Featured Image Credit: Rockstar Games / 2K Games / Square Enix
Topics: GTA, Grand Theft Auto, Cyberpunk 2077, Saints Row, Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption 2, Watch Dogs, Mafia, GTA 6, GTA 5, GTA Online, Rockstar Games
Topics: GTA, Grand Theft Auto, Cyberpunk 2077, Saints Row, Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption 2, Watch Dogs, Mafia, GTA 6, GTA 5, GTA Online, Rockstar Games
The best GTA alternatives should provide you with ample gaming time while we wait around for GTA VI, and these eight games are a great start.
There’s still a long road ahead if you’re waiting for Grand Theft Auto VI, and after 13 years and two delays, it looks like the game may finally be set to arrive for us all in November (well, everyone who isn’t a Switch or PC gamer).
But with seven months still to go until Rockstar releases its next game, these alternatives should fill your time with similar gameplay and vibes. Let’s dive in, shall we?
We’ll start this list off with a modern classic. CD Projekt Red is no stranger to developing huge open worlds brimming with detail, and Cyberpunk 2077 has proven to be the closest we’ve gotten to a futuristic GTA game in the past generation.
With multiple endings, varied quests, and multiple opportunities for character builds, Cyberpunk 2077 also lends itself well to repeat playthroughs, which should prove handy if you’re after a GTA-like game to occupy all your free time.
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The Mafia series has filled a fun niche of being “historical GTA” with a bit more focus on story. The most recent entry took us back to 1900s Sicily, but many fans would argue the series was at its best with Mafia II.
Set in Empire Bay, a fictional city based on places like New York City, Boston, and Chicago, the open world game charts the story of Vito Scaletta, a young mobster and war veteran who rises through the ranks of the city’s organised crime hierarchy, and becomes caught in a power struggle between the city’s different factions.
Ubisoft has become synonymous with creating large, open world games of varying quality, but it arguably did the GTA formula best with its Watch Dogs series.
Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, Watch Dogs 2 has you play as a hacker who works to take down the city's dystopian surveillance system known as ctOS. The game has an open world structure, where you can complete missions, drive around doing various activities, and upgrade your skills and gadgets to improve your playstyle.
As Rockstar Games’ other flagship franchise, I remember describing the original Red Dead Redemption back in 2010 as “GTA with horses”, and that’s still pretty much the best way to describe it today.
Red Dead Redemption uses its open world structure to tell the story of a former wild west outlaw who attempts to bring his former gangmates to justice after his family are taken hostage by the government. Its prequel, Red Dead Redemption 2, is also particularly worth getting into, especially if you like immersive open world games.
Originally made as a new entry to the True Crime series, Sleeping Dogs is set in Hong Kong where you play as Wei Shen, a police officer who goes undercover to take down a triad gang operating within the city.
As the game has you playing as a cop, some of the open world shenanigans of Sleeping Dogs can feel a little limited, but it generally does a good job of translating the traditional GTA-style gameplay into a completely new perspective. It’s worth checking out for any fans of GTA or classic Hong Kong cinema.
The Saints Row series has always prided itself on being a sillier GTA, but where the later entries went a little too far into embracing the self aware shenanigans that open world driving games often exhibit, Saints Row 2 was able to strike a perfect balance.
While the series has definitely fallen off a lot in recent years, the original Saints Row games were recommended as solid GTA alternatives back in 2008. Saints Row 2 prides itself on allowing you to create a custom character, giving you a huge city to explore and telling you to “go nuts”. There’s plenty of innovation here that the GTA series was ignoring in the late 2000s, allowing Saints Row to fill a slightly alternative niche that was welcomed by fans.
Similar to Saints Row, the Just Cause franchise has also been an excellent source of chaotic fun. While the games aren’t necessarily remembered for their stories, they’re excellent for finding things to mess around in, blowing stuff up, or just flying around inside a wingsuit.
Any of the Just Cause games are worth playing, but the best place to start would be with Just Cause 4, considering it’s the most recent one and is best available on all modern platforms (outside of Nintendo Switch). Here’s hoping for a Just Cause 5 at some point in the future.
If you were too young to play GTA games when you were a kid, your parents very likely got you The Simpsons: Hit & Run as a compromise. At least that’s what happened in my family, where I didn’t even play a GTA game until I was 13.
The game translates the GTA series penchant for violence, fast cars, and silly humour into what is essentially a repackaged extended episode of The Simpsons that you can play through.
Okay, Samson isn’t actually out yet, so we’re just parking this here as one to look out for right now. It’s an open-world game set in the 1990s and features a bigger emphasis on car combat and melee fighting.
Out later this week, Samson is already proving itself to be an interesting game for those who are waiting for GTA VI, but either can’t wait until November, or are playing solely on PC, in which case GTA VI is likely not coming out until 2027 or beyond. Still though, it’s worth keeping an eye on this.
