Everybody loves being the hero, but sometimes it’s fun to be a little bad too. This is where anti-heroes come in. One flawed person in the right place can turn them into the hero of a narrative. The games below go a step further and include a whole team of them fighting against the odds.
Some of these teams have redeeming qualities that show them as complicated characters doing their best in an evil world while grappling with their own personal demons. Other times they are just downright bad people who could just as easily be the villain of someone else’s story if the players were following someone else’s perspective.
A lot of negativity is lobbed atSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Much of it is focused on the repetitive gameplay designed around a live-service model and the comparisons to theArkhamgames with which it shares a continuity. It is a shame the game went this route, because nuggets of goodness are evident in some of the cutscenes.
Controlling theSuicide Squadwhile they take out members of the Justice League is a cool idea and a nice subversion of expectations as the next step for theArkhamuniverse. The team’s personality shines through in many of the cinematics. It is just a shame it iswrapped up in a live-service title.
There’s nothing wrong with live-service games, but it was not what most fans of the narrative-based single-playerArkhamgames wanted for a follow-up.
TheSaints Rowgamesevolved from aGrand Theft Auto-influenced open-world game into a zany spectacle that parodied games and pop culture with endearing low-brow humor. At the center of it all was the titular Saints, a gang that grew all the way from the dirty streets right into the White House.
In the first two games the Saints, along with the player-created protagonist, are more ruthless and unforgiving. Part three takes the series into an exaggerated reality and adds a lot more humor to the criminal entrepreneur, and take to the fourth game, where players are the literal U.S. President who kills aliens. Yeah, it’s safe to assume these are the good-ish guys.
With as flexible a narrative asBaldur’s Gate 3, the party can go in anentirely heroic direction or become downright evil maniacs. This RPG is smarter than most games, though, and many choices fall into a narrative gray area that more often than not turns the leader of the party and the rest of the crew into antiheroes.
Many of the characters individually have features common to antiheroes. Lae’zel is from a brutal race of disciplined and unflinching warriors, Astarion is an unwilling vampire with the urges typical of mythological beings, and Shadowheart worships a dark goddess.
Despite being the third game in a series,Baldur’s Gate 3can be played as a standalone title without confusing newcomers.
The titular characters of these two games are brutal criminals with zero redeeming qualities both morally and socially. They are the stars, though, and players control them as they shoot their way through the criminal underworld, indiscriminately leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.
Lynch is also clearly dealing with intense psychological issues. While the gameplay has aged, they are still interesting to play because of their unflinching dedication to the protagonist’s cruelty and unlikability. Both games are also fully playable in co-op.
The sequel,2 Dog Days, plays as if an unseen camera crew films the two characters. There is a filter to make it look like a camcorder is recording and the audio sounds like a boom mic is picking it up. This adds to the game’s grimy aesthetic but also adds disorientation to the players.
The fifth mainline game in this legendary series introduces the mechanic of having multiple protagonists.Each of them is engaged in criminal life, but for different reasons and at different stages. Franklin is looking for a better station in life, Michael is looking for meaning and purpose to escape his comfortable but boring life in the witness protection program, and Trevor is just a psychopath.
They deal with all manner of criminals during the course of the story. What separates the three from many of the other gangsters, both street and corporate, is their honestly. A character like Devin Weston is a greedy backstabber while the FIB stoops just as low as the protagonists but tries to justify it in the name of the greater good. The anti-hero protagonists are not trying to pretend they are better than everyone else.
Every group of mercs in theBorderlandsgames can be considered anti-heroes to some extent. Even by this standard, the playable characters inThe Pre-Sequelstand out as particularly worthy of this list. The Vault Hunters here are sent to Pandora’s moon on orders from Jack, who eventually becomes known as Handsome Jack, the villain ofBorderlands 2.
Though greed is at the center ofThe Pre-Sequel’sstory, the characters still do some heroic things, like preventing the moon from being blown to smithereens. There are six characters to choose from including the DLC, like the Atlas corporation assassin Athena and a doppelgänger of Jack.
This one is complicated because of howRed Dead Redemption 2’sstory unfolds. The Van der Linde gang is a rag-tag group of bank robbers running away from modernity on the edge of society. During the story, certain characters emerge as outright villainous as the gang slowly falls apart.
However,some stay right by Arthur Morgan’s sideright until the very end, so some semblance of an anti-hero gang remains until the epilogue. At the start, the Van der Linde gang feels like the romanticized outlaws so often depicted in media about the Wild West.
