conveyed via your mission briefings, which cut away from the top-down view and give you two large, static character heads to look at while reading the game's dialogue. The game doesn't really have the ironic sense of humor that helps make the GTA games great, and the dialogue is written in a very plain way that really lacks punch. These things make it easy to not care at all about the game's overall plot.

The look and feel of GTA Advance take things back to the original Grand Theft Auto, though there have been some changes. Some of the side missions introduced in GTA III are here, so you'll be able to hop in a cop car and go on vigilante missions, drive a taxi, play paramedic for a day, and so on. You can enter yourself into races for some extra cash, and the game has 100 hidden packages for you to find. Every tenth package adds another item to your hideout, which is where you go to save the game. Annoyingly, picking up a weapon from your hideout doesn't give you the maximum ammo count, so if you want to roll fully strapped, you'll have to enter and exit your hideout over and over again to recollect weapons until you've picked up enough bullets to do the job.

Other changes to the old GTA is that cars can now flip over, which usually happens if you T-bone them really hard. Generally speaking, though, the vehicle physics that govern how the cars react in a collision just feel strange. Cars pinball off of one another and go flying after even slight hits, and a vehicle's weight isn't taken into consideration as much as it probably should have been. On top of that, the game does a poor job at delivering any real sense of speed. One of the great things about the old GTA games is that they ran really fast and smooth, making high-speed driving a real thrill. Here, the game sort of sputters along, and you never really get the feeling that you're driving through the streets of Liberty City at breakneck speeds. Furthermore, the game's camera zooms out when you start moving faster, but it doesn't pull back far enough to give you a clear view of the road, making dodging traffic and making turns a real chore. When driving, you'll probably spend as much time looking at the map as you do looking at the road; though unfortunately, the onscreen map can't be blown up. The game comes with a foldout map of the city, but this is completely useless since a piece of paper isn't going to show your current objectives on it.