Ask a GTA fan what their favourite mission is and there's a good chance they'll say Three Leaf Clover from Grand Theft Auto 4. Ask them what the hardest is and you might get the same answer. This downtown heist is 25 nerve-racking minutes of confusion and mayhem, as Niko Bellic and a crew of coked-up idiots attempt to rip off the biggest bank in Liberty City. Over the years it's earned a reputation for being challenging, which can overshadow the fact that it's just really, really good. I completed it today and can confirm: it still whips.
Three Leaf Clover is bold, thrilling, and masterfully choreographed—and about as exciting as GTA games get. It's a mission people still talk about today, and is frequently held up as an example of the series at its best. It proved so popular, in fact, that Rockstar made bank heists a major feature of both Grand Theft Auto 5 and its online component, GTA Online. It's a lot simpler than the multi-stage missions in those games, but the bungled heist and ensuing Heat-inspired firefight on the streets of Liberty City is still hugely entertaining.
Niko receives a text from Packie McReary saying he's planning a big job, and asks him to hit up boutique clothing store Perseus to buy a suit—because if you're gonna rob a bank, you gotta look sharp. Niko, who by this point in the game has a bit of extra cash to throw around, drops a grand on a tailored black suit and some shiny new Oxford brogues, then meets the gang at Packie's house to plan the heist. Packie and his idiotic brothers argue between bottles of beer and lines of coke, which is your first clue that this job ain't gonna go smoothly.
Niko drives the crew to the South Algonquin branch of the Bank of Liberty in a black Feroci sedan. On the drive, Packie outlines the plan. Him and Saint Michael are gonna handle the civilians; Niko and his brother Derrick will take care of the employees. "Anyone tries anything," says Packie. "You put them down hard." Then, once the people in the bank are under control, Derrick will blow the vault door. Compared to Lester Crest's meticulously planned heists in Grand Theft Auto 5, it all feels a bit amateur and slapdash.
It's a long, tense drive over the bridge to Algonquin—which is even worse if you've played the game before, because you know you're about to take on one of the toughest missions in the entire GTA series. Niko must be feeling pretty tense too as the childish, coke-fuelled bickering from earlier continues in the car. "If you guys can stop arguing for a few minutes," he says, running out of patience. "I think we might be okay." The crew parks up outside the bank then storms through the front door, guns primed, faces obscured by balaclavas.
One of the bank's customers, who obediently drops to the floor when the crew bursts in, is a guy in a black and white letterman jacket. This is Luis Lopez, protagonist of The Ballad of Gay Tony. As Niko you can actually shoot and kill him after the police have arrived, although he appears in later missions, and is seen walking away from the scene of robbery in the Gay Tony expansion, so it's decidedly non-canon. He's lying on the floor next to fellow hostage Eugene Reaper, who foolishly decides to take matters into his own hands.
He says he has a gun. Luis tells him, wisely, that this is a bad idea. "My friend, the world was built on bad ideas," he says, revealing a concealed pistol and killing Saint Michael—before being gunned down himself by a furious Derrick and Packie. Between this and the brothers accidentally revealing identifying information about themselves to the hostages, the heist is already off to a disastrous, amateurish start. Then the C4 on the vault door suddenly explodes, activating an alarm and triggering an instant 5-star wanted level.
Three Leaf Clover is a masterclass in escalating chaos. The heists in Grand Theft Auto 5 capture some of this feeling—but the fact you're part of a team of mostly professionals, in jobs carefully planned and mapped out by an expert, means it's a more controlled kind of chaos. Here in Liberty City, the moment that alarm goes off, the mission suddenly spirals out of control. Niko rushes down to the vault and fills black gym bags with stacks of money. Outside, sirens wail as the full might of the LCPD descends on the bank.
This is where Three Leaf Clover goes full Heat. The image of a group of suited bank robbers with cash-stuffed gym bags slung over their shoulders, fighting waves of cops on busy city streets with assault rifles, is straight out of Michael Mann's classic crime flick. Rockstar often pays homage to cult cinema; here it's just saying, go on, pretend you're in Heat for 15 minutes. Enjoy it. The crew fights through a series of streets, alleys, and subway tunnels against a tidal wave of trigger happy cops and a police chopper. It's relentless.
Three Leaf Clover's reputation for being difficult is largely down to Grand Theft Auto 4's complete lack of any kind of checkpoint system. If you screw up, even if you're seconds away from finishing the mission, you have to do it all over again—and make the drive from Packie's house to the bank every single time. This can be pretty annoying, but it has the positive side effect of making every second of the heist even more tense. It gives it real stakes, because dying is something you actively, desperately want to avoid, not just a minor inconvenience.
In the final stage of the mission the crew jumps into a bouncy Huntley Sport SUV, the worst car for a police chase, and attempts to shake off their wanted level—which has been mercifully reduced to 3 stars after the preceding rampage of death. This is the easiest part of the mission. Escape the fuzz successfully and you're home free. You return to Packie's house and claim your cut of the loot: a cool $250,000. A big payday, although there isn't much to actually spend your money on in GTA 4 other than clothes and weapons.
Until this point, Niko has mostly been a small-time crook. Now he's a bonafide master criminal, who stole from the biggest banking institution in America and lived to tell the tale. Every GTA game is structured around this kind of rags to riches story, but there's something about this mission in particular—playing as a poor immigrant who arrived in the city with nothing to his name—that gives it extra impact. Niko is a ruthless criminal and basically a very bad dude, but after pulling this off, I feel weirdly proud of him.