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Open World reviews

261 Open World games reviewed and scored, best first.

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261 reviews

Sunkenland

A Waterworld-flavoured survival crafting game still in Early Access, whose real fun core loop is undercut by genuine base-corrupting bugs and security concerns — and whose "abandoned by the developer" complaints, common in 2025 reviews, are directly contradicted by an active, multiple-updates-per-week patch history running right up to this review.

6 / 10

Reviewed

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

One of the best-received remasters this library has covered at launch, and one of the most soured a year later — recent English sentiment has fallen to 54% positive, sixteen months after 9 million players jumped in, because the performance problems that greeted launch day were never fixed.

6 / 10

Reviewed

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The Serpent Rogue

A Team17-published fantasy alchemy-adventure about a masked Warden brewing potions and taming creatures to stop a spreading corruption -- genuinely atmospheric and well-loved by a devoted minority, but let down by threadbare tutorials, a locked camera and a developer who shipped two patches in its first two weeks and then largely went quiet.

6 / 10

Reviewed

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Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles

A deliberately combat-free, chore-and-exploration adventure that sold itself as a Zelda meets Stardew Valley hybrid -- reviewers who took that pitch literally have spent nine years saying the same thing, that the surface is genuinely lovely and almost every system underneath it is thinner than the comparison implies.

6 / 10

Reviewed

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Archipelago: Island Survival

A solo-developer survival RPG that stacks base building, faction reputation, dungeon crawling and an 11-category weapon system onto an escalating chain of islands — an enormous feature list for the price, but one that remains almost entirely unreviewed nearly two years after launch.

5.8 / 10

Reviewed

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Aeternum Infecti

A VR-supported open-world survival game whose entire, small early review sample dates from its first three days — a window that turns out to mostly predate two patches directly fixing nearly every specific bug those reviews describe.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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ARK: Survival Evolved

One of survival gaming's defining sandbox games, whose Mostly Positive 80% across 332,096 reviews now sits under a live, furious controversy — official servers sunset in 2023 to push players toward a paid Unreal Engine 5 remaster after reviewers cite an archived tweet promising that exact upgrade would be free, and a 2025 update reviewers say broke years of mods, maps and communities on the way out.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Citadel: Forged with Fire

A fantasy survival MMO built around the pitch of "everyone is a wizard" that hooked players for hundreds and even thousands of hours -- and whose own longest-invested fans now write reviews describing years of stalled development, dead servers and a game they keep hoping will come back to life.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Codex Lost

An ambitious, magic-only Soulslike built almost entirely by one developer, drawing genuine Dark Souls and Elden Ring comparisons for its interconnected world and spellcrafting, undercut by missing hit feedback, unrebindable controls and a scarcity of post-launch fixes for problems its own fans have been asking about since release.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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DeadboySkeleton

A cheap third-person action game built as an explicit fan tribute to the hip-hop collective TeamSesh — reviewed on its complete 35-review English sample, most of which turned out to be one-word fandom slogans, with the real, substantive verdict hiding underneath them.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Forspoken

A visually striking open-world action RPG whose parkour-and-magic traversal genuinely splits opinion between reviewers who call it a highlight and those who find it repetitive, but whose dominant, heavily-corroborated complaints — quippy, widely mocked dialogue and poor launch performance — proved severe enough that Square Enix dissolved developer Luminous Productions into itself barely three months after release.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Gray Zone Warfare

A hardcore open-world tactical extraction shooter with genuine "Ghost Recon meets Tarkov" ambition and a playerbase invested enough to log hundreds of hours each — reviewed here through a persistent, multiply-corroborated PvP cheating problem several reviewers say the developers actively suppress discussion of, alongside two years of genuinely frequent development.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Lost Skies

A co-op sky-sailing survival sandbox from Bossa Studios -- spiritual successor to their abandoned MMO Worlds Adrift -- that pairs a genuinely loved grapple-and-shipbuilding core with a rushed five-month Early Access run, a save-corrupting bug streak that outlived the 1.0 launch, and a development pace that stalled for the better part of a year before recent fixes started landing.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Nightingale

A gorgeous Gaslamp Fantasy survival-crafting game with a passionately invested fanbase, currently caught between real studio turmoil — confirmed layoffs and a Tencent acquisition — and a content-direction reversal that alienated some of its most dedicated long-time players.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Ravenbound

A Nordic-folklore action roguelite that launched with a secretly always-online requirement for a single-player game, patched it out within months after backlash, then wound down development entirely by October 2023 — leaving real structural complaints about exploration and weapon variety permanently unaddressed.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Skull and Bones

Ubisoft's long-delayed pirate action RPG launched to a Mixed reception it has never fully shaken — this review reads the full arc from launch-week server chaos through two and a half years of live-service seasons, and finds a genuinely enjoyed core loop that its own invested fans still won't recommend at full price.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Storm Seas

A solo-developed 18th-century Caribbean trading sim that pairs a genuinely layered supply-chain economy with a rough, one-day-old Early Access build — Mostly Negative across its first ten Steam reviews, with independent day-one reports of unbeatable enemy encounters, brutal docking damage and helm controls that pull you off the wheel to do anything else.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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The Ranchers

A years-in-the-making, Kickstarter-backed open-world farming sim that finally hit Early Access — and immediately ran into the one thing its audience cared most about. The co-op isn't the shared-farm co-op people bought it for, and the Mixed rating is mostly that discovery happening 392 times.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Windbound

A gorgeous, Breath of the Wild-indebted survival roguelite about a shipwrecked warrior sailing between procedural islands — praised for its art and boat-building, undercut by a identity crisis between story, survival and permadeath that most players never resolve, since fewer than one in eleven ever finishes it.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Zenith: Nexus

A VR-only MMO that launched to real excitement and $35 million in funding, then had its developer cease content work in 2024 and fold what paying customers bought into a free mode -- verified against press coverage, not just the review corpus that says the same thing.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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The Cursed Forest

A genuinely beautiful atmospheric horror walking sim, undercut by an over-reliance on cheap jump scares that reviewers say breaks the very atmosphere it built, plus persistent crash reports spanning years and a store page that openly lists unresolved compatibility issues.

5.4 / 10

Reviewed

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