SA Girl Gamers: 10 of The Best Crime Games

Gameranx listing of the 10 best Crime Games.
Whether you like it on the right side of the Law or a being a criminal mastermind, these games are bound to sate your criminal appetite...

Omerta: City Of Gangsters

Not long after Xcom re-introduced us all to turn-based combat with an overarching strategy system, Omerta: City Of Gangsters was released and showed the idea had legs outside of an alien invasion.

Reductively, it’s the same game with gangsters instead of sectoids, but it’s a little more fleshed out in certain areas. It tries to tell a story based on the setting and characters and doesn’t limit itself to difficult decisions. You build a crime empire and it’s up to you how you choose to do so.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Warriors

It’s strange that The Warriors even exists, given that it’s a cult classic without a lot of mass name recognition. It’s especially weird that it was developed by one of the biggest studios in the world taking on a licenced game for a film which came of decades previously, and yet it made absolutely sense to do so. It filled in the back half of the narrative in ways that were actually compelling and fleshed out characters who die within moments of the movie starting.

Can you dig it?

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.

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.

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.

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.