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261 Open World games reviewed and scored, best first.
261 reviews
A falling-sand physics factory game — every grain, drop and spark is a simulated resource — that went into Early Access on 13 August 2026 to a near-unanimous reception, backed by Hooded Horse and pre-release press comparing it to Factorio, Terraria and Noita all at once.
8 / 10
A co-op drug-empire sim that turned into one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of the past two years, built almost single-handedly and beloved for exactly the reasons Breaking Bad was — right up until the empire is built and there's nothing left to do with it.
8 / 10
One of the most-loved games on Steam at 98% across 155,976 reviews — and the two loudest criticisms on its store page are complaints about an Early Access build it left behind nine years ago.
8 / 10
A cozy management game about dying, and one of the few games that earns the crying its reviews describe. The management half is fetch quests and minigames — which is the honest thing to tell you, because the store page sells it the other way round.
8 / 10
Fifteen years on, Skyrim's open world is still the reason people play it — walk in any direction and something is there. The systems underneath that world, from swordplay to loot to the dialogue tree, have aged a lot less gracefully, and Bethesda has spent a decade finding new ways to resell the same game. Reviewed as Skyrim Special Edition, the version Steam actually sells you today.
8 / 10
A game whose central mechanic is a 400-day countdown that runs whether you play or not — the most literal treatment of idle time anyone has attempted, and it's 92.3% positive six years on.
8 / 10
A terraforming survival-crafting game that turns a barren world into a breathable one in front of your eyes — beloved for exactly that transformation, and honestly criticized by a consistent minority for being addictive without offering much real friction or danger.
8 / 10
A puzzle game built around one genuinely brilliant idea — photographs you place in the world become the world, letting you reshape reality by swapping what a picture shows for what's actually there — undercut by a runtime and a script that its own fans agree don't live up to the mechanic carrying them.
8 / 10
A survival-crafting game with action-RPG combat and a boss list instead of a tech tree, built around a PvP fantasy that most of its players quietly opt out of. Two years past 1.0, with the studio now calling it content-complete, it's worth being precise about which version of this game you're actually signing up for.
8 / 10
Shiro Games' open-world mercenary RPG treats a company of sellswords as a small business — wages, food, gear repair and prisoners are the real spreadsheet, and combat is what happens when that spreadsheet goes wrong.
8 / 10
A long-running brawler franchise's biggest gamble in years — swapping real-time combat for a turn-based JRPG system — paid off with the series' best critical reception yet, though a vocal minority of longtime fans still argue the new combat never matched the writing around it.
8 / 10
Villa Gorilla's pinball-metroidvania hybrid won a BAFTA for Best Debut and sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam eight years on -- a genuinely inventive idea that a small but consistent minority of players say the traversal design never quite lives up to, in a game its one-off studio never got the chance, or perhaps never wanted, to follow up.
8 / 10
A voxel zombie survival game built entirely around a scheduled siege that arrives on a known clock and gets worse every time. Eleven years in Early Access ended in July 2024 — the core loop is still one of the smartest in the genre, but the years show in how it looks, runs and argues with its own community about what it used to be.
7.5 / 10
Ubisoft rebuilt Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag from the ground up on the current Anvil engine rather than simply upscaling it, and the parts that made the 2013 original a fan favourite — Edward Kenway, the Jackdaw, the whole rotten, beautiful Caribbean — survive the trip largely intact. What doesn't survive as cleanly is some of the combat identity Ubisoft chose to strip out along the way.
7.5 / 10
The most beautiful open world Ubisoft has built, and the clearest case study in gaming of a cash shop reaching backwards into a game's design. Eight years on it costs NZ$19.99 and holds 89% — but the level gates it built around its XP boosters are still exactly where they were.
7.5 / 10
A beloved co-op space-building sandbox with three distinct eras in its review history — an adored Early Access, a 1.0 launch derailed by an EULA backlash that had nothing to do with the game, and a 2025 wave of long-term fans warning newcomers about DLC and premium currency arriving after a "strategic acquisition."
7.5 / 10
A co-op game about walking and talking with friends, from the Untitled Goose Game studio — shipped two days ago without a separate voice volume slider, so half its reviews are the same polite request written 1,400 different ways.
7.5 / 10
Koji Igarashi's Kickstarter-funded spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night is still a deep, generously-supported Metroidvania seven years on -- but a December 2025 switch to requiring Epic Online Services has visibly dragged its recent review score down from Very Positive to Mostly Positive.
7.5 / 10
A free ASCII-art browser game that opens on a candy counter and nothing else, then spends the next several hours quietly revealing a full RPG underneath — one of the genre's founding tricks, and still one of the hardest to pull off honestly.
7.5 / 10
Pearl Abyss's massive, visually stunning open-world action-adventure launched to a rocky Mixed reception — a specific, documented 51% positive Steam score in its first days — before climbing to Very Positive within a week and staying there through five months of relentless, near-weekly patches, even as a real, ongoing thread of criticism argues the game never fully shakes its origins as an MMORPG stripped of its multiplayer.
7.5 / 10
An open-world zombie survival game with a genuine cult following that grew after release — launched on PC in 2021 with one of the most severe, best-documented data-collection controversies this library has seen, since resolved with an opt-out but still shaping how the game is remembered.
7.5 / 10
A celebrated, GOTY-winning BioWare fantasy epic whose Steam review page has spent six straight years dominated by one complaint that has nothing to do with the game — the mandatory EA launcher, which reviewers are still calling out for breaking the game as recently as this year.
7.5 / 10
Capcom's open-world action RPG is built around a genuinely strange idea — AI companions on loan from other players' worlds — wrapped in a combat system that rewards climbing monsters like furniture and a map that punishes you for wanting to skip the walk. Two-plus years of patches have quietly answered most of its launch complaints; the review score never fully recovered from asking anyway.
7.5 / 10
A survival MMO that actually earns its licence — stillsuits, spice addiction and sandworms all function as real systems — held back by an endgame that still leans too hard on forced PvP for players who came for the desert, not the fight.
7.5 / 10
