Five Games Related to GTA, and the Player Each One Actually Rewards
Five games related to GTA, from Saints Row IV to Watch Dogs 2, sorted by the player each one actually rewards.
GTA is the reference point for the crime open-world genre, and its formula is easy to describe. Drive somewhere, shoot someone, take the next mission in whatever order you feel like. Plenty of games related to GTA borrow that frame. Far fewer understand why it works.
The five below all hand you a city, a car and a gun, which is the standard opening move for open-world crime games. What separates them is what they ask you to be good at. One wants you to brawl. Another would rather you sat still and watched a story play out. A third expects a room full of guards cleared without a single shot. Pick wrong and you'll quit inside an hour, convinced the whole genre isn't for you.
Which Games Related to GTA Fit How You Actually Play?
Before the individual verdicts, it helps to sort these GTA alternatives by the one thing each does better than the rest.
Game | The thing it does better than the rest | What it asks of you | Skip it if |
|---|---|---|---|
Saints Row IV | Superpowers that make cars pointless | Embrace the absurd | You want weight and consequence |
Sleeping Dogs | Hand-to-hand combat in a dense city | Learn to counter | You play these games for gunfights |
Mafia: Definitive Edition | A scripted story with real pacing | Patience for linear missions | You want to wander off |
Watch Dogs 2 | Stealth routes and gadget planning | Slowness and observation | You want to shoot your way out |
Just Cause 3 | Movement and destruction physics | Setting your own goals | You need a reason to blow things up |
Read the last column twice. It's the one that decides whether you finish the game or leave it installed for a year. Which line sounds like you?
Saints Row IV Hands You Superpowers and Stops Apologizing
Saints Row spent its early years as the friendlier alternative to GTA, and by the fourth entry it had given up on competing at all. You're the president. Aliens have taken over. The city turns out to be a simulation, which is the game's excuse for giving you powers the plot never has to justify.
That changes how you cross the map in ways you notice within a minute. Super sprint covers a district in seconds. Glide and wall running turn buildings into stairs. Cars stop mattering, which is a strange sentence to write about a game in this genre. Missions become set pieces strung together by jokes, and most of the side activities are there to be skipped.
What lands
- Movement that makes crossing the city the best part of the game
- A comedy that commits to its own nonsense instead of winking at you
What doesn't
- Side content repeats itself fast
- Nothing you do leaves a mark on the city
Take it if you want the shape of an open-world crime game without the friction. Leave it if weight matters, because nothing here has any. Sending a pedestrian over the roof of a bus is funny once and silly the tenth time.
For Straight-Up Brawling, Sleeping Dogs Beats Every Other Game Related to GTA
The first time you slam a thug's head into an air conditioning unit, the game has told you exactly what you're playing. Sleeping Dogs is a brawler with a city attached, not a shooter with a melee button.
United Front Games built the fights around counters. You hold a button, wait for the attack to land, and the camera snaps into a short animation that ends with someone on the floor. Stand near a fan, a door or a phone booth and the animation changes to use it. Guns show up, and they're the least interesting tool you have. The game knows.
Compare that with GTA, where hand-to-hand is what happens when you've run out of ammo. Here it's the main event. Wei Shen moves through a crowd of Triad enforcers on a rhythm that takes an hour to learn and stays satisfying for the rest of the run. The 2012 release from United Front Games and Square Enix landed on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, and the fighting still holds up better than the shooting.
Hong Kong does half the work. Markets and back alleys are cramped enough that a chase feels like a chase, and the vertical layout gives you reasons to take stairs. Driving is the weak link: loose handling, narrow streets, traffic that arrives at the worst moment. Not ideal. You'll still call a taxi when the prompt appears.
Play it if you've ever finished a GTA mission and wished the fight had gone on longer.
Mafia: Definitive Edition Asks You to Watch More Than You Drive
Mafia is the one entry here that would rather tell a story than hand you a playground, and that's a warning as much as a pitch.
Hangar 13 and 2K rebuilt the 2002 original and shipped the remake on September 25, 2020 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. The plot is unchanged in shape: a cab driver named Tommy Angelo falls in with the Salieri family in a fictional city styled after 1930s Chicago. Missions are linear on purpose. You drive to a location, a cutscene plays, a scripted chase starts, and failing it puts you back at a checkpoint the game chose for you.
That rigidity is the whole design, and it's also the bill. You can't wander off mid-mission. You can't solve a problem a different way. What you get instead is pacing that most open-world games can't manage, because they keep interrupting themselves.
What lands
- Writing and voice work that hold up between missions
- A city that looks right for the period, down to the cars and the radio
What doesn't
- Chase missions send you back to the start more often than they should
- Shooting feels older than the graphics do
It suits the person who liked the story parts of GTA more than the mayhem, and who doesn't mind being told where to stand.
Watch Dogs 2 Reframes the Genre as a Puzzle You Can Solve Quietly
Most people file Watch Dogs under "GTA with a phone." Sound familiar? That comparison is the main reason the series gets dismissed, and it's wrong in a way that matters. The second game isn't a shooter with gadgets bolted on. Strip out the guns and you still have a working game about traffic lights and cameras.
Every restricted area is a small puzzle. Cameras can be hijacked, vents lead somewhere useful, patrol routes have gaps, and a drone can scout a floor before you commit to walking in. Most objectives can be finished without killing anyone, and the game pays you back with fewer alarms and cleaner exits.
Driving exists. It's fine. The handling is loose in an arcade way, the map is generous, and you'll mostly use a car to reach jobs you could have fast-traveled to. That's not a complaint so much as a note about where the design effort went.
Worth it if a plan surviving contact with the enemy appeals to you. Skip it if the fight is the part you came for, because the shooting is the thinnest thing here.
Is Just Cause 3 the Best Game Related to GTA for Pure Chaos?
Your first hour in Just Cause 3 goes to tying a fuel tank to a guard and watching what happens. That's the pitch, and it holds up longer than it has any right to.
The grapple does most of the work. Fire it at a wall and you're pulled toward the wall. Fire it at a helicopter and you're pulled toward the helicopter, which is either a great idea or the last one you'll have. Same tool, wildly different outcome. Add the parachute and the wingsuit and you get a traversal system more entertaining than most games' combat.
What's missing is a reason. Rico topples a regime, he doesn't run a crew, so the crime fantasy that defines this genre is absent. Bases are checklists of things to destroy, and the story exists to move you between them. Avalanche Studios and Square Enix shipped it on December 1, 2015 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One, and the console versions had frame rate problems at launch.
Buy it for the toy. If you need a motive before you blow up a bridge, this one will feel hollow by the second province.
What These Games Related to GTA Still Can't Match
None of these five does everything GTA does. That's the honest summary, and it isn't a knock on any of them.
GTA's edge isn't a single mechanic. It's density: radio stations with actual taste, side characters who come back, heists that switch between driving, shooting and planning inside one mission. Each game above grabs one of those strands and pulls hard on it. That's why they're worth your time. None of them replaces the original.
So start with what you want in the first ten minutes, and let that decide. Install one at a time. They all want the same evenings, and none of them gets better if you split your attention across three.
