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575 Open World games reviewed and scored, best first.
575 reviews
A factory-automation game whose endgame isn't a bigger number but a visible megastructure eclipsing a star. Five years into Early Access, the premise is still the best in the genre — the question is whether the game around it has caught up.
7.5 / 10
A survival-automation game that makes terraforming the actual win condition instead of a late-game side quest, tying every conveyor belt and machine you build to a planet visibly coming back to life around it.
7.5 / 10
A voxel survival game that welds on a real RPG skill tree and dares you to dig, sculpt and build inside a world that is actively trying to kill you on a clock. Two and a half years into Early Access, with a 1.0 date finally on the calendar, the question is whether the fog and the talent tree were ever really talking to each other.
7.5 / 10
The game that Epic Battle Fantasy 5's critics kept holding up as the better one — except it rates two and a half points lower than the sequel they were complaining about.
7.5 / 10
A single-player RPG built to feel like a classic MMORPG raid night, populated entirely by NPC "SimPlayers" who level, group up and loot alongside you — a genuinely novel hook wrapped around an Early Access game still finding its footing on UI, quest clarity and combat feedback.
7.5 / 10
A co-op liminal-space horror game that rode the Backrooms internet craze into Early Access in 2022, spent three years earning a huge audience on atmosphere and jump-scares with friends, and is still being actively patched onto new consoles four years later.
7.5 / 10
A debut game from a studio built by BioWare and Ubisoft veterans that pitches itself as "Monster Hunter meets Shadow of the Colossus" and, for most of its 1,764-review Steam audience, actually earns the comparison — while a substantial minority documents real unpolish, from a fiercely disliked inventory system to physics bugs that launch players into the air.
7.5 / 10
Nautilus Games' cozy digging platformer follows a lost kitten drilling through a meteor-scarred underground world in search of her mother, earning a "Very Positive" score for its gorgeous pixel art and heartfelt world, tempered by thin progression systems and the lack of an autosave.
7.5 / 10
Bethesda's sprawling open-world RPG has weathered two separate, nearly identical controversies seven years apart — Creation Club's paid mods in 2017, and a 2024 "next-gen update" that broke almost everything the modding community had built to fix it.
7.5 / 10
A deep, genuinely meditative agricultural sim that reviewers describe finding real therapeutic value in — held back for years by the same specific, franchise-wide complaint about hired-worker AI, and a biennial release cycle some longtime fans feel delivers too little new for the price.
7.5 / 10
A cozy, one-developer hybrid of gardening and light action combat, where the plants you grow become the spells you fight robotic deforesters with, earning warm, near-unanimous praise and heartfelt frustration from its own fans that so few people have discovered it.
7.5 / 10
Quite possibly the best arcade racer ever made, set in the best map the series has built — and its two most-upvoted negative reviews are from people who couldn't play it because they block telemetry.
7.5 / 10
A cozy creature-collector about caring for a magical island of frogs while piecing together a forgotten past, built on a Neko Atsume-meets-Virtual-Villagers charm and unusually thoughtful accessibility options, undercut for a vocal minority by clunky minigame controls and occasionally vague quest direction.
7.5 / 10
A warm, genuinely funny, lovingly hand-crafted open-world satirical adventure from established art-game studio Molleindustria, following a bitter, dying old man's last day in a Pittsburgh reimagined as an ecosocialist utopia, unanimously praised in its small early sample for exceptional writing and voice acting, tempered by a few dull gameplay stretches, a short runtime relative to price, and one reported dialogue-sequencing bug.
7.5 / 10
A widely acclaimed single-player crime saga bundled with an online mode whose 2017-2018 wrongful-ban epidemic became one of the most documented anti-cheat fairness disputes on Steam — improved since, but echoed by a related complaint that persists into 2024-2025.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developer, text-only ASCII RPG that closed a disciplined ten-week Early Access run with a genuinely huge 1.0 patch — 328 skills levelled by doing, 190 classes across seven tiers reached through evolve-or-merge choices, and a NZ$7.89 price with no ads, no microtransactions and no sound at all.
7.5 / 10
An open-world wuxia RPG spiritual successor to the beloved 1996 cult classic Heroes of Jin Yong, praised for genuinely deep freedom, customization and a sprawling martial-arts sandbox — hit at launch by a real, developer-acknowledged community/AI-assisted English translation that dominated negative reviews, and worked on continuously across more than three years of patches since.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, best-in-class open-world recreation of the wizarding world undercut by combat and side content a large share of critical reviewers call repetitive and shallow — and, since early 2025, a wave of high-vote negative reviews over a new privacy policy and EULA that reviewers say arrived with a modding update and made opting out of data sharing nearly impossible.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, unusually faithful Indiana Jones game with excellent puzzles — and hardware requirements strict enough that its second most-upvoted critic warns you'll discover the problem after the refund window closes.
7.5 / 10
A Puzzle Game That Refuses To Explain Itself In & Out, released August 31, 2026 by solo developer and publisher KASTEN, is a $4.99 first-person puzzle game set inside a cold, clini
7.5 / 10
A serene climbing adventure whose art, sound and central mechanic draw near-unanimous praise, undercut by a consistent complaint — voiced even inside its own top positive review — that a three-to-six hour runtime and static, letter-based storytelling ask a lot for the price, with barely a third of players ever reaching the ending.
7.5 / 10
A squad-based open-world RPG with no main quest, no level cap on how far you can fall, and an engine that has been fighting its own interface since a Steam Early Access launch in March 2013 — five and a half years before the "release date" most storefronts show. Its systemic freedom is genuinely unmatched; its performance and UI never caught up to the ambition.
7.5 / 10
An ambitious, unusually grounded medieval RPG whose historical immersion and storytelling are still praised even by its harshest critics — undercut by a combat system reviewers say only really works one-on-one, persistent bugs eight years on, and two fresh 2026 controversies: a retroactive EULA change requiring a third-party account, and an allegation that Warhorse replaced a human translator with AI.
7.5 / 10
RGG Studio's dual-protagonist send-off for Kazuma Kiryu and showcase for Ichiban Kasuga is the best-reviewed game the series has ever made by critics, and Very Positive on Steam besides — but its own launch was defined almost as much by locking New Game+ and postgame content behind paid DLC editions, a decision even one of the game's own voice actors publicly condemned.
7.5 / 10
