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575 Open World games reviewed and scored, best first.
575 reviews
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 short, GBC-styled metroidvania about a whip-wielding kid named Alex exploring ancient ruins, with a near-unanimous Steam sample praising its clever level design, charm, and generous accessibility options despite thin combat and dialogue.
7.9 / 10
Read review of Raider Kid and the Ruby Chest Review: A Tiny, Near-Perfect Game Boy Metroidvania
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
A charming, DS-era-styled cozy train game built around the beloved passenger runs of Zelda's Spirit Tracks earns rapturous nostalgia-fuelled praise, though poor Steam Deck performance and rigid passenger mechanics frustrate a meaningful slice of its audience.
7.5 / 10
From Itch.io Demo To A Minecraft-Meets-Terraria Early Access Launch Allumeria launched into Steam Early Access on August 28, 2026, from solo(-ish) developer Infinimelon, closing ou
7.5 / 10
Analgesic Productions' first 3D game turns exploration itself into the combat system, wrapping a strange, sincere story of memory and identity around a hidden-in-plain-sight overworld that critics adore and a vocal share of players found thinner than promised.
7.5 / 10
Alexander Bruce's solo-developed, seven-years-in-the-making puzzle game builds an entire first-person world on non-Euclidean geometry and broken expectations — reviewers describe it in strikingly unusual terms, some insisting it must be played despite admitting it often isn't conventionally fun, while a specific, recurring accessibility warning about motion sickness deserves equal weight.
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 Chemistry Simulator That Happens to Be a Game Atomcraft launched into full release on Steam on July 23, 2026, from solo-developer-led studio Triplejump, following a demo and Stea
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 gorgeous, gentle puzzle game about coaxing forgotten Victorian-era plants back to life inside a stately English manor, critically acclaimed and BAFTA-nominated — with a value complaint so consistent across its own reviews, positive and negative alike, that it's less a criticism than the single thing almost everyone who's played it agrees on.
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
Gambling With Your Life at the Crimson Casino Casino Casualty takes the FNAF formula of being trapped overnight with hostile animatronics and swaps the usual security-office surviv
7.5 / 10
A six-year solo passion project built without RPG Maker or any off-the-shelf framework, praised by CRPG veterans as a genuine, deep throwback in the vein of Jeff Vogel's work — worn down over a 90-to-100-hour playthrough by a widely-reported glut of low-stakes trash combat that even its biggest fans say the back half leans on too heavily.
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
Surgent Studios' FMV-infused psychological horror sends a struggling actor into a producer's mansion to find his missing rival, earning a "Very Positive" score for its star-studded performances and unsettling atmosphere, held back by uneven pacing and a divisive second half.
7.5 / 10
A Reality Show You Can't Vote Yourself Off Of Dolls: The Hunt drops up to four players into a warped, surreal world where contestants in an inescapable reality show are hunted
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
