Games Like GTA: 8 Open World Crime Games Worth Playing

Grand Theft Auto has cast a long shadow. Since GTA III turned the open world crime game into a genre in 2001, plenty of studios have tried their own version, and a few of them have made something genuinely better in one specific way.

With GTA VI due on 19 November 2026, and PC players facing a wait beyond that, there has never been a better time to work through what else is out there. Here are the games worth your time.

Cyberpunk 2077

The closest thing to GTA in scale and ambition, and after several years of patches it is finally the game it was supposed to be at launch.

Night City is denser and more vertical than Los Santos, and the writing is a long way ahead of anything in the genre. Where GTA is satire, Cyberpunk plays it straight, and the Phantom Liberty expansion is some of the best work in any open world game.

The trade-off is that it is a role-playing game underneath. You build a character, you make dialogue choices, and there is no equivalent of GTA's aimless chaos. That is either the appeal or the problem, depending on why you play GTA.

It is also the most demanding game on this list by a wide margin. See what you need on our Cyberpunk 2077 gaming PC page.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Rockstar's own answer, and the one most GTA players end up loving most.

Swap cars for horses and Los Santos for the American frontier in 1899, and everything else you recognise is there: an enormous open world, a proper story, wanted levels, and a level of detail that is still unmatched eight years on.

It is slower than GTA deliberately. Missions take their time, travel takes real minutes, and the game expects you to sit with that. Stick with it and it is arguably the best thing Rockstar has ever made.

Watch Dogs 2

Ubisoft's take, and the second game is where the series worked out what it was for.

Set in San Francisco, you play a hacker rather than a criminal, and the whole city is a system you can manipulate. Traffic lights, security cameras, other people's phones. You can complete most missions without firing a shot, using drones and a remote-control car to do the work instead.

The first game took itself far too seriously and the third spread itself thin. The second is the one to play.

Sleeping Dogs

Set in Hong Kong, and the best combat in any open world crime game by a comfortable distance.

You play an undercover police officer working his way into a triad organisation, which gives the story a tension GTA rarely reaches for. The fighting is hand-to-hand and borrows heavily from the Batman Arkham games, and it feels far better than shooting does in most of these titles.

The Definitive Edition is the one to buy. It never got the sequel it deserved.

The Mafia series

Three games, three eras, all of them focused on story rather than sandbox.

Mafia: Definitive Edition is a full remake of the 2002 original, set in the 1930s, and it looks superb. Mafia II covers the 1940s and 50s. Mafia III moves to 1968 New Orleans and has the weakest structure but the strongest atmosphere.

The newest entry, Mafia: The Old Country, arrived in August 2025 and is set in 1900s Sicily. Worth knowing that it is deliberately linear rather than open world, so it is closer to a crime drama you play than a sandbox you explore. It was well received.

If the parts of GTA you enjoy are the missions and the story rather than the messing about, Mafia is the series for you.

Yakuza 0

The strangest game on this list and the one most likely to surprise you.

Set across two small, extraordinarily detailed districts in 1980s Japan, it swaps GTA's scale for depth. You cannot steal cars. You can, however, run a real estate empire, manage a hostess club, sing karaoke, race slot cars and play a fully functional arcade.

The tone swings from brutal crime drama to pure farce and somehow holds together. Start with Yakuza 0 rather than the earlier releases, because it is a prequel and by far the best entry point into the series.

Just Cause 4

If what you want from GTA is chaos, this goes considerably further.

You get a grappling hook, a wingsuit, an infinite parachute and a very large island. The physics engine exists to be abused, and most of the fun comes from tethering things to other things and watching what happens.

The story is forgettable and the missions repeat. Nobody plays Just Cause for the plot.

Saints Row: The Third

The series that started as a GTA imitation and then went in a completely different direction.

The Third is where it found its voice: absurd, loud, and entirely uninterested in realism. Saints Row IV takes that further still by giving you superpowers, at which point it stops being a GTA clone altogether.

Worth being clear about the 2022 reboot, simply called Saints Row. It attempted to bring the tone back to earth and was poorly received. If someone recommends Saints Row to you, they mean The Third or IV.

What to play while you wait for GTA VI

GTA VI arrives on 19 November 2026, but only on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. Rockstar has not announced a PC version or given a date for one, and GTA V's PC release came eighteen months after console.

So PC players are likely looking at a wait. If you want something in the meantime, Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are the two that come closest to filling the gap, and both are considerably cheaper than they were at launch.

It is also worth using the time to work out whether your machine is ready. No requirements have been published for GTA VI, and there is no sense guessing at them, but it is reasonable to assume it will ask for a good deal more than GTA V does.

Still playing GTA V?

You are not alone. More than a decade after release it is still played daily by millions of people, largely because of GTA Online.

If you are working through the series properly, we have the full list in GTA games in order, and if you are chasing lap times, our guide to the fastest cars in GTA Online.

Final Thoughts

None of these games replaces GTA, and none of them is trying to. What each does is take one part of the formula and push it further: Cyberpunk the writing, Red Dead the detail, Sleeping Dogs the combat, Yakuza the depth, Just Cause the chaos.

Pick based on which part of GTA you actually enjoy, and you will get more out of it than looking for a straight replacement.

If your PC is struggling with any of them, see our GTA gaming PCs, or build your own with our online configurator.

Why not also read: Games like Fallout and Games like Skyrim.