Once Human
A genuinely strange free survival MMO whose defining flaw — seasonal servers that wiped everything you built — has quietly been fixed, while its veterans have moved on to a different argument entirely.
7 / 10
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Open World reviews
261 Open World games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
261 reviews
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
The closing chapter of the rebooted Survivor trilogy swapped Crystal Dynamics for Eidos-Montreal and gunfights for stealth and puzzles -- a deliberate pivot that split reviewers in 2018 and, eight years and a Definitive Edition later, is still what most players argue about, alongside a specific progress-blocking puzzle bug that outlived several rounds of patches.
7 / 10
SnowRunner
A relentlessly demanding, meditative off-road trucking sim that reviewers describe with genuine reverence and dark humor in equal measure — undercut for years by unreliable multiplayer and crossplay stability, and an extensive DLC roster reviewers say pushes toward $200 for the full experience.
7 / 10
Solar Ash
A sci-fi skating-platformer from Heart Machine, the studio behind Hyper Light Drifter -- Very Positive on Steam and genuinely loved for its movement and art, but shadowed across years of reviews by a consistent verdict that it never quite lives up to the pedigree that sold it.
7 / 10
Sonic Frontiers
Sonic's first open-world entry, warmly received for boss fights and writing that reviewers say the series hasn't matched in years -- while a growing, high-vote complaint about Denuvo's always-online requirement has nothing to do with hedgehogs at all.
7 / 10
Starbound
A ten-year-old space sandbox that still earns a Very Positive rating on the strength of its crafting-and-exploration loop and its modding scene — until you check the dates and find the developer has shipped one hotfix since 2019, then marked the tenth anniversary of its 1.0 launch with a vinyl record instead of an update, which is currently tanking the recent-review score in real time.
7 / 10
Sword x Staff
Boltray's "Third Way RPG" genuinely earns its hybrid pitch, blending exploration and auto-battle strategy with idle progression, but its skill-gacha economy and paid-only enhancement currency pull hard once the early zones stop carrying you for free.
7 / 10
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales
A gorgeous HD-2D homage to Zelda-style action-adventure from the Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default team, undercut by a chatty fairy companion, a single overworld recycled across four time periods, and a full price that a meaningful share of its own reviewers say the content doesn't earn.
7 / 10
Read review of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales
The Candle
A NZ$7.39 first-person survival horror game built entirely from a streamer's improvised joke pitch, sold with "Idler" as a top-voted community tag despite having no idle or incremental progression anywhere in it.
7 / 10
The Greenening
Erkberg Games' short incremental about washing ash off a dead planet with a rain-cloud and a skill tree — a review of how far a three-hour, five-dollar cozy game can stretch its one good idea before it runs out of road.
7 / 10
theHunter: Call of the Wild
Nine years, 60 DLC packs and 201,251 reviews — and unlike other DLC-heavy giants, here the store really is the complaint, because what's behind the paywall isn't extra content but the equipment you need.
7 / 10
The Knightling
A shield-surfing, Jak-and-Daxter-flavoured open-world action-adventure whose movement, art and award-winning soundtrack draw the kind of praise that gets a game called "the PS2 game we never got," undercut by year-long unfixed performance stutter and a combat system a large share of its own reviewers call the weakest part of the package.
7 / 10
The Last Caretaker
A genuinely beloved Early Access survival-crafting game about a lone robot scavenging a drowned Earth to save the last of humanity, Very Positive across more than 12,000 reviews for a premise and atmosphere reviewers describe with real passion — undercut by severe, well-documented performance problems, a persistent unresolved crash bug, and a motion-sickness accessibility gap that several devoted fans describe as painful to keep flagging.
7 / 10
The Lure
A free, twenty-minute psychological horror vertical slice built around a genuinely unsettling premise — you're trapped inside a mimic that's rebuilding a familiar environment around you to keep you docile before it eats you — with visual ambition well beyond what its tiny indie studio should be able to pull off.
7 / 10
Voxel Miner: Dwellers of The Deep
A solo developer's nearly two-year passion project, a procedurally-generated first-person voxel mining and exploration game with light AI-uprising narrative, released for NZ$1.49 in June 2023 with a perfect, if very small, positive review record.
7 / 10
Hello Kitty Island Adventure
A genuinely charming, actively supported Sanrio cozy-life-sim that became a real viral phenomenon, undercut by real mobile-port friction on price and time-gating, and a documented monetisation reversal that a meaningful share of its own most dedicated players say broke trust.
6.7 / 10
Afterimage
A hand-drawn, ambitiously huge metroidvania set in a ruined fantasy world -- reviewers are close to unanimous that the art is gorgeous, but well over half the negative reviews sampled for this piece raise the same specific complaint: a map so large and under-signposted that players spend hours lost rather than exploring.
6.5 / 10
Assassin's Creed Valhalla
A visually striking, content-packed Viking open-world RPG whose negative sample is dominated by a specific, well-documented complaint — a genuinely 15-20 hour story stretched with repetitive filler into 65-plus hours — compounded by a notorious two-year wait for Steam achievements and crash reports still arriving more than three years after release.
6.5 / 10
Asterigos: Curse of the Stars
A Greek-and-Roman-mythology action RPG that plays like Immortals Fenyx Rising crossed with a lighter Dark Souls — strongest in its opening hours, and still missing basic quality-of-life features four years and nine patches later.
6.5 / 10
Atomfall
A 1950s British nuclear-disaster survival-mystery whose atmosphere and detective-driven structure draw real, specific praise even from its own harshest critics, who nonetheless argue the game never commits to being any one thing — and whose most-upvoted single complaint isn't about design at all, but an undisclosed always-online requirement on a single-player game.
6.5 / 10
Avoidvania
A tiny, no-combat runner/metroidvania about a cat who can't fight and can only sprint past danger — a nearly five-year-old Early Access project the developer just released for free after its funding fell through, reviewed on its complete review sample old and new.
6.5 / 10
Botworld Odyssey
A mobile-to-PC creature collector that deliberately stripped out its predecessor's ads, energy timers and microtransactions, earning real goodwill for the conversion even as reviewers say the underlying grind — especially past level 20 — followed it over anyway.
6.5 / 10
Cloudpunk
A gorgeous voxel-built cyberpunk delivery-driver story that most of its own fans agree is close to a walking (or rather, flying) simulator — Very Positive at 86.2% across 8,209 reviews, propped up almost entirely by atmosphere and writing, with an unusually large and specific negative corpus arguing the actual moment-to-moment gameplay barely exists.
6.5 / 10
Conan Exiles
A brutal, deeply detailed survival sandbox set in Robert E. Howard's Hyboria that's held a genuinely devoted following since 2018, now carrying real, current frustrations over monetisation additions and mandatory online requirements introduced since Funcom's acquisition by Tencent.
6.5 / 10