After finishing Red Dead Redemption on Xenia, I have a weird itch to play some more of the open world games I’ve missed. I was just completely exhausted with sandbox games by around 2013 and avoided all of them, even the ones I heard good things about.
Some of the games on my “maybe check out” list:
Sleeping Dogs - Apparently a really good GTA clone. The Hong Kong setting and melee combat make it stand out.
Assassin’s Creed 4 - The two additional Ezio games and Assassin’s Creed 3 were big factors in why I got completely burned out on open world games but the ship combat is supposed to be really good- also pirates are cool. It should also predate the series turning into a singleplayer MMO thing.
Far Cry 3 - Never got around to playing this despite all the praise. I know the FC3 style got milked to death but there’s probably a reason it became used as a template for Ubisoft games. Wasn’t this also the game with the retrofuturistic 1980s DLC campaign with Michael Biehn?
Mad Max - From what I’ve seen this is a pretty generic open world game in the vein of the later Arkham games but it seemed like a pretty faithful recreation of the Mad Max world in video game form.
Black Flag was fun. Mediocre AC game but great fucking around being a pirate game.
The Blood Dragon mini-campaign for FC3 was hilarious if you’re old enough to remember late-80s early 90s sci-fi action movies.
The Mad Max game was a surprisingly fun and well made game. The core game loop of driving around causing mayhem in your car is really well done. The on foot combat is fun. And it nails the Mad Max theme of hard, scarred people trying to fix the broken world they’ve found themselves in and make it a little softer. Good representation of disabled people. And just overall a lot of fun.
Mad Max can get grindy but otherwise a great game. It was also incredibly well optimized even for my old pc