Terraria
A 2011 sandbox that turned "dig, build, fight" into a full RPG and never stopped growing — fifteen years and counting of free updates, still one of the best-value games on Steam.
9.5 / 10
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Open World reviews
261 Open World games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
261 reviews
Cyberpunk 2077
The most famous broken launch in modern gaming is now, five years and one total rebuild later, one of the best open-world RPGs you can buy. Ninety-six of its hundred most recent reviews are positive. The thing to check before buying isn't the game any more — it's the licence.
9 / 10
Elden Ring
FromSoftware took the tight, authored corridors of the Souls formula and let them loose across an entire continent, trading hand-guided pacing for a world you're free to get lost, lost again, and overpowered in on your own terms.
9 / 10
Fallout: New Vegas
Widely regarded as the best-written game in the Fallout series, and just as widely known for crashing constantly — a reputation so baked into its identity that even its own fans write songs about the bugs in five-star reviews, fifteen years on.
9 / 10
Hollow Knight
The 2017 original that the whole modern metroidvania wave points back to. Nine years on it still sells on reputation alone — and the reputation holds up, with one honest asterisk.
9 / 10
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Seven years after it was announced, Team Cherry's sequel arrives faster, meaner and bigger than the original, and mostly earns every one of those seven years.
9 / 10
Outer Wilds
A time-loop mystery about a tiny solar system that "everyone says" you need to experience knowing nothing about — Overwhelmingly Positive at 95.6%, and honest enough with itself that its own top negative review is a genuinely unresolved crowdfunding controversy, not a design flaw.
9 / 10
Satisfactory
An automation game solved in three dimensions instead of two, where every belt run is something you physically walked and every ratio problem is also an architecture problem. Five years after leaving Epic exclusivity, its 1.0 release confirms it was worth the wait.
9 / 10
Stardew Valley
A decade on, the thing that still makes Stardew Valley work isn't the farm, it's the clock — energy, daylight and a hard seasonal deadline turned into the best progression pressure the genre has ever built, even if the pressure quietly switches off once you're rich.
9 / 10
Subnautica
An open-world survival game that strips out weapons almost entirely and replaces them with an oxygen gauge, a sound cue you can't place, and a lot of very dark water. Eight years after full release, it's still the best argument that dread works better than a sword.
9 / 10
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Eleven years and one free next-gen overhaul later, CD Projekt Red's open-world epic is still best understood through its side quests rather than its main story — and its combat, inventory and level-gating have aged in ways the writing never did.
9 / 10
ANIMAL WELL
One person spent seven years building a pixel-perfect puzzle box with secrets buried so deep the playerbase had to solve the last of them collectively — and never added key rebinding, which is still its most-upvoted complaint.
8.5 / 10
Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling
The Paper Mario game a huge share of its own reviewers say Nintendo stopped making — turn-based RPG combat, real puzzle-solving abilities, genuine charm — built by a small independent team instead, and rarely called out for anything beyond a handful of specific, old-school JRPG design choices.
8.5 / 10
Core Keeper
A mining sandbox that turns "just one more tile" into a genuinely well-paced RPG — skills level as you use them, bosses gate the map instead of a level counter, and up to eight players can dig through it together.
8.5 / 10
Geneforge 2 - Infestation
A ground-up remake of Spiderweb Software's 2003 cult classic open-world CRPG, rebuilding its mutant-crafting and faction politics for modern systems with Kickstarter-backed new content, earning near-universal acclaim tempered only by longtime fans mourning a handful of specific systems the remake simplified away.
8.5 / 10
Ghost of Tsushima DIRECTOR'S CUT
A conventional open-world checklist game wearing the most beautiful presentation layer in the genre — and, after Sony's reported retreat from PC in March 2026, quite possibly the last Sucker Punch game PC players get to buy.
8.5 / 10
Gothic II: Gold Edition
Widely regarded as one of the finest CRPGs ever made — the game reviewers cite as the benchmark even when discussing other Piranha Bytes titles — now facing a genuine, independently verified controversy: a January 2025 price hike that doubled the cost of the entire Gothic catalogue on Steam, timed near the Gothic 1 Remake's announcement, which drove the sharpest spike in negative reviews this classic has ever seen.
8.5 / 10
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Warhorse Studios' medieval simulation grows up without losing its stubbornness — a sequel that fixes the first game's roughest edges while doubling down on the idea that realism should cost you something. The result is one of the most complete RPGs of the last few years, provided you're willing to let a swordfight or a bowl of stew go badly.
8.5 / 10
Middle-earth Shadow of Mordor
A landmark action RPG whose Nemesis system was genuinely influential and remains widely loved a decade on — but a real, organised share of its negative reviews are deliberate protests against Warner Bros. patenting that same system and closing developer Monolith Productions in 2025, not complaints about the game itself.
8.5 / 10
Palworld
Two and a half years after the meme that ate January 2024, Palworld's 1.0 finishes the job — a survival sandbox whose real subject is labour, with 72 more Pals, a level-80 ceiling and two new regions bolted onto the top of it.
8.5 / 10
Stray
Four years on, 97.2% positive across 176,389 reviews — and its critics are still arguing that the only reason it scores that well is that you play as a cat.
8.5 / 10
The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim Special Edition
One of the most influential open-world RPGs ever made, still drawing near-unanimous recent reviews nearly a decade after this remaster's release — but its negative sample is dominated almost entirely by a specific, well-documented grievance: Bethesda repeatedly breaking the mod ecosystem with forced updates while reintroducing paid mods, and delisting the original game from Steam search in the process.
8.5 / 10
TUNIC
A game about a small fox that hands you an instruction manual in a language you can't read and lets that single idea carry an entire adventure — and a soulslike hiding inside a Zelda costume, which is where most of its arguments start.
8.5 / 10
Valheim
A Viking survival sandbox that gates its whole progression behind biomes, each one resetting your sense of safety from zero. Five and a half years into Early Access, with a firm 1.0 date finally on the calendar, it's worth asking how much of that reputation still holds.
8.5 / 10