GTA 6 In-Car Combat: Tire Shots, Helicopters and the Weapon Wheel in the Extended Look

Old GTA chases have a beautifully simple law: accelerate, avoid lamp posts, and if everything gets worse, accelerate harder. GTA 6 looks interested in giving your other hand something to do.

TechRadar highlighted shooting from the car at police and helicopters, targeting police-car tires, environmental crash damage, and a clear look at the weapon wheel after the pursuit. That turns the road into more than a moving backdrop.

The interesting word is choice. If you can disable a car instead of simply outrunning it, select targets and manage weapons while moving, a chase starts behaving like a full encounter rather than a driving test with sirens.

The wheel itself is visible. What we do not have yet is a final rulebook for ammunition, weapon storage, carry limits or how close the system is to GTA V versus RDR2. No need to invent one because a circular menu appeared for two seconds.

TechRadar also reported a six-star wanted system. That belongs in the dedicated police file, where we can keep every claim and confidence level together rather than turning this story into a mechanic junk drawer.

Not the number of police cars. AI, roadblocks, vehicle physics and damage behavior are the real test. If those systems react to the gunfight instead of just decorating the old GTA V chase loop, that is the generational jump.

Disabling a pursuing vehicle creates a different kind of choice from simply destroying it. If tire damage consistently changes steering, speed or police positioning, the player can shape a chase without turning every encounter into an explosion. That sounds small, but it is exactly the kind of systemic interaction that makes road combat feel less scripted. The footage supports the existence of targeted shooting during the chase; how reliable tire damage is across vehicles and conditions still needs sustained gameplay before it can be described as a complete mechanic.

A helicopter is not just another health bar in the sky. It can keep visual pressure on the player when street units lose position, force aiming away from the road and create a reason to think about cover while moving. The Extended Look shows the player engaging aerial police during a chase, which makes the encounter feel layered across road and air. What remains unknown is how helicopters search, communicate with ground units, recover from lost sight or scale across different wanted levels.

Bent bodywork and impressive crashes are easy to notice, but the more important question is whether damage changes how a vehicle drives. Tire loss, suspension damage, engine problems or broken steering become meaningful when they alter the decisions a player can make during an escape. The presentation gives us visible collision and damage cues, but a final judgment needs repeated tests with different cars, speeds and surfaces. A beautiful crash model is not automatically a deep handling model.

Seeing a radial weapon selector tells us Rockstar is keeping a recognizable interaction pattern. It does not tell us the final carry limit, whether larger weapons are stored elsewhere, how ammunition is managed, or whether inventory rules borrow from Red Dead Redemption 2. Those details matter because they can change the rhythm of a chase dramatically. A familiar wheel can sit on top of a very different inventory philosophy, so the safest conclusion is limited to what the interface actually shows.

The best pursuit system is not the one with the most effects; it is the one where police, traffic, vehicle physics and player weapons react to one another in consistent ways. After launch, the useful tests will be simple: disable the same kind of police car several ways, compare helicopter behavior after breaking line of sight, damage identical vehicles at different speeds, and watch whether roadblocks respond to the direction of escape. If those interactions remain coherent outside scripted missions, the chase system will have earned the generational-jump label.