The 10 Best Villain Games to Play Right Now (October 2026)
CRIMENET Popularity Index: October 2026
The most popular villain in this month's chart isn't a supervillain, a demon prince or a bloodthirsty alien.
It's an office worker.
A deeply unpleasant office worker, admittedly. One whose job involves scamming fictional strangers, hitting financial targets and trying not to be screamed at by management. Somewhere along the way, gaming invented the possibility of ruling the world with a doomsday device and thousands of people decided they'd rather go to work.
I don't know whether that says more about gaming or employment, but neither comes out of it looking especially healthy.
Welcome to the CRIMENET Popularity Index, where we follow the villain games people are playing right now. The ranking is driven by player activity, not by whether I'd personally trust these characters with a spare house key. Every entry also has to let you do something villainous, monstrous or gloriously objectionable. Wearing a black coat and delivering a threatening speech to the hero doesn't get you in.
This is our first villain edition, so everyone starts as NEW. Next time we'll find out which fiends hold their ground and which ones are quietly escorted out of the evil headquarters.
Chart Key
▲ Climbed
▼ Dropped
▬ No Change
NEW First Appearance
RE Re-entry
Popularity checked: October 2026
The October 2026 Chart
Rank | Movement | Game |
1 | NEW | Scam With Your Friends |
2 | NEW | Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League |
3 | NEW | Skul: The Hero Slayer |
4 | NEW | LEGO DC Super-Villains |
5 | NEW | Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince |
6 | NEW | Maneater |
7 | NEW | Untitled Goose Game |
8 | NEW | CARRION |
9 | NEW | Evil Genius 2: World Domination |
10 | NEW | Aliens vs. Predator |
#10 NEW Aliens vs. Predator
In most horror games, you spend your evening running away from something with too many teeth.
Aliens vs. Predator asks a far more interesting question: what if you were the thing in the ventilation shaft?
The 2010 game has separate campaigns for a Marine, a Predator and an Alien. The Marine is there for the traditional experience of regretting every career choice that brought him into a dark corridor. The other two are why we're interested.
As the Predator, you stalk targets, use specialised equipment and turn hunting into an alarmingly elaborate ceremony. The Alien approaches the same world from the other end of the food chain, crawling through places humans really ought to have checked before signing the facility's safety certificate.
There's something satisfying about seeing the same environment stop being a haunted house and become your personal hunting ground. The terrified soldier at the end of the hallway still thinks he's the protagonist.
He isn't.
➡️ Aliens vs. Predator Review
#9 NEW Evil Genius 2: World Domination
I've always admired the confidence of villains who decide world domination is a reasonable personal goal.
Not wealth. Not a nice home. Not even a private island, although that's where Evil Genius 2 starts.
The entire planet.
You build an underground lair, hire minions, train specialists, install traps and send your organisation out to perform criminal schemes while agents of justice attempt to ruin everything. It's the classic spy-film supervillain fantasy, except you're responsible for the building layout.
And that's where it becomes wonderful. You can dream of a doomsday device capable of terrifying governments, but first you need corridors, generators and a workforce capable of walking to their assigned jobs without creating a logistical catastrophe.
Imagine the interview process. "Why do you want to work here?" "I've always been passionate about global suffering, and the benefits package looks competitive."
The game sometimes gets bogged down in management, but that's almost part of the joke. Apparently ruling the world involves paperwork. The heroes get a dramatic entrance. You get a staffing problem.
➡️ Evil Genius 2: World Domination Review
#8 NEW CARRION
There's no tragic childhood, no sympathetic speech and no charming explanation of why the monster is misunderstood.
You're a disgusting mass of flesh and tentacles trapped in a research facility, and you'd quite like to leave.
The people working there would prefer that you didn't.
CARRION reverses the usual horror arrangement beautifully. You slither through vents, grab people, consume them and become increasingly capable of turning a scientific workplace into the reason nobody answers the emergency phone.
What I love about the premise is how little justification it needs. You don't have to convince yourself you're the good guy. You're not even particularly interested in being a guy. You're a rapidly expanding biological incident with locomotion.
For the scientists, this is the worst day of their lives. For you, it's Tuesday, assuming the facility still has clocks after you've been through it.
The game understands that being the monster is about how you move through the world, not simply how ugly your character looks.
➡️ Carrion Review
#7 NEW Untitled Goose Game
The first six entries on this list contain criminals, killers, monsters and people capable of causing catastrophic property damage.
Then there's a goose.
And I would argue the goose is the least trustworthy of the lot.
Untitled Goose Game gives you a peaceful little village full of people trying to lead perfectly ordinary lives. You have a list of things to ruin, a beak, a honk button and absolutely no reason to behave yourself.
You steal objects, manipulate villagers, interrupt routines and make a nuisance of yourself with the focused determination of someone who has spent three months drafting a complaint about their neighbour's hedge.
There's no kingdom to conquer. No society to overthrow. You simply decide that a gardener shouldn't be allowed to enjoy his morning, and the game builds an entire comic masterpiece around that conviction.
Most villains want power. The goose wants your keys.
I find that considerably more frightening.
➡️ Untitled Goose Game Review
#6 NEW Maneater
Normally, when a shark attacks somebody, the news calls it a tragedy and a marine biologist appears to explain that sharks are misunderstood.
Maneater dispenses with this entire public-relations department.
You play a bull shark that eats wildlife, attacks humans, fights hunters and grows into an increasingly formidable apex predator. It's an open-world action RPG where progression involves becoming a much larger reason for the local tourism board to panic.
The story gives you a revenge motive, but most of the entertainment comes from how completely the game commits to its ridiculous premise. Human beings spend fortunes building coastal infrastructure, purchasing boats and equipping themselves with elaborate weapons. You arrive with teeth and an appetite.
Eventually, the hunters come looking for you. This is supposed to be intimidating, but from the shark's perspective it's rather considerate. Dinner has started delivering itself.
You can upgrade and evolve your shark along the way. Because apparently nature's existing design was judged insufficiently hostile.
➡️ Maneater Review
#5 NEW Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince
Psaro has a problem.
He's a demon prince with a grudge against his father, but he's been cursed so he cannot personally hurt monsters. For someone with ambitions involving an army of monsters, that's inconvenient.
His solution is to recruit the monsters and get them to fight on his behalf.
There it is. Middle management again.
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince puts a famous Dragon Quest IV antagonist in the leading role. You explore, recruit creatures, build teams and combine monsters through synthesis to create stronger ones. It isn't a freeform evil simulator where you can terrorise every village for sport. The appeal is controlling an increasingly formidable monster force from the perspective of someone the wider series once asked players to defeat.
I like that distinction. Sometimes playing the villain doesn't mean selecting the red dialogue option marked BE HORRIBLE. Sometimes it means finally seeing what the bloke on the other side of the boss battle has been doing with his evenings.
In Psaro's case, apparently a great deal of recruitment.
➡️ Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince Review
#4 NEW LEGO DC Super-Villains
Some games allow you to become evil. LEGO DC Super-Villains allows you to design your own evil person, which is obviously much more important.
You create a new supervillain and join a cast that includes Joker, Harley Quinn and Lex Luthor while the supposed replacement heroes, the Justice Syndicate, turn out to be rather suspicious themselves.
The fun is in seeing DC's habitual troublemakers handed the starring roles. They get the elaborate schemes, the bizarre powers and the opportunity to smash large portions of a LEGO city into collectible pieces.
Of course, it's still a LEGO game, so the moral depravity is kept at a level suitable for children. Nobody is filing a war-crimes indictment over an exploding brick-built taxi.
But the playable fantasy is real. You're not merely watching famous villains perform. You're running around with them, using their abilities and building your own addition to a criminal roster that was already desperately short on responsible adults.
Frankly, it might be the healthiest villain community on the list. Everyone's awful, but at least they seem to enjoy the company.
➡️ LEGO DC Super-Villains Review
#3 NEW Skul: The Hero Slayer
Here's an uncomfortable question: if an army of heroes storms a demon castle, destroys the place and imprisons its inhabitants, who exactly are we cheering for?
Skul: The Hero Slayer has an answer, and it isn't the people wearing shiny armour.
You play a small skeleton left behind after the human army attacks the Demon King's fortress. Your job is to fight through the invaders and rescue your captured allies. Mechanically, this means fast roguelite combat, changing skulls to gain different powers and discovering combinations that transform a modest pile of bones into a serious problem.
The game isn't about behaving wickedly for entertainment. In fact, the skeleton has a more defensible reason for fighting than many supposedly heroic protagonists. But it delivers something wonderfully rare: the ability to experience a fantasy adventure from the monster army's side.
And it exposes how much moral authority game characters acquire merely by calling themselves heroes.
Apparently the correct procedure is to invade someone's home, kidnap their king and then express surprise when a skeleton gets annoyed.
➡️ Skul: The Hero Slayer Review
#2 NEW Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
There's a special sort of confidence involved in making a superhero game where the objective is to kill the superheroes.
Rocksteady chose that route, handed the job to Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and King Shark, and presumably watched several executives develop an involuntary twitch.
The characters aren't suddenly benevolent saints. They're violent, dangerous criminals drafted into an operation because the usual protectors of Metropolis have become the problem. They fight, shoot and move through the city with different traversal abilities and combat styles.
So the premise is magnificent. How often do you get to take on the Justice League as a collection of people Batman would normally have arrested before breakfast?
The execution, unfortunately, proved more divisive. Loot-heavy combat and repetitive live-service structure are not automatically improved by giving the person holding the gun an excellent criminal résumé.
And there's an irony in the setup: these villains have been assigned the job of saving the world. Even the bad guys can't escape compulsory public service.
Second place reflects the audience in this month's chart, not a sudden declaration that every criticism has disappeared.
➡️ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Review
#1 NEW Scam With Your Friends
We have spent decades demanding games that let us become the bad guy.
Developers gave us aliens who eat scientists, sharks that eat tourists, supervillains who want to enslave humanity and monsters who can tear through entire facilities.
And the winner is a call-centre employee.
Scam With Your Friends puts you and your friends in a fictional scam office where you talk to AI-driven callers, manipulate them, use computer tools and try to reach a daily financial quota. Then you face a performance review from a boss who appears to have mistaken workplace leadership for a competitive screaming event.
I adore how unpleasantly ordinary this makes villainy. You're not hiding in a volcano, polishing a death ray and waiting for a secret agent to arrive. You're sitting at a desk, doing something thoroughly dishonest, while management demands improved productivity.
Think about what that means. Even in a fantasy where the player's job is to scam people, the true terror is still the boss.
You can practically imagine the Monday morning meeting.
"Excellent work stealing fictional people's savings last week. Unfortunately, we're going to need a 14 percent improvement in evil by Friday. Also, whoever keeps leaving mugs in the sink needs to stop."
It's a new Early Access game, so there are still plenty of questions about how the systems will hold up over time. But its immediate popularity is impossible to ignore. Our first villain chart has been conquered by a fraudulent office, and I can't think of a more depressing victory for corporate culture.
Not even Lex Luthor managed that.
➡️ Scam With Your Friends Review
Who's Actually the Villain Here?
The amusing thing about this ranking is that some of its supposed monsters have remarkably good reasons for what they do.
Skul is trying to rescue his people from an invading army. The creature in CARRION wants out of captivity. Even the shark has the excuse that a shark's career prospects are limited and nobody has yet invented an underwater supermarket.
Meanwhile, Untitled Goose Game presents a perfectly peaceful village and gives you an entire list of ways to spoil it.
No tragic backstory. No betrayal. No empire to avenge.
Just a goose who sees somebody enjoying a quiet afternoon and considers that an intolerable personal insult.
Which raises a question I'd rather not answer: what does it say about us that the least powerful creature on this chart may be the most genuinely committed to being awful?
Just Outside the Evil Headquarters
Hatred and Destroy All Humans! remain obvious games to investigate for anyone who wants villainy without a redemption speech. Tyranny has a far more interesting approach to serving an oppressive regime, while Party Hard turns an antisocial obsession into a stealth game about killing noisy partygoers.
None needs a podium finish to be worth discussing. Popularity and imagination have never been particularly reliable colleagues.
And yes, Police Chief Simulator appeared high in the original results. It's a game about running a police station and fighting crime. You can call that villainous if you want. We're not giving the police chief an office in our evil headquarters unless the game actually makes corruption a meaningful part of play.
For more games where you're the problem rather than the solution, explore CRIMENET's Villain hub.
The Verdict
Scam With Your Friends takes the October crown, with Suicide Squad and Skul behind it. But the real pleasure of the list is how thoroughly the games disagree about what a villain ought to be.
Some want to conquer the world. Some want revenge. Some want lunch.
The goose just wants to ruin your day.
And frankly, if I had to choose which one to leave alone in my house, I'd trust the shark before the goose.
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