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261 Open World games reviewed and scored, best first.
261 reviews
Level-5's sequel swaps Studio Ghibli's direct involvement for a hybrid of open-world action RPG and kingdom-building sim -- gorgeous and generous with content, but eight years on its combat, story and half-baked army battles are the recurring complaints even among fans who put hundreds of hours into it.
7.5 / 10
Barrel Smash Studios' two-person Early Access debut drowns the world and asks you to build a colony on whatever's still floating — rafts, sinking islands, shark attacks and a corporate conspiracy buried in scavenged bunkers, all wrapped around a Rimworld-flavoured survivor sim.
7.5 / 10
Widely regarded as Piranha Bytes' finest work and the true spiritual successor to their acclaimed Gothic series, Risen carries a remarkably stable, decade-spanning structural complaint — a genuinely strong first half giving way to a repetitive, fetch-quest-heavy final chapter that reviewers writing in 2016 and 2026 alike describe almost identically.
7.5 / 10
Jagex takes twenty-five years of RuneScape skill icons and welds them onto a Valheim-shaped survival loop. Fifteen months into Early Access, with a 1.0 date now on the calendar, the question is whether the skilling actually survived the move or just changed clothes.
7.5 / 10
Endnight's sequel to The Forest is the best-looking survival-horror island you can build a base on, and its rockiest reviews — mostly written in the first weeks after launch — argued a beautiful map was hiding surprisingly little to actually do. Recent sentiment suggests the gap between the two has narrowed since.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely excellent, atmospheric successor to one of survival gaming's most beloved titles, selling two million copies in twelve hours — whose launch was immediately overshadowed by a well-documented controversy over an unusually restrictive EULA from publisher Krafton, set against a pre-existing, publicly reported dispute over developer bonuses that the community rallied around in real time.
7.5 / 10
A first-person open-world RPG built openly in the shape of Skyrim, but set in a bleaker, more literary Arthurian world where night itself turns hostile — ambitious, well-written and visibly under-budgeted in the faces of the people telling its story.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, ambitious philosophical puzzle sequel that expands everything the original did, which a large and vocal share of veteran fans argue is exactly the problem — bigger worlds, more dialogue and easier puzzles than the tight, focused original they loved.
7.5 / 10
A charming, Pikmin-inspired storybook fantasy adventure about two runaway children commanding a herd of forest spirits -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam for its art and atmosphere, with a consistent, specific complaint that its combat and controls never match the genre giant it invites comparison to.
7.5 / 10
A charming, gorgeously realised 3D exploration game about being shrunk down inside an ordinary suburban house, whose near-unanimous acclaim sits on top of a small but consistent minority report that the collecting loop underneath the charm doesn't have much depth once the novelty wears off.
7.5 / 10
A cheap, finite incremental about piloting a ship from Earth to the edge of the observable universe, with an unusually healthy completion rate to back up its warm reception, let down by a user interface that splits into too many screens as it grows and a back stretch several reviewers say outstays its welcome.
7.5 / 10
A stick-figure comedy RPG from the Kingdom of Loathing team that landed among 2017's most acclaimed indies -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam nine years later -- while carrying a serious, publicly documented allegation against its director that a real share of its own reviews now raise unprompted.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, enormous free wuxia open world with some of the most charming systems design in any live-service RPG — welded to an energy meter, five battle passes and a cosmetic gacha that its own store page describes as cosmetics-only.
7.5 / 10
An alien-planet survival and building sandbox — described by one of its own players as "stitched from Don't Starve, Terraria, Stardew Valley and RimWorld" — that launched into Early Access with a punishing hunger system and has spent thirteen straight days of near-daily patches turning early frustration into a genuinely glowing recent reception.
7.5 / 10
A handsome late-Ming soulslike carrying a Mixed badge that English-speaking players didn't give it — and a post-launch patch that changed the story out from under the people who'd finished it.
7.5 / 10
Kuro Games' answer to Genshin Impact swaps careful elemental chemistry for a faster, parry-driven combo system and a stamina-free traversal kit — and two years of patches have turned a rocky, heavily-criticised launch into one of Steam's best-reviewed live-service action RPGs. The question this review actually answers is what that trade costs you.
7.5 / 10
A shipwreck-survival action RPG that turns rescuing NPCs into a settlement-building system and backs it with some of the fastest, most readable real-time combat Nihon Falcom has ever shipped. The PC version carries genuine baggage from a rough 2018 launch and a since-rewritten English script, but the game underneath both has aged well.
7.5 / 10
A Soviet-wasteland spiritual successor to Fallout 1 and 2 that a large, engaged Steam community calls the real deal — turn-based combat, GURPS-inspired character building, and branching quests, undercut by punishing early-game difficulty spikes and combat AI several reviewers call the game's weakest system.
7.4 / 10
An anime open-world action RPG that was built as a mobile gacha game, lost its publisher, won a legal fight to come back as a single-purchase Steam release, and still carries every scar of where it came from — for better and for worse.
7.2 / 10
A staff-wielding metroidvania that took six years to reach Steam, changing developer partway through — smooth movement and near-unanimous praise for its pixel-and-3D art sit alongside a shallow combat loop and a reward economy that gives exploration almost nothing to find.
7 / 10
A smaller-scoped "return to form" for the series whose Steam launch was marred by a severe Ubisoft Connect authentication error, but whose more durable complaint is that the game itself feels generic and forgettable relative to the franchise's high points — sentiment has since recovered meaningfully as launch-specific issues faded.
7 / 10
A story-driven action RPG from DON'T NOD where an emotionally rich central relationship and genuinely difficult moral choices are widely praised, while the open world built to hold them draws a remarkably consistent complaint from its own most invested players — it's simply too big for the game inside it.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, Kickstarted turn-based RPG built from Joe Madureira's 1990s comic, praised almost universally for its art and combat variety and just as consistently accused of burying both under grinding and pacing that never speeds up -- nine years on, the achievement data backs up exactly where players quit.
7 / 10
MercurySteam's dark fantasy forging-adventure spent a year as a PlayStation and Epic Games Store exclusive before reaching Steam alongside a substantial Version 2.0 update. Its combat divides reviewers sharply, and one escort-quest section is disliked with rare unanimity.
7 / 10
