Open-world games build engaging landscapes with colorful characters and scenic locales. Players can jump in and out of these worlds, whether to continue the main story or just to mess around and get into whatever trouble comes their way. That’s the beauty of open-world games, they offer amazing environments for players to experience while still allowing freedom.
While every open-world brings something unique to the gaming adventure, some of them can be marred by a slow start, oftentimes to build up the story and characters. A rough start to a game can be a major deterrent for any player, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the game isn’t a fantastic journey.
10 Far Cry 2
The second game in the Far Cry series gets a bad rap, namely for the annoying medicine prompts and choppy technical issues, but it still delivers on the realism factor. Players are dropped off in the African landscape with little assistance from the game. One wrong turn can spell doom for novice players exploring the landscape. While this makes things a bit bumpy at the start, the game picks up the pace in the second half, offering new areas to explore, bigger guns to shoot, and easier gameplay mechanics.
9 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Perhaps the series most responsible for bringing open-world games to the masses, Grand Theft Auto is still a leader in building exciting cities and characters. While the beginnings of GTA games are always slower than the explosive missions that occur later, San Andreas is notorious for cramming some really annoying missions into its first section. The painstakingly difficult train mission and lack of weapons make the introductory component more frustrating than players might expect. Thankfully the rest of the game is smoother sailing, featuring some of the most outrageously fun missions in the whole franchise.
8 Sleeping Dogs
Hong Kong makes for an amazing open-world in Sleeping Dogs. From the colorful neon lights to the animated city streets waiting to be explored, the game packages an engrossing open-world filled with intrigue and vice.
The game is slow to start, putting emphasis on the story and main characters rather than dynamic missions and gameplay. This shouldn’t deter potential players, as the action certainly picks up as the plot unfolds.
7 Batman: Arkham Origins
Comic book video games are always going to be judged down to the last pixel by die-hard fans, and naturally, the Batman series is no exception. Batman: Arkham Origins is the prequel game to the Arkham series, positioning Batman in a fight to save Gotham on Christmas Eve. The game jumps around a bit at the beginning, starting with a prison break before jumping into the city itself. The story and missions are a bit disorganized, especially during the introduction, but as the game progresses players will be treated to a collection of great side quests, fun puzzles, and some of the best boss fights in the whole franchise.
6 The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
The introductory sequences of The Elder Scrolls games are legendary in and of themselves, although Morrowind is something of an anomaly. The game simply drops players off in a strange alien land to fend for themselves. The lack of direction and HUD makes the first few hours of Morrowind quite challenging, as new players are forced to find weapons and armor to ensure they don’t die as soon as they step out of town. The game’s sweetest moments come later, as players learn their way around the gameplay and become accustomed to the lay of the land.
5 S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow Of Chernobyl
Survival horror and open-world games go together like chocolate and peanut butter, with notable game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. leading in terms of scares per square foot. The first game is not a walk in the park, heavily emphasizing the survival aspects of gameplay over most other features. New players are exposed to a lawless land with mutated monsters, radiation pockets, and rogue gangs of trigger-happy bandits. The realistic shooting mechanics and lack of equipment make the beginning of this horror classic tougher than what most players might be expecting.
4 Dead Rising
Dealing with zombies overflowing a shopping mall sounds straightforward enough, bash and slash them by the horde and then move on to the next swarm. But the first Dead Rising doesn’t shy away from mixing things up. At the start of the game, players are exposed to the confusion of the undead invasion without much of a clear trajectory. The first few hours of the game are spent finding a few survivors, progressing the story along, and introducing a few characters. The game is unforgiving early on, as players are low-level and have few health bars or item slots.
3 Assassin’s Creed II
The exposition of a video game can be dramatic and flashy while still introducing players to the key gameplay elements. The Assassin’s Creed series rarely changes the core mechanics of its games, although the second game significantly built off the first game with new features and characters, helping the franchise to become one of the most popular in video game history.
Assassin’s Creed II still takes its sweet time getting to the actual assassinations, more so than subsequent games in the series. Albeit, the game has to take time to introduce the themes of Ezio’s story.
2 Red Dead Redemption
Building a massive world that lives and breathes as its own entity is easier said than done. Rockstar Games always demonstrates masterful world-building and excels in making every inch of a map interesting. The first Red Dead Redemption is no exception. The Western theme is a huge draw and the iconic campaign is still one of the best of the modern gaming era. Still, the beginning of the game is slow and takes a decent amount of time to set the pace before fully cutting the player loose to experience the world to its full potential.
1 Crackdown
Most games usually get more fun as the plot moves forward and the challenges become more demanding. The first Crackdown game keeps things interesting by leveling up the player and greatly expanding upon their super-powered abilities as more areas of the map are unlocked. The gameplay doesn’t change too much beyond “go here and kill this person,” but the methods of attacking an enemy stronghold are much more diverse and thrilling when players can super-jump or run lightning-fast. To get to that point, players will have to spend a few hours grinding to level up their abilities.
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