10 Best 2019 Video Games You're Not Playing

9. American Fugitive

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Fallen Tree Games

GTA on the Switch.*

Done.

Oh, you want more? Well, American Fugitive is like what old-school GTA might look and feel like if it was released in 2019.

Clearly developers Fallen Tree Games are huge fans of Rockstar's magnum opus, but particularly of the older, top-down iterations. It results in something that connotes just enough of that original GTA nostalgia, but with a physics model guaranteed to result in car-mangling chases or ragdoll-bodied shootouts.

The really cool stuff comes from seeing how a team of fans have modernised and fleshed out what used to be Rockstar's late 90s template for GTA. We've now got things like snagging a change of clothes from a washing line to lose the cops, holding up stores for cash, crouching behind cover during firefights, or breaking into houses room-by-room to get valuables, items or weapons.

The latter idea is done through a minigame, but all these things combine to give American Fugitive enough of an identity on top of such an obvious homage. And if you literally just want some GTA, the game's map screen and array of vehicles are direct nods to the lineage of the franchise.

Fallen Tree have been very active on social media, saying they'll tweak parts of the game to refine it even more going forward, but this is one hell of a showing for a first console release.

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*Plus PS4/Xbox One.

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Gaming Editor
Gaming Editor

WhatCulture's Head of Gaming.