8 Best Cheat Codes In Modern Games (2024)

One of the big old-school elements of retro games people miss is cheat codes. Whether it was turning on God mode and blasting through a game or turning on wacky cheats, people had a blast with these. However, once the Xbox 360 arrived and Microsoft created the achievement system that's now widely used, cheat codes started to become extinct.

They appeared less and less, and whenever cheat codes did show up, often they would disable achievements, removing much of their usefulness. There are a handful of modern releases, though, that do offer great cheat codes worth using.

8 Grand Theft Auto 5: Change Weather

A Lifesaver When Easter Egg Hunting

If you love finding Easter eggs, you can never go wrong with Grand Theft Auto, especially the fifth instalment where the hidden UFOs and Bigfoot areas are highly desirable to search for. However, there's an issue; one of the UFOs can only be discovered in stormy weather, and to get every Golden Peyote plant, the weather has to be either snowy or foggy.

This requires a ton of luck, but you have cheat codes to save the day, and by pressing RT/R2, A/Cross, LB/L1 twice, LT/L2 thrice, and X/Square, you can change the weather. You might need to input the code multiple times to get the weather you want, which helps the Easter egg hunting process tremendously and is an absolute must.

7 Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour: Cheat Menu

Something You Don't See In Most Console FPS Ports

Classic 90s FPS games are known for their cheat codes, with Doom having infamous ones like idclip, iddqd, and idkfa, but the issue comes that when these games get ported to modern consoles, the cheat codes are often neutered or removed altogether. Quake 1 has no cheat codes on console, and no clip isn't available in the modern releases of Doom 1 and 2.

Duke Nukem 3D remains king in this aspect; you have a unique code to activate the cheat menu; the cheats don't disable achievements, and to top it off, no clip is present. This was required for Duke 3D due to the heavy number of out-of-bounds Easter eggs the level designers put in.

6 Dead Space: Free Money And Refill Stasis

One Thing That Was Unfortunately Cut In The Remake

The original Dead Space had an incredible remake, no doubt about it, but something sadly absent was the cheat codes present. For those unaware, in Dead Space Classic, you could put in six once-per-run cheat codes to start the game with 18,000 credits and seven Power Nodes.

Anybody who knew the cheat codes did this, whether it was in New Game Plus or playing Impossible mode, and what's even more helpful regarding the latter is that you can use a cheat code at any time to refill stasis. This massively helps to save ammo when doing your Impossible run, because the cheats don't disable achievements.

5 Bully: All Cheats

The One Rockstar Title That's A Breeze To Platinum

In nearly all of the seventh-gen and up Rockstar open-world games, you can use cheat codes, but they always disable achievements. Besides some cases like GTA5, where they're useful despite the achievement setback, this largely makes the cheat codes worthless.

Bully, however, was an early seventh-gen game, technically released first on PS2, but the complete Scholarship edition was first released on Wii and Xbox 360 in early 2008, making it an early 360 Rockstar title where you can use cheats and still get achievements. This even applies to the version playable on PS4 and PS5, and with these cheats, Bully has to be the easiest Rockstar open-world game to platinum by a mile.

4 Batman Arkham Series: Big Head Mode

The Greatest Superhero Games Of All Time Get Even Better

So many titles had big head mode back in the day, and it was always fun to play with, and nowadays the feature is near extinct, but one series largely from the 2010s kept it in. That was the Batman Arkham games, specifically Arkham City, Arkham Origins, and Arkham Knight, and there are variations to the code, but all three games essentially work this.

You must hold down all bumpers and triggers and move both sticks sort of like a boat, moving the right one clockwise and the left counter-clockwise; with City and Origins, you must use the Cryptographic Sequencer as well. This affects not only Batman but all the other NPCs, which adds a ton of goofy fun to these otherwise serious superhero titles.

3 Homefront: The Revolution: TimeSplitters 2 Full Game Unlock

A Huge Reason To Even Buy The Game

One franchise that seems to be cursed is TimeSplitters; again and again, TimeSplitters 4 has been rumored or been in development at certain points, only to lead to cancellation. An exciting prospect fans had for years was a remaster of the fan-favorite TimeSplitters 2, and in Homefront: The Revolution, they got that, but not at first.

About two-thirds of the way into the game, you can access an arcade machine that'll let you play the first two levels of TimeSplitters 2, and it wasn't until 2021 that a game developer revealed the cheat codes needed to access the full game. A 4K port of TimeSplitters 2 is awesome, especially if you game on PlayStation, as the title's already backward compatible in 4K on Xbox.

2 Bionic Commando: Transfer Cheats Between Rearmed And The 2009 Game

Not Your Average Game Transfer

The seventh generation was when many games allowed you to transfer progress into the title's sequel, and normally, they would just read your saved data off the hard drive, but Bionic Commando had to go that extra mile. In Bionic Commando Rearmed, you can obtain three cheat codes that unlock content in the 2009 Bionic Commando game.

You'd think you could just put in a cheat code someone else found, but you'd be dead wrong, as these cheats are unique for every profile. Make sure to write them down or take a picture because the unlocks in the 2009 Bionic Commando are pretty neat, and you can play as Classic Spencer and access a special room filled with 3D models that don't appear anywhere else in the game.

1 Contra 4: Konami Code

The Greatest Use Of The Konami Code

You just can't get much better than the Konami code in Contra 4; for one, it's incredibly well-hidden and wasn't discovered until years after the game came out. This is largely because the code's already used for upgrading your weapon in the pause menu, so many thought that was the end of it.

The real Konami code here comes from using the touchscreen; once the first level boots up, enter the code by tapping the appropriate sides of the touchscreen, pressing B, A, and then tapping the center of the screen to gain 30 extra lives. It's comical looking back at how many people complained that the extra lives code wasn't included when it was there the entire time.