Games

I'm still playing GTA 4 and the vigilante missions come across a bit questionable in 2025. In GTA 4, when you're driving any police vehicle you can access the onboard police computer and either do repeating missions where you kill generic criminal NPCs or tick off a list of Liberty City's most wanted criminals. Most of them basically just boil down to you pulling up somewhere in a cop car and eliminating black and brown people (though sometimes you get to shoot motor cycle gangs and Italian goombas)

As I was running over Spanish-speaking gangsters that were fleeing on foot in the militarised police Hummer belonging to the GTA universe's version of ICE I had stolen I felt like I was stuck in some Grok-generated AI video on the White House's Twitter account

It's even worse because in GTA 4, most NPCs don't die outright unless you kill them with a headshot, and instead they go curl up into an extended dying state where they slowly bleed out while they moan and beg for mercy. This doesn't count as a kill for these missions, so most of them end with you going around and executing people as they lie on the ground

It's all just throwaway extra content and not functionally different from the shit you do normally in the game's missions but something about the cop framing makes it feel much ickier than murdering people for Russian mobsters or Puerto Rican coke dealers

Something tells me we won't be seeing these missions return in GTA 6