GTA 6 grenade launcher: the heavy weapon Lucia uses on police cars

The loudest weapon in either Grand Theft Auto VI trailer is a grenade launcher. During a police chase sequence in Trailer 2, Lucia fires on a line of police vehicles and destroys several of them in one go, which GamesRadar flags as the return of a series staple.¹²

What kind of grenade launcher

Insider Gaming, writing on the day of the trailer, describes the weapon as an automatic grenade launcher and notes Lucia using it during the chase.³⁴ A follow-up breakdown places her firing it from a damaged bus.³ PC Gamer looks at the model itself and reckons it resembles the grenade launcher from GTA 5 closely enough that it may simply be the same weapon returning, and community databases list it as based on the Milkor MGL, the drum-fed six-shot launcher.⁵⁶

A long history in the series

Explosive launchers have been part of Grand Theft Auto's heavy weapon class for years, sold at Ammu-Nation alongside rocket launchers and machine guns, and used mainly for exactly what Lucia does with it: ending vehicle pursuits.⁶⁵ PC Gamer's take is that it will be just as useful as ever against pursuing cars and helicopters, which is a prediction rather than confirmed behaviour.⁵

It is not the only heavy weapon

The Ammu-Nation advert later in Trailer 2 shows the shop's owner picking up and firing a large customised light machine gun, and community databases list a rocket launcher among GTA 6's heavy weapons based on identifications from other material.³⁶ Neither has been named, and it is not clear how many heavy weapons the finished game will carry.⁶

What is not confirmed

• The weapon's in-game name. GTA 5 simply called its version a grenade launcher, but GTA 6 names guns more specifically.⁵
• Whether it is genuinely automatic or semi-automatic.³⁵
• Blast radius, ammunition capacity, reload speed and price. Nothing published.⁶
• Whether it is bought at Ammu-Nation or only appears in story missions.⁵⁶

Where it appears, scene by scene

Lucia's grenade launcher moment sits inside Trailer 2's police chase sequence. Insider Gaming's shot-by-shot breakdown places her firing the weapon from the back of a moving vehicle, aiming down a road at a line of pursuing police cars, and destroying more than one on a single shot before the trailer cuts away.³⁴ It is one of the few points in either trailer where a single weapon visibly ends multiple pursuers at once, which is why breakdowns singled it out as a highlight rather than just another gun in a montage.²³

The real weapon behind it

The Milkor MGL that community databases point to is a real, widely issued weapon. It was designed by Andries C. Piek in South Africa, demonstrated to the South African Defence Force in 1981 and adopted into service in 1983 as the Y2, a lightweight revolver-style launcher that cycles six 40mm grenades from a rotating cylinder rather than reloading one shot at a time.⁶⁸ More than 50,000 units have been built since, and armed forces and law enforcement agencies in over 50 countries have adopted it, which is a big part of why it is such a familiar shape in games and films.⁸

History of this class in the GTA series

Grand Theft Auto's grenade launcher goes back further than GTA V. GTA Wiki traces it through the Episodes from Liberty City expansions, where it drew more on the single-shot HK69A1 launcher, before GTA V and GTA Online switched the model to the Milkor-style revolver design and rebranded it under the fictional manufacturer Shrewsbury.⁷ A grenade launcher was reportedly planned for Vice City at one point but never made it into the finished game, so its absence from the 3D-era GTA titles was not for lack of trying.⁷

What GTA 5 and Online did with it

In GTA V's story mode the launcher cost $8,100 with medal discounts available, while GTA Online locked it behind Rank 60 and priced it at $32,400.⁷ It also spawned automatically in later waves of Survival mode and could be unlocked for free use at a bunker's shooting range after clearing a set of upgrade challenges during the Gunrunning update.⁷ Mod options at Ammu-Nation included a grip, a flashlight, a scope and several tint colours, and the in-game magazine held ten rounds even though the real MGL it is modelled on carries six, one of several places where GTA V exaggerated a real weapon's capacity for the sake of play.⁷⁸

The weapon also has a longer marketing history than most GTA hardware: box art, trailers and box-office-style promo shots for GTA V regularly put a grenade launcher or rocket-style weapon in frame precisely because it reads clearly at a glance, and Rockstar appears to be leaning on the same instinct in Trailer 2 by giving Lucia's shot a clean line of police cars to hit rather than a crowded, hard-to-parse background.¹²

What we expect in GTA 6

Expectation, not confirmation: PC Gamer's read that the GTA 6 launcher looks close enough to the GTA V model to be the same weapon carried forward points toward Rockstar reusing the Shrewsbury-branded revolver-cylinder design rather than starting from a different real-world launcher.⁵ If that holds, the GTA 6 version would likely keep the same job it has always had: a heavy-weapon-class purchase at Ammu-Nation, priced well above the everyday guns, aimed squarely at vehicles and groups of pursuers rather than single targets.⁵⁷