It's the Eighties, a time of loud clothes, bad haircuts, and conspicuous consumption.

But if you want to hark back to these halcyon days, the good news is you can. Or, at least, to Grand Theft Auto's version of events, a la Vice City.

It's now almost a decade since the 10th-anniversary game was ported to mobile, so you are probably kicking yourself you had cottoned on sooner.

Features

● Beautifully rendered graphics

● Updated characters and lighting effects

● Precise targeting and firing

● Customizable controls

● Almost endless gameplay

More

If Vice City was your first entry into the GTA world, or you want to explore the back catalog, Vice City is well worth your time.

GTA: Vice City does an excellent job of recreating the 1980s, with its massive shoulder pads, pastel suit sleeves rolled up, and wanton excess. Indeed, if you sit quietly with your eyes shut, you can almost smell the aftershave.

Very wisely, the mobile version sticks faithfully to the original, which tells the epic tale of one man's sordid rise to the summit of the criminal underworld.

Explore and carry out missions in Vice City, a massive urban sprawl, complete with a beach, swamps, a glitzy uptown, and down-at-heel ghettos. For its period, Vice City was one of the most expansive and varied cities then undertaken by Rockstar.

And the storyline is not to be sniffed at either. This open-world gameplay is character-driven, with the player optimistically rocking up in Vice City and taking every chance they get to be the kingpin.

PROS

● Retro gaming at its finest

● Multi-language support

● Captures the mood of the 1980s

CONS

● Glitchy, but not as terminally bad as San Andreas

● Hasn't been updated since 2019

Price - $4.99

How to use

Despite not being touched with an update since 2019, GTA: Vice City is surprisingly bug-free compared to GTA: San Andreas. Sure, a few minor glitches have cropped up, but Vice City is still eminently playable. Clearly, the last update future-proofed Vice City to a large extent.

Android users will be interested to hear the game is compatible with the MoGa Wireless Controller (circa 2019 presumably) and some USB gamepads.

If you have an old phone kicking about, you may well be able to use it exclusively for this game. In addition to Android phones (7.0 or later with at least 1.5 GB of storage space), Vice City also supports:

● Four Motorola phones

● Three HTC smartphones

● Google Nexus 4

● Various Samsung Notes and Galaxies

● And a heap of old Sony handsets, including the venerable Walkman Z series

It will also work on a diverse range of older tablets.

For optimal results, Rockstar recommends restarting after the download and always closing other apps when playing Vice City.

It is downloadable from Google Play and Apple's App Store, where the former gives the game a remarkable 4.4 out of five and the latter 4.5.

iOS users need to have 1.2 GB of free space and be packing a minimum of iOS 8.0.