With many open world games being basked in America, whether its the Grand Theft Auto series satirizing US culture and the idea of the American dream, Or Far Cry borrowing climates from various areas, few games give Europe the due diligence it deserves.
Europe is full of different cultures and mesmerizing architecture that would be great to explore in a video game given today’s physics and graphics. But as the popularity of open world games still continues to grow, few of them look for influence across the pond, favoring fictional worlds or the east or west coast of North America. However, though the options are scarce, there are sandbox games that take advantage of Europe’s aesthetics.
10 Grand Theft Auto: London
GTA might be the most popular Rockstar series there is, but there are some older entries that players might not have heard of. GTA was the series that started it all, and though the game was top down and the series hadn’t reached the three dimensional worlds at this point, London was as rendered as well as it ever could. The game was based in the 1960s and though it was met with a mixed reception from critics, the game won a BAFTA, which is almost certainly due to players seeing new countries represented in video games.
9 Getaway – London
Getaway was one of the few successful imitations of Grand Theft Auto, as instead of creating another American metropolitan or putting their eggs in different baskets by featuring several different cities, Team Soho decided to focus on London only and relish the cockney slang and winding streets. As far as GTA clones go, Getaway (and its sequel) was one of the best of its generation and still remains great to this day.
8 Assassin’s Creed: Unity – Paris
It seems like Assassin’s Creed is the only AAA series that doffs its cap to Europe, and the rest of the world, as almost every game in the entry is features a huge European city to explore. Whether it’s walking over cobbled stones in Victorian England, battling vikings in Norway, or taking down the Byzantine empire in Constantinople, the Ubisoft series is synonymous with open world maps in Europe. Assassin’s Creed: Unity is the best example of this thanks in to its dense exploration of Paris.
7 Midnight Club II – Paris
Though EA jumped on the popularity of The Fast and the Furious franchise quickly by releasing Need For Speed Underground, an arcade style racer with souped up Japanese imports, Midnight Club was doing it long before that. MC could be seen as the Pro Evolution Soccer of arcade racers, as the popularity of Need for Speed dwarfed the series, just like FIFA did to PES, and Midnight Club didn’t have any licensed cars, just like PES didn’t have licensed kits.
But despite this, Midnight Club was the ultimate game of the two racers due to having the ability to free roam and allowing players make their own route to each checkpoint. Better still, the series went oversees, with the best example of this being in Paris. Additionally, if players had a car with good enough acceleration, they could drive up the Louvre in Paris, which has had fans wishing the series would be brought back.
6 The Italian Job – Italy
There are no awards for guessing which open world The Italian Job dabbles in. The Italian Job features a fun interpretation of Turin (and London too), and though it was released over thirty years after the release of one of the most classic movies ever made, the game is surprisingly faithful to the movie and played fairly smoothly. Though the chase sequence at the end of the film has been hilariously recreated in GTA V.
5 Wheelman – Barcelona
Wheelman may have been nothing more than a failed experiment in which Vin Diesel tried to dominate games consoles just like the box office. It’s safe to say that Wheelman performed as well as the awful Fast and Furious tie in games, but Wheelman’s gameplay handled surprisingly well. Better yet, the game is based in a fully open Barcelona that was littered with destructible objects and Catalonia’s criminal underworld.
4 Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 – Barcelona
THUG2 was the most polarizing entry in the entire Tony Hawk series, as it was seen as jumping the shark to some fans, but also seen as expanding the brand’s horizons to others, who are begging for a remake. But one thing that the game did best was expanding the globe trotting locations the series became known for in to gigantic maps (for the time) and making it completely interactive. Barcelona is many fans’ favourite, not only of the game but of the entire series.
3 Div3r – Nice/Istanbul
It’s no secret that Grand Theft Auto inspired a wave, an absolute unstoppable tsunami, of knock off games created by developers who thought a bare bones open world and basic third person mechanics could compete with Rockstar. Well, Driv3r is the epitome of that era.
The developer didn’t realize what it was that made GTA so great. The open world of GTA wasn’t fun because players could decide which lane to be in, but because the world was so interactive and full of secrets. However, as empty and uninteractive as Driv3r is, it has full cities of both Nice and Istanbul, and it looks beautiful just cruising around. Admiring the polygons that make up the beautiful Nice terraces is kind of quaint.
2 Test Drive Unlimited 2 – Ibiza
Unfortunately, Test Drive Unlimited 2 wasn’t the best of sequels, as it was plagued from the start as the developer crumbled from the pressure of trying to create a completely online racing simulator. However, the game did live up to the series’ impressive visuals with a rendering of Ibiza that rivaled its predecessor’s amalgam of Hawaii islands. The rendering of Ibiza still kept it exciting to roam around, despite its bugs and glitches.
1 Just Cause 3 – Fictional City of Medici
No other game has ever embraced being an open world adventure as much as the Just Cause series. Though Grand Theft Auto Online continues to be this ever-expanding unstoppable machine with limitless possibilities, offline is extremely linear comparatively. Just Cause 3 is the apex of offline open worlds, as it’s vast, there are surprises around every corner, and it’s based in Medici, which might be a fictional place, but is still based on the Mediterranean islands.
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