The best action games like Grand Theft Auto V are Red Dead Redemption 2, Saints Row IV and Sleeping Dogs. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to action costs you.
Filtering to action means you want the fighting to carry the game rather than the story or the map. It is the right filter when what you actually miss is how something felt in your hands.
What you get: Combat you get better at. Action games put their design budget into the moment-to-moment, so the thing you are doing in minute two is the thing you are still doing in hour twenty, only better.
What made Grand Theft Auto V worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the action part of that answer, and only the action part.
The same studio's other open world, slower and far better written.
The absurd end of the genre, where the superpowers replace the driving.
Hong Kong, the best hand-to-hand in any open-world crime game.
San Francisco, hacking as the traversal, and unusually cheerful.
A linear crime story with none of the sandbox, and better for it.
The most convincing city in any game, after Phantom Liberty.
If the chaos rather than the story was the appeal.
A crime story with far more heart, and the best side content in games.
Rockstar's shooting at its very best, without the open world.
Pacing and world. Action games rarely have the quiet stretches or the writing that the adventure and RPG picks bring, and a few of them are shorter than they look.
The full list is on games like Grand Theft Auto V — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Red Dead Redemption 2. The same studio's other open world, slower and far better written.
No. Grand Theft Auto V released on the PC & Modern Multi-Platform, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A small set of verbs and a game that keeps finding new questions to ask of them. The weak ones add buttons instead; the strong ones make you better at the ones you already have.
No, and difficulty is a poor proxy for depth. Some of the hardest action games have very few decisions in them, and some of the deepest have a difficulty setting that lets you meet them halfway.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Grand Theft Auto V list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is action — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the action guide for where to start in the genre generally.