Grand Theft Auto VI is 110 days out, which gives you exactly one summer to clear every criminal open-world itch off your to-play list. When Leonida calls, everything on the desk gets benched for three months — guaranteed by history.
These seven crime-flavored worlds will tune you up. Time to get corny in someone else's city.
The old king remains the warm-up act at its own successor's coronation. Los Santos still plays fast, mean, and busier than any of the ninety open-world cities that copied it over thirteen years — and Rockstar continues feeding GTA Online with new heists and vehicles that function increasingly as shipping containers for GTA VI-era tech. Three months is almost enough time for another arc through Trevor's rampages and the doomsday ladder, cousins. One more ramp, for old time's sake.
Rockstar's 2018 epic remains the living laboratory where VI's souls will be grown. Its ambient systems — animal hunting, town gossip, snow-thaw physics, moral consequence — are the nearest thing to a playable preview of what Lucia and Jason's Vice City will feel like hour to hour. RDR2 also remains the single prettiest game of the previous console generation; between the landscapes and the most heartfelt writing Rockstar has ever done, this replay is as much attitude adjustment as radar prep.
Night City remains the most vertiginous urban space in gaming, period — and post-2.0 (plus Phantom Liberty), it's finally the game it claimed to be in 2018's first teaser. The genre-bending of criminal wheelmen, fixers, personal climb and skilled economy is the same fantasy GTA monetizes; CDPR simply wrapped it in cyberdecks, trauma dramas and one of Keanu Reeves' best performances. If the ambition of a mega-city obsessed with its own skyline is the pitch, there's no better prep school.
This July's mobile for Mafia has been established since 2025, but the series' new entry is the most cinematic crime story of the past year — Sicily in the early 20th century, leaning on family loyalty, betrayal and vendettas rather than sandbox toys. The Old Country's pace is unusually deliberate for open world action: story first long before icon-counting side work. Bonus timing: the expansion Man of Honor (bringing back Don Salieri) drops this August, putting one more milestone inside the GTA pre-window.
Wei Shen's undercover Hong Kong saga — genuine martial arts combat, karaoke side missions, pork buns as health kits — remains criminally underrated relative to every masterpiece comparison it earned on 2012 release. Sleeping Dogs basically built the 'GTA but with hand-to-hand that isn't an accident' niche and no one's filled it since. Square Enix's Definitive Edition is regularly priced to move; do your civic duty and visit Hong Kong. There will never be another like it anywhere on the current pistes.
Two cities, two protagonists, forty combined hours of karaoke, cabaret, real-estate fraud and dramatic sudden karaoke — with one of RGG Studio's finest crime stories underneath the clowning. Kiryu and Majima's origin story works as both comedy machine and a genuinely involving period drama about honor systems and how debt makes friends; the modern Kiwami packaging means it's aged like real estate in Kamurocho's best block. When you hear 'Friday Night' start playing, everything goes right with the world.
Santo Ileso's startup-gang fantasy remains our archive's most dependable case of 'this was kind of bodged, but also kind of great'. Volition's franchise reset in 2022 traded the Saints' old cosmic absurdism for a grounded, weirdly sincere misfit-business parable with solid enough gunfights and a consistent sense of fun. We reviewed it on this blog; it's aged well relative to the reception it got. If the crime wheelman fantasy skews sillier in your hands, Santo Ileso still has parking.
Finish these and you'll hit November properly calibrated — crate-heading into Leonida like it's someone else's birthday. Lock up your hours while you still can.