
Yakuza 0's open world may not have the same scale as Elden Ring, but boy is it filled with colour and personality and bicycles and thugs.

What else should I be playing if I like this? The rest of the Yakuza series! Here's the order we'd recommend you tackle them in. Each formula one race course, or Italian town, or quaint manor house has so many ways to creatively kill off the bad guys. What makes Hitman such a great open world game is the freedom you've got from the off. He's good at garroting folks and making quips while garroting folks, and it's up to you to deploy the garrote, and sometimes explosive rubber ducks, to assassinate high profile people. You control Agent 47, a bald man with a barcode on the back of his head. Hitman: World Of Assassionation may not spring to mind as a traditional 'open world game', but hey, it's all of Hitman 2 and 3's offerings bundled into one mega-package of mini-sandboxes. Hitman: Blood Money is excellent, as is Contracts. What else should I play if I like this? The many Hitman games that came before it. Hitman: World Of Assassination Developer: IO Interactive You might get involved in some races, you never know! Oh, and the soundtrack by Mark Sparling is lush and relaxing. There are many other wonderful bits about the game, but it's bumping into other hikers that makes the climb particularly memorable. There's fishing by river banks or diving off cliff edges and soaring over to hidden treasures.

And so, off you pop, on a calming ascent which you can tackle any way you'd like. You play as a cute penguin who decides that they'd quite like to reach the summit of Hawk Peak. Don't discount Alba: A Wildlife Adventure or Tchia, if you're after a whimsical tour of some lovely countryside.Ī Short Hike takes the crown for the loveliest game on this list.
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What else should I play if I like this? Give Donut County and Frog Detective a whirl for similar, stress free vibes. We might just include them in a future update. Don't be afraid to fight for your own favourites in the comments if you think they've been missed out.

And to make the entries below easy to follow, you'll find links to all of the best open worlds on this list. Expect us to keep an eye on the heavy hitters as they evolve, as well as any smaller entries that pique our interests, too.

Not to discount some of the biggest games ever, right? Grand Theft Auto is an almost universally known thing at this point. Cyberpunk 2077's upcoming Phantom Liberty DLC will look to convert those who ditched the game after its rocky launch, for instance. Get open worlds right and they can be, genuinely, spectacular forays into the most memorable spaces. Despite not being very good, Arkane's Redfall was an open world swing by Microsoft in the hopes it would cash in on the sandbox-likers. I mean, we've got Bethesda's much anticipated Starfield arriving soon, and we're all hoping it lives up the hype and isn't a stinking sci-fi mess. Yep, open world games are still a big deal in 2023. So, join us as we've put together our list of the 10 best open world games to play in 2023. There are some exceptions to the rule, but we reckon they're justified because some worlds are too special to discount. You know, the sort of games where you're let loose on some open turf, perhaps with an objective, perhaps not, but always with an eye to see what's over yonder. The best open world games can mean a lot of things, but here we're going with the strongest selection of games set in a sandbox, where the onus is less on survival and more on exploration or questing.
