games where you play as an evil character

[Dalisclock]

Saints Row 2 is my choice. You play a horrible person who's whole desire is to topple the gangs of the city for no other reason than you want to. You commit horrible acts to various individuals (one highlight is literally burying somebody alive) and some of the side activities have you brutalising people whilst pretending to be a police officer and protecting drug dealers when the police come after them. There's also some of the weapons like the chainsaw which have mini-cutscenes of the victim screaming in agony as their body rapidly goes limp.

Saints Row: The Third is similarily reprehensible, but it's so tonally scattershot as to lost the impact. Saints Row 1 is similar, but the character is portrayed as more or less going along with people's ideas because he wants to help the people who saved him.

SR3 involves you going to war against the US government as part of the main plot(basically making you a terrorist), as well as having the option of weaponizing a zombie virus and blowing up a skyscraper in the middle of a major city. As mentioned above, it's also a lot more wacky at times and the boss isn't nearly as much of a dick in 3, so it doesn't feel as dark.

Yeah, SR2 is what I came here to say. Unlike the GTA games, there isn't even the pretense that you're doing this for the greater good. It's pretty much "Break out of prison, reestablish the saints, and claw your way back to the top, killing pretty much anyone who gets in your way". Some of the people who get in your way being people who really didn't do anything to you at all(Maiming the guy who does the Tattoos for one of the gang leaders...and isn't involved in the gang at all comes to mind).

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

"Evil for the sake of evil"? Hatred. Though I hear on top of it all it's just not very good a game.

 

[Auberon]

Depending on your faction, you can get into some really, really dubious creations in Alpha Centauri.

 

[Kathinka]

Debatably, Spec Ops: The Line. Worth playing at any rate.

 

[sagitel]

I actually hate most "Evil" games, because you're never really evil at all. You're always chaotic good. Like the Overlord games. You're supposed to be this great daemonic prince with dozens of sex slaves and minions...and yet you're always freeing orphans from the corrupt and often corpulent "good" Knights and Paladins that eat live kittens. How can I feel evil when I'm doing what Shepard or Batman would be doing?! You never order your imps to burn nuns at the stake. You never really have sex slaves, because all your consorts are hopelessly in love with you and willingly go with you.

Or Evil Genius, where you're an "evil" Bond type villain. Except all the worlds governments are supposed to be super corrupt and tyrannical. And you never do anything truly evil! You never drop a nuke on London. You never steal orphans from China to start a death-cult of minions. You never have enemy agents(of either gender) raped or brutally tortured. You never go around just murdering innocent old ladies. You're never "evil"! You're only chaotic good or at worst, chaotic neutral. You never do anything Catwoman or Garrus wouldn't do.

And even a game like Hatred, yeah I suppose you're evil. But I think we can all agree its comical evil at best. Frank Miller evil. The type of evil Marv or Dwight would fight. And that's just not an evil I can take seriously.

thank you for saying what i wanted using better words. i didnt explain good enough. (no sarcasm) im looking for this where you are pure evil. you start a deathcult with orphanes and burn good people and honest priests at stakes. you go around raping, pillaging and looting. im looking for an evil game that you can play while having rivers of blood flowing around you while you do the evil laugh. (thats totally a thing)
i remembered another one. black and white let you be really really evil. from working your villagers to death, sacrificing children, burning them creating plagues and all that.

snip

Spoiler: SPOILERS!

Braid...

well in those two games you are not evil for the sake of being evil and in the case of that spoilered one, you dont even know that you are evil until the end of the game.

 

[Drathnoxis]

We had this thread a couple months ago so I'm just going to quote myself, you could follow the quote and check the other responses in that thread too.

Destroy All Humans: you play as Cryptosporidium-137, a vicious alien soldier, come down to earth to extract brain-stems and subjugate all the filthy monkey scum that lives on Earth. It's a lot of fun running around playing with all the creative weapons like the anal probe that makes people run around clutching their butt until their head explodes or to fly around in your spaceship nuking city blocks. This is probably one of the purest examples of a villain protagonist as Crypto doesn't have a whole lot of redeeming hero qualities or motives. Sure he may be collecting brain-stems to reverse his race's genetic deformation, but that a small part of the story and Crypto is mostly there just to blow things up and make the filthy primitive human scum squirm.

Fable: The Lost Chapters: The best of the Fable series in my opinion. Does somewhat have a morality system, but it's still fun to run through a village slaughtering everyone until you've grown a massive set of horns and are surrounded by an evil mist.

My other picks of Saints Row 2 and Prototype have already been mentioned

Edit: you might also want to check the TV Tropes page for Villain Protagonist [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainProtagonist] for a couple more that might not have been mentioned here.

Also, I want to add Emily Enough. It's An indie adventure game from 2005 where you play a psychotic little girl who, having just murdered her parents, is trying to escape a mental institution. The game has a delightfully twisted sense of humour and is quite short so it doesn't run on too long. Also it's free [http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/602/], so go play it!

 

[FPLOON]

snip

Spoiler: SPOILERS!

Braid...

well in those two games you are not evil for the sake of being evil and in the case of that spoilered one, you dont even know that you are evil until the end of the game.

Meh... That's kinda the reason why I put it under a spoiler tag in the first place... Besides, the game, itself, does a "pretty good" job of hiding that fact, anyway...

 

[Fallow]

I actually hate most "Evil" games, because you're never really evil at all. You're always chaotic good. Like the Overlord games. You're supposed to be this great daemonic prince with dozens of sex slaves and minions...and yet you're always freeing orphans from the corrupt and often corpulent "good" Knights and Paladins that eat live kittens. How can I feel evil when I'm doing what Shepard or Batman would be doing?! You never order your imps to burn nuns at the stake. You never really have sex slaves, because all your consorts are hopelessly in love with you and willingly go with you.

Or Evil Genius, where you're an "evil" Bond type villain. Except all the worlds governments are supposed to be super corrupt and tyrannical. And you never do anything truly evil! You never drop a nuke on London. You never steal orphans from China to start a death-cult of minions. You never have enemy agents(of either gender) raped or brutally tortured. You never go around just murdering innocent old ladies. You're never "evil"! You're only chaotic good or at worst, chaotic neutral. You never do anything Catwoman or Garrus wouldn't do.

And even a game like Hatred, yeah I suppose you're evil. But I think we can all agree its comical evil at best. Frank Miller evil. The type of evil Marv or Dwight would fight. And that's just not an evil I can take seriously.

thank you for saying what i wanted using better words. i didnt explain good enough. (no sarcasm) im looking for this where you are pure evil. you start a deathcult with orphanes and burn good people and honest priests at stakes. you go around raping, pillaging and looting. im looking for an evil game that you can play while having rivers of blood flowing around you while you do the evil laugh. (thats totally a thing)
i remembered another one. black and white let you be really really evil. from working your villagers to death, sacrificing children, burning them creating plagues and all that.

snip

Spoiler: SPOILERS!

Braid...

well in those two games you are not evil for the sake of being evil and in the case of that spoilered one, you dont even know that you are evil until the end of the game.

Then your best bet is modding communities. There are some Blackguard / Assassin mods in NWN2 where you can do those things. Prolly some in NWN as well (though graphics may be somewhat dated by now). I think there was an evil vampire mod thingy for TES:O, and prolly some others that I haven't seen.

Anyhoo, I'd start with NWN2, it has the orphanage thing.

 

[kris40k]

There is also Lucious 1 & 2, where you basically are playing Damien from the Omen movies. I haven't played them myself, and they mostly seem pretty "so bad its good" from the videos I've watched, so meh, ymmv with that series.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Or Evil Genius, where you're an "evil" Bond type villain. Except all the worlds governments are supposed to be super corrupt and tyrannical. And you never do anything truly evil! You never drop a nuke on London. You never steal orphans from China to start a death-cult of minions. You never have enemy agents(of either gender) raped or brutally tortured. You never go around just murdering innocent old ladies. You're never "evil"! You're only chaotic good or at worst, chaotic neutral. You never do anything Catwoman or Garrus wouldn't do.

Did you play evil genius?

Firstly, you do torture people. Most of it is "comedy" torture like making them watch really awful dance moves, but there's one animation in which a torturer presses a lit cigarette against someone's skin, for example. It's a comedy game, so I don't know why the hell you would want or expect people to be raped in it (as if you could even show graphic rape in a deadly serious game).. As for murdering innocents, quite a few of the people you torture are just random people with useful skills. This is actually the key method of upgrading your minions, you go out and kidnap someone with the appropriate skillset and then torture them to death.

The game has three different endings depending on which doomsday device you construct. In one, you create a device which cancels out gravity, causing all the people (and cute puppies) in an affected area to be sucked into space where they presumably freeze or suffocate, the second causes massive city-destroying earthquakes and in the third, you release a gas which erases the individual personalities of everyone affected by it and transforms them into generic minions.

Furthermore, the world's governments are not particularly "corrupt." They're parodies of real-world cold war defensive alliances, so HAMMER and ANVIL are communist dictatorships, but the rest are never presented as particularly unjust.

Again, it's all done in the style of campy humour, but the evil genius is certainly not "lawful good".

 

[Terminal Blue]

In a very different sense, God Save The Queen. It's a of visual novel where you get to be absolutely evil. Also you'll die... a lot. Often it's necessary.

Just to clarify, the title is "Long Live the Queen". Although I agree it's glorious and it is possible for Elodie (the main character) to become a total *****..

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

War for, and fall of Cybertron has full campaigns between the good and bad side of the fight like Sonic Adventure 2. Though I could say it is cartoonish evil, it still feels cartoonishly justified.

Spoiler: A particularly great scene to play in Fall ofCybertron...

...After Starscream sneakily destroys Megatron and crowns himself leader, you play again as the remaining consciense of Megatron, figuring out how to rebuild himself and take back his throne. It was a cathartic power trip.

 

[LetalisK]

Overlord 1 and 2. Though those are more of a cartoony evil.

I'm not sure if even a completely Light-Sided Sith character in SWTOR can be considered to be not evil. Both are still dark leaders of the genocidal Sith Empire, either a Dark Council member or the Emperor's Wrath incarnate, in other words the Emperor's strongest and most loyal enforcer. Both earn their Darth titles even if they try to be good.

I like to think of Light-Sided Sith characters as basically not Stupid Evil like everyone else. They're still evil, but they realize that skewering a subordinate because they sneezed wrong is not the path towards a sustainable nation.

 

[Ima Lemming]

The first thing that came to my mind was Evilquest, but I dunno, it wasn't a great game. Could have been a nice little tribute to Crystalis, but most of the bosses are beaten by drip-feeding yourself healing items and I thought it was a one-note joke. But if you want a video game where your character's only motivation is "Because I'm EEEEEEVIL! MOOHOOHAWHAWHAAAAAAW!", that ends with...

Spoiler

you killing God and and blowing up the world

... then it might be worth the $2 it costs on Steam.

 

[Neverhoodian]

Try playing as Chaos or Necrons in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. While all the factions are brutal and oppressive in some form (this IS Warhammer 40,000, after all), these two are particularly noteworthy for their nefarious deeds and imagery.

 

[Nixou]

The Clausewitz Engine games, especially when you decide to transfer your saves from one game to the next, in which case, you are going to lie, cheat, bribe, and slaughter people by millions in the name of securing planetary dominance for your medieval lordling's bloodline.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

God of War III, no question. It features, literally, while not exactly puppies, inordinate amounts of kicking dogs, killing characters who don't deserve it, bringing about an apocalypse and horrendous mutilations each more graphic than the last one. Beginning with first-person eye-gouging from the perspective of the victim, which sort of gives you an idea of the level we're at.

 

[sagitel]

Well, going for full on evil, there's rape games or if you care to be on the FBI watchlist some games by religeous-nuts/terrorists where you go around burning churches and killing civilians.

are you talking about that japanese game? Im not going to play that.
and in case of the terrorist made games im looking for a game thats at least a quality product with story and background for your character