GTA V had a mini-mission where you fought off aliens with a mini-gun in a pot-hazed frenzy. That happens in the first fifteen minutes. I mean, Saints Row 4 begins where you are the President of the USA, and you battle an alien spaceship. This trend continued with Saints Row 4 and Saints Row: Gat out of Hell. While Grand Theft Auto games had a sense of humour, Saints Row took their humour and turned it up to eleven, transforming Saints Row into Grand Theft Auto’s wackier, albeit less popular cousin. It wasn’t until Saints Row: The Third came along that the series really differentiated itself from Grand Theft Auto. Not bad games, although they reminded me of an old saying ‘why go out for the hamburger when you can have the steak at home?’ Thematically, aesthetically and mechanically, they were the poor man’s GTA.
The first two games in the Saints Row series were the quintessential Grand Theft Auto rip-offs. So let us be thankful for Grand Theft Auto and for all of the ripoffs it inspired. It is fair to say that Rockstar Games are the masters of this genre and without their efforts, many of the games on this list may not have come to exist. There is just no hiding from the fact that they had borrowed elements of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. For this, we look down on them for trying to replicate the structure of Grand Theft Auto, rather than do their own thing entirely. It’s not that there is anything wrong with these games – some of them are exceptionally good. Games where the developers clearly show their inspirations and are unashamed of doing so. Right or wrong, these games have been called Grand Theft Auto clones or rip-offs. The formula has been so successful that other developers have tried to copy and adapt it for their own games. Rockstar Games don’t own the third-person open-world genre, but they did a lot to advance it with the Grand Theft Auto franchise, even applying the formula to their other major works, like Red Dead Redemption and Bully. The concept of going anywhere and doing anything you wanted to was a tantalizing prospect for gamers as we had never seen such freedom in a game before.
No game that had come before offered such unfettered approach to gameplay. Sure, we had seen 3D games before the release of GTA III, but not of the same scope and ambition. Since Grand Theft Auto took the leap to 3D in 2001, it has been considered a ground-breaking franchise.
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