10 Best Crime Games

Update: One game to look out for is Grand Theft Auto 5—which is coming to new-gen platforms like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 [November 18, 2014], and also the PC [January 24, 2015]. If you've already played the game on the PS3 or Xbox 360, the game's newly confirmed first-person view should bring you back with the new experience it offers.

We've added Watch Dogs to the list, because how could we not? It's only the best crime-related game that's currently out for the PC, PS4 and Xbox One—not to mention the PS3 and Xbox 360. We replaced Warriors with Watch Dogs because barely anyone played Warriors at all, thanks to the fact that it was on the PSP.

Few people with options otherwise would chose to do crimes, but yet somehow culturally we find the idea fascinating. We base so much of our entertainment on people doing terrible things that we’d vilify in real life. It’s as true in games as it is in films or books.

We don’t claim to have an answer for why this is, all we know is, there are a bunch of games about crime that are very good and you should think about playing them! We’ve collected 10 of them here!

10) Payday: The Heist

We all saw Heat (or we pretend to have seen Heat but have only watched the opening scene of The Dark Knight) and thought we could rob banks. We thought we could scheme a way to take massive amounts of money out of a building while wearing masks and telling everyone to keep cool and stay on the ground.

Payday is the Bank Robbery Sim. Though it inevitably becomes a shooting gallery toward the end of missions, nowhere else has yet attempted the same idea quite as specifically.

It’s a little bare-bones in the original, but the concept is claimed to be advanced even further in the sequel, accessible early now on Steam.

9) Yakuza 4

Crime isn't relegated only to the West. Following the events of the three preceding games before it, you once again return to the role of the Yakuza boss Kazuma Kiryu, who's joined by three new protagonists this time around. 

As with the previous games, the action takes place in Kamurocho, a fictionalized yet realistic recreation of Shinjuku's red light district. 

8) Mafia 2

Set in the late 1940's to the early '50s, Mafia 2 is the epitome of crime in games as you play the role of Vittorio Antonio "Vito" Scaletta, and up-and-coming member of the Sicilian Mafia. 

As Vito, you perform a wide variety of criminal activities, ranging from heists to assassinations as you proceed through the game's The Godfather-inspired storyline. 

7) The Godfather

It’s impossible to deny the quality of Francis Ford Copella’s film which even today holds up as an absolutely essential piece of entertainment. So pervasive is this film’s appeal that the plot of this game wouldn’t think to stray from it. You’re a character introduced into the world working behind the scenes, performing tasks from within the film like planting Michael’s gun and the iconic horse head.

Through your role might be a little hammered in, it’s well executed and utterly recommendable.

6) Watch Dogs

Watch Dogs is about crime and the prevention of crime before it happens. As a futuristic vigilante, you’ll have access to the city of Chicago’s powerful ctOS system that allows you to predict crimes even before they occur and break them up as they are in progress, leaving the cops to clean up after you. It’s a bit like Minority Report but with nightsticks and shooting up the bad guys.

Can you dig it?

5) Grand Theft Auto 4

After release there was a lot of complaint about GTA4 being more restrained than the previous games in the series. People disliked how the cars felt weightier and your actions within the world didn’t have the same kind of levity. What it tried to do instead was create a game with a more meaningful story to tell about criminality and how it relates to an immigrant’s understanding of the american dream. 

There’s no parachuting or plane-jacking, but there’s an adult narrative told well.

Oh also you can go bowling with your cousin, which is clearly the best part and no one has anything bad to say about it.

4) Saints Row the Third

Though 2 is where the series began to diverge into total hilarity, SR3 is where any pretense that the series is about anything except random joy was entirely dropped. 2 painted you as a horrible gangland villain, 3 painted you as a powerful crimelord and essentially a superhero. 

At a point in Saints Row 4 the difficulty trails off and you’re just asked to be part of set-piece after set-piece. You can gain upgrades that make your starting pistols fire explosive ammunition which never needs to be reloaded. You get the ability to call down an airstrike in the second mission of the game. 

There’s a baseball bat which is actually a 5 foot cock and balls. There’s a mission entirely set to Kanye West’s Power and it’s 

You should really play Saints Row the Third.

3) Monaco

It’s two different games. One of them is about as tense a stealth experience you can have on your own, the other is a frantic goof around with your friends. In Monaco you’ll inevitably bungle something up, but that’s when heists are at their most intense. It successfully makes you fail constantly but never feel like you’re a failure.

2) Grand Theft Auto 5

Grand Theft Auto 5 is the first game in the GTA series that doesn’t lock our perspective into a single character, giving us instead the opportunity to play three different characters across a lengthy, and well-written criminal narrative.

The plot is familiar, with small crimes leading to bigger ones and government agents getting their hooks into the protagonists before they eventually take charge of their own destinies. It’s typical GTA stuff, but far better than almost anything else out there.

1) Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

As we said about Saints Row 3 before it, GTA:SA is about set-pieces, It’s a game where you burn down fields of pot with a flamethrower and gradually get high as the fields burn.

It’s a game where you break into a military facility without knowing what you’re there to find and then you’re rewarded with a jetpack you can ride around in for the entire rest of the game.