8 Open-World Games Where You’re the Anti-Hero

3 hours ago 1

Published Feb 11, 2026, 2:17 PM EST

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

An anti-hero, at least by my reckoning, is a character who uses morally questionable, or even outright villainous means in order to accomplish ultimately just and/or altruistic goals. “Good guy do bad thing,” in short. Part of what makes this kind of character compelling is their degree of commitment, their resolution to use less-than-savory tactics if the end result is a net positive. It’s rather fitting, then, that antiheroes have a pretty comfortable home in the world of open-world games.

10 JRPGs Where You're the Anti-Hero

While it's fine playing the white knight trope, these JRPGs are ones where you play someone decidedly morally grey as a naughty anti-hero.

To traverse an open world, ticking off tasks and busting an endless stream of skulls, requires a pretty substantial degree of commitment, something most anti-heroes possess in spades. Plus, on the gameplay side of things, having a more morally-flexible protagonist means you can get up to a greater range of shenanigans without worrying as much about the moral ramifications. They don’t care, or at least they don’t care enough for it to matter, so why should you?

Spoilers for the following games ahead!

8 Assassin’s Creed

“Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted”

As far as less-than-savory professions go, assassination ranks pretty high on the list. It’s literally killing people for money, it doesn’t get much more unsavory. Technically, though, the Assassin Order in Assassin’s Creed isn’t about the material gain of things. Rather, their blades, as well as the blade of our protagonist Altair, are intended to serve a grander purpose.

The Assassin Order is kind of a covert peacekeeping organization, operating outside the bounds of local laws and moral norms in order to remove those who would attempt to seize wide-scale power over humanity from play. The chief maxim of the titular Assassin’s Creed is “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” the meaning of which is pretty obvious: society is an inherently fragile thing that can be disrupted by dangerous individuals, and Assassins are obligated to use any means necessary to prevent that from happening.

Of course, Altair’s chief foes, the Templars, are ostensibly the arbiters of what is and isn’t just in the world. Their whole deal is seizing control to “guide” humanity to their perfect version of world peace, after all. As such, from a normal person’s standpoint, murdering Templars, not to mention guards and soldiers who probably know nothing of all this, does technically put Altair in the wrong of things.

7 Darksiders

Clocking In for the Apocalypse

Darksiders: Warmastered Edition

When you think about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, what springs to mind? Four terrifying dudes on horseback, riding a wave of death and destruction and indiscriminately crushing everyone in their path? A fair assumption, but at least in the world of Darksiders, it’s not quite true. The Horsemen are a scary bunch, for sure, but for them, it’s just a job more than anything.

The entire reason War descends upon the Earth at the start of the game is because he got the signal that it was apocalypse o’clock. There were demons and angels duking it out in the realm of humanity, with his job being to mediate things and ensure humanity isn’t completely wiped out. War and his siblings aren’t there to cause the apocalypse, they’re more like… referees. Of course, War then gets court-martialed for allegedly starting the apocalypse before it was actually time, which is why he has to go on his little journey to figure out who actually fired the proverbial starting pistol.

The looming war between heaven and hell, with humanity in between, is apparently governed by a lot of clerical stuff. War has no particular affinity for the Earth and its people, and doesn’t really care about reviving humanity, he just wants to do his job and is annoyed when someone else pins a clerical error on him.

6 Sly 2: Band of Thieves

There are Always Worse Criminals

As established in the very first Sly Cooper game, the credo of the Cooper Family and its thieving legacy is only to steal from other criminal masterminds. It’s less of a moral hangup, and more because stealing from crooks is more entertaining, but it’s still an iron-clad rule that Sly and his gang follow to the letter. Their efforts in Sly 2 to target the members of the Klaww Gang are mostly personal, but they do have an overall benefit to the world as well, even if Interpol would rather they knock it off.

The primary reason the Cooper Gang targets these particular crooks is that they’re in possession of the various mechanical parts of Sly’s old nemesis, Clockwerk, using them in all sorts of criminal endeavors like counterfeiting or illegal spice production. All Sly really cares about is gathering up the parts so they can be safely destroyed; he doesn’t particularly care about what the Klaww Gang is actually doing with them, though stealing them does tend to scuttle their operations in the process.

While destroying the Clockwerk parts would probably be in the world’s best interest, stealing them does interrupt and hinder various ongoing Interpol investigations, which is still kind of problematic. Though, considering The Contessa is both a Klaww Gang member and an Interpol agent, perhaps getting in Interpol’s way isn’t quite as unjust as you’d think.

5 Infamous

How Much Depends on You

As one of the archetypal open-world games focusing on binary moral choices, Infamous has something of a sliding scale of anti-heroism baked into its core concept. Cole McGrath got his powers after accidentally activating a super-science weapon that atomized everyone else within its blast radius, which definitely didn’t endear him to the populace of Empire City. All he really wants at first is to get out of the city and hide in a hole somewhere, but when Moya offers to clear his name, he needs to get a little more proactive.

Besides being in rough shape due to the incident, the city is overrun with combatants from assorted gangs and organizations, including the Dust Men, the Reapers, and the First Sons. Cole uses his powers to battle them and clear them out, though obviously, using these powers in front of the general populace freaks them out and perpetuates his terrorist branding.

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As is revealed in the game’s big twist, Cole’s powers are part of the machinations of his own future self, Kessler, who orchestrated him receiving them to protect the world from a mysterious entity called the Beast. Whether Cole accepts his role as humanity’s lonely protector or becomes an apex predator with no care for the safety of the people is on you and your decisions.

4 Prototype

Just Barely Better

The protagonist of Prototype, Alex Mercer, is about as far as you can get from being an actual hero without entering full-on villain territory, which I guess makes him anti-hero by sheer definition. He is an ambulatory mass of man-eating tendrils, devouring people to absorb their memories and mimic their shape. In just about any other game, he would be the antagonist. Heck, he is the antagonist in Prototype 2. In the first game, though, he is ever-so-slightly better than the alternatives.

While Mercer is out and about, New York is under dual threat from those who have been hideously mutated by the Blacklight virus and, unlike him, haven’t managed to retain their humanity, as well as the iron-booted heel of the Blackwatch organization. If you’re not at risk of being devoured by a monster, there’s some dude in combat armor pointing a rifle at you. It’s not a fun time for anyone.

Mercer is our anti-hero here because he’s fighting against both factions, even if it’s mostly for his own sake; killing monsters enhances his own abilities, and killing Blackwatch soldiers gets him intel. Everyone would probably appreciate it if he just got rid of both, assuming anyone’s left to be happy about it when the dust settles.

3 Just Cause 2

Destabilizing Regimes for Fun and Profit

In the original Just Cause, our protagonist, Rico Rodriguez, was deployed to an island nation by his agency to overthrow its dictator leader. I guess he did such a good job that it became his whole shtick, because in Just Cause 2, he’s sent to another island nation with the mission of overthrowing another dictator. The difference here is that there’s a bit more of a multifaceted impetus behind this mission.

Rico is encouraged to cause as much trouble as possible throughout the island to destabilize the dictatorship, even enlisting the aid of its three most dangerous criminal and militia organizations to help. While the dictator, Panay, is absolutely a dangerous person who needed to be removed, though, his dangerous presence was actually the only thing preventing the world from going to war over the island’s oil reserves, with even those three other organizations all having foreign backers.

In the game’s climax, Rico personally decides to detonate a missile over the island’s oil fields, completely destroying them along with any reason for any other country to be interested in the island. He stopped a major war, which is good, but I have a feeling the island’s residents probably didn’t appreciate the lengths he went to.

2 Saints Row: The Third

Gang-on-Gang-on-Paramilitary Violence

In the first two Saints Row games, the Playa, then the Boss, are definitively criminals on the wrong side of the law. Even if the Third Street Saints were originally formed to protect a slice of Stillwater from worse gangs, by the end of the second game, they have a more-or-less uncontested hold on the entire city’s underworld. In Saints Row: The Third, though, things have taken a more commercialized turn.

By the time the game starts, the Saints have become nationally-recognized pop culture icons thanks to help from the conquered Ultor Corporation. They still commit crimes, but the populace of Stillwater are kind of content to just let them because they might be able to get a selfie. Even after being dragged to Steelport by the Syndicate and having their assets stolen, the Saints are still recognized in the streets by adoring fans.

More to the point, over the course of the game, the Saints successfully disband all three of the Syndicate’s component gangs, all of whom were planning to subject the city to some pretty nasty stuff, as well as the military organization STAG, which places the city under martial law. Assuming you get the good ending, they even rescue Mayor Burt Reynolds and one of its major landmarks from being destroyed by STAG’s overreach. A lot of stuff got blown up and a lot of people got hurt in the process of all of this, but the end result was… mostly positive. Positive enough, at least.

1 NieR: Automata

Perpetuating the Cycle

In NieR: Automata, the various android forces, both standalone and affiliated with YoRHa, have the goal of defeating the machine lifeforms and reclaiming the Earth for humanity, which currently lives in a small colony on the moon. This is 2B and 9S’s primary goal, and at a glance, it seems like a wholly altruistic one. Here’s the problem: humanity is dead, and this entire war is completely pointless.

YoRHa androids only keep the proxy war going because, if the war ended, all the androids would lose their purpose in life, or at least that’s what the top brass likes to think. The machines don’t want to fight anymore either, but they keep going because their own directives command them to, and because they don’t want to die. Neither 2B nor 9S are heroes in any real capacity, they’re just cogs in a machine.

2B, in particular, has a rather unpleasant role in all this: her real designation is 2E, an executioner unit ordered to murder 9S every time he uncovers the truth of the proxy war. She has killed him so many times, and no matter how many times his memories are reset, he always figures it out again. 2B and 9S’s situation makes them anti-heroes of circumstance more than ideology; they both want to do right by both humanity and the other androids, but the circumstances of their situation keep forcing them to do terrible things.