Top 10 Best Rewards For Playing Evil in Video Games

Top 10 Best Rewards for Playing Evil

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Welcome to WatchMojo and today we’re counting down our picks for the Top 10 Rewards in Video Games for Playing Evil. For this list, we’ll be looking at the best powers, upgrades and bonuses which are unlocked by being a terrible human being. Are these rewards worth abandoning your moral compass for? Let us know in the comments!

“Fallout 3” (2008)

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After sending you out into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Fallout 3 quickly let you choose how you wanted to survive - making nice and building alliances or taking names and kicking ass. In most karma-based games, achieving the status of true evil requires hours of work and a steady procession of nasty choices but Fallout 3 gives players the chance to become irredeemably awful early on. When you arrive in Megaton - a town built around an undetonated nuclear bomb - a shady figure offers you a handsome reward for pressing the big red button. Take him up on it and you’ll not only enjoy a hefty pay-day, but you also get to know what it feels like to blow an entire town of the face of the earth.

“BioShock” (2007)

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Bioshock decided to really test the moral fibre of its players by asking them a simple question - will you harvest this kid if it means you can shoot bees from your fingertips? Given that Bioshock’s world is an underwater nightmare filled with dangerous lunatics and murderous diver suits, the temptation to do whatever it takes to max out your Plasmid powers is pretty strong. Sure, you would feel better about yourself if you set the little girls free but then you wouldn’t have mind powers, would you? Bioshock does a really good job of adding an emotional weight to your evil choices but the promise of fully-upgraded plasmids due to getting more ADAM is sure to consign many Little Sisters to a watery grave all the same.

“Black & White 2” (2005)

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The Black and White games let you live out the ultimate power fantasy by having you play as an actual, honest-to-goodness god. With a civilization to rule over, you can choose either to look after them as a compassionate, kindly deity so that they praise your name or to terrorise them from above until they cower before you. Rather than acting directly though, you’ll rely on a creature to act as your stand-in. Over time, not only will it grow to gargantuan proportions, but it will also begin to reflect your ethical choices. So whether you play with the upstanding moral character of a noble lion or the shameless bloodlust of a ravenous, eighty-foot-tall killer demon monkey, you’ll see that reflected in the game.

“The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” (2011)

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With its sprawling, fantastical land, much of the appeal of Skyrim comes from the freedom it gives the player to be whoever they want. Whether you dream of charging into battle with an axe in each hand or creeping through the night like a deathly shadow, Skyrim accommodates it all. And that includes those who want to reanimate the bodies of their fallen foes to use as a horde of undead bodyguards. With your foul-smelling entourage in tow, you’ll be notably harder to kill as well as being kind of terrifying. Necromancy really hits the bad guy trifecta of being spooky, gross and highly effective. Be careful, though - raising the dead in public is illegal in certain towns and highly unpopular in most of the others.

“Jak and Daxter” series (2001-17)

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In the early 2000s, going dark was all the rage. While the original Jak & Daxter was a brightly-coloured 3D platformer about an island boy and his furry friend, it’s sequels spat them both out into a bleak metropolitan future filled with gun-toting goons. After being experimented on by the powers that be, Jak gains the ability to transform into Dark Jak - a beastly, brutal version of himself crackling with Dark Eco energy who can reduce enemy troops to scrap metal in a few short seconds. Eventually, your dark powers allow you to become briefly invincible or grow to Hulk-like proportions, but there’s nothing quite like a good Dark Strike in Jak 3 to really revel in your destructive capabilities.

“Deus Ex: Human Revolution” (2011)

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As a cybernetically-enhanced operative, your body is essentially a highly upgradeable weapon in Deus Ex, allowing you to customise each part of it to suit your style. The quiet or loud, lethal or non-lethal combat choices available were nothing new by themselves but Deus Ex stood out thanks to its commitment to the concept, making it possible to complete the entire game without taking a life. Even the bosses could be taken down non-lethally if you wanted to retain your sense of humanity. But if you would rather tune your robo-body up into a walking death machine, that was also an option. Especially with things like Typhoon Explosion which pretty much demolishes everything in your vicinity.

15 years after events of the first game, the steam-punk city of Dunwall once again finds itself embroiled in a bloody power struggle. During their quest to restore order, the player must decide whether to add to the carnage or attempt to quell it. While killing off guards is usually the easiest way to play a stealth game, Dishonored 2 gradually makes players pay for their body-count - acting mercifully keeps the city relatively calm while murdering everyone in sight quickly turns it into a highly-fortified, rat-infested, plague-ridden hell-hole that is much harder to navigate quietly. That said, the decay does have its advantages - by strapping a mine onto a rat and then possessing its body, the player can use them as teeny, tiny terrors.

Like many open-world games, the effect of the players moral choices in Fable impacts both their appearance and the way the rest of the realm responds to them. Previous games saw the main character become steadily creepier as they made evil choices but Fable 3 really went all in on this aspect by allowing the player to transform into a full-on demon, complete with horns and wings. Since Fable 3 also lets you become ruler of Albion, this means you get to roam the land as a demonic king, terrorising your citizens with your horrifying appearance while also making them pay taxes. Now, you can also get some nice shiny wings by being a good guy but no horns. It’s all about the horns.

Sometimes, it’s important not to overthink these things. It’s a blast. It Obliterates. It’s an Obliterating Blast. Each game in the Infamous series lets the player unlock a series of elemental powers and use them to become either a shining superhero or a monstrous supervillain. Play nice and you’ll unlock a restrained, environmentally-friendly selection of moves. Play nasty and you’ll get some much smashier powers. In the first game, where all your powers are electrical, being bad eventually unlocked Arc Lightning which was a tremendous way to zap a whole load of people. In Second Son, which features powers based on everything from Neon to Concrete, it includes the aforementioned Obliterating Blast. Which, once again, obliterates whatever it blasts. Really can’t emphasize that enough. Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

“Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” (2003)

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The battle between light and dark has been at the heart of the Star Wars franchise ever since Darth Vader first tried to recruit his son over to Team Palpatine. In Knights of the Old Republic, players finally got the chance to make that choice for themselves - would they join the honourable ranks of the Jedi or be swayed by the destructive might of the Dark Side? The second option really is quite enticing. Sure, fear leads to hate and anger and suffering, but it also leads to lightning powers and badass red lightsabres, so that’s really not such a bad deal, is it now Yoda? Best of all, you get to do Vader’s patented Force Choke. Hooray for the Dark Side!