• Games Games Software Software. Browsing Open World Browse the newest, top selling and discounted Open World products on Steam New and Trending Top Selling.
• Mar 27, 2020  Best single-player games 2020: the top games for playing solo on console and PC By Robert Zak, Lloyd Coombes, Vic Hood 27 March 2020 Less is sometimes more.

The best sandbox game is difficult to nail down, as the sandbox style is spread across countless genres with disparate mechanics and settings. But all sandboxes share a common trait: freedom. Whether it’s creating a whole world or building up a gang of criminals across a city, sandbox games leave most of the agency up to the player. They are universes to be experienced at a pace not dictated by developers.

There needs to be a bit of clarity when looking at what makes a great sandbox game, though. They have, since the days of Elite and Ultima, referred to open-world games filled with choice and diversions. But revisionist history would describe them as “games like Minecraft”. For the purposes of this exploration of the best of the bunch, we’re taking a look at them all. We support sandbox egalitarianism.

Mar 10, 2020 Here are some of the best co-op games of all time across a range of platforms, genres, and difficulties. When it comes to cooperative open-world games. PS3, Switch, PC, Mac).

So from the mean streets of Los Santos, through the ruthless missions of Agent 47, to the stunning expanse of Eve’s universe, these are the very best sandbox games on PC.

Here are the best sandbox games on PC:

MINECRAFT

Minecraft is synonymous with modern sandbox games. And it deserves to be. It’s one of the purest sandbox titles because it’s more a tool than a game. It’s a figurative sandpit, waiting to be molded into giant fortresses, complex circuits, and gargantuan spaceships suspended in the sky. Yes, you could be the next person to make one of the best Minecraft maps or cool Minecraft houses.

Minecraft captures the essence of playing – and fashion, just check out some of the best Minecraft skins for proof. It’s a tactile experience that evokes days spent building Lego creations in your bedroom. Limitations are few and far between, and usually, the simple installation of a Minecraft mod will smash down any those that do exist – it’s more concerned with giving players the tools to curate their own experience than telling them what to do.

It’s bridged the gap between different generations of gamers. Its rudimentary graphics and interface inspire nostalgia, while its simple logic and blocky building appeals to mites (and a fair few adults). And it’s easy to describe; or, at least the very basics are. The common sense logic that runs through its foundations makes it accessible and less daunting for the uninitiated, making it an experience that can be shared by kids and their parents.

GRAND THEFT AUTO V

Rockstar’s most recent open world is a true play pit of opportunities. At times it feels like every street of the sprawling city is a destination for fun, offering up new types of people to interact with, new terrain to experiment on, and new buildings to explore.

The simulation offers an exaggeration of urban and rural America, and so going mental with a few firearms can lead to chaos in the streets, not to mention some exceptionally wild police chases. Pushing the limitations of the world is part of the expected experience: seeing just how many bodies you can pile up, how many hitchhikers you can kidnap, how long you can go with a five-star wanted level.

The GTA V mods scene is booming right now so it’s the perfect place to experiment with other people’s creations. But, beyond that, the game comes bundled with its own extensive tool kit for creative types: the Rockstar Editor. A seemingly limitless machinima movie creator, it allows you to film whatever you fancy, and cut and shape it into a work of cinematic art.

If you’re not into the creative side of Rockstar’s behemoth, fear not: you can always relive the chaotic days of Vice City and San Andreas by using some GTA 5 cheats or try out GTA RP in dedicated servers. It’s also a game that’s still growing with massive new updates like the GTA Casino update, which adds heaps of new missions and rewards like the Enus Paragon R, plus a massive ruddy casino to chill out in.

HITMAN

Before sandboxes were synonymous with crime-filled open worlds or low-res block building, the term was inescapably linked to the freeform murder of Hitman. After a heavy misstep with Absolution, Agent 47 retrieved his sandbox crown with 2016’s Hitman. A set of six locations provides you with uncountable opportunities to dispatch a target, from a simple sniper rifle shot to an some of Hitman’s craziest kills.

More like this: The best stealth games around

Despite the immersive sim being huge this generation, with the likes of Dishonored and Deus Ex, many simply can’t compare to the dense detail of a Hitman level. They provide the freedom to approach the situation in almost every manner you can imagine. And, should your imagination fail you, there are dozens of suggestions thanks to the brilliant Opportunities system. What’s more, each level is being constantly added to over time, with brand new Escalation missions and Elusive Target contracts. Hitman is a sandbox that won’t stop evolving.

The emergent fun continues in the sequel, as we found in our Hitman 2 review. It might be released as one package unlike its predecessor, but there’s plenty there for returning assassins, such as Hitman 2’s Ghost Mode and an inventive AI that wants you to murder in the coolest possible ways.

SCRAP MECHANIC

Despite being in Early Access, Scrap Mechanic already has all the makings of a true sandbox hit. Like Minecraft, it’s fuelled entirely by your creativity, and how your mind manages to extrapolate the basic features into a mini (or not-so-mini) masterpiece.

What makes Scrap Mechanic different to other building games is how it encourages momentum with components that move. It sets it apart from most other games which tend to stick to creating fortresses and other stationary objects. Even your static castle can come to life with elaborate unlocking mechanisms in Scrap Mechanic. But it’s the cars, tanks, and hover machines that really demonstrate the depths of its potential.

Make the best of it: our best crafting games on PC

For a quick overview of what makes it special take a look at our Scrap Mechanic beginner’s guide and then see the best Scrap Mechanic creations from the community. What’s surprising is that most are built with only a handful of basic components. Imagine what could be built when the game eventually expands its inventory.

ELITE DANGEROUS

The original Elite was one of the first sandboxes, setting the standard for future sandboxes and simulation games alike. It’s still pretty impressive, even 30 years on, with over 200 worlds to visit and trade with. Elite Dangerous, though, is a galaxy in size, a scale that is both bewildering and extremely intimidating. Just the scope of the thing is astounding. No wonder it’s one of the best space games on PC.

Making your way through the galaxy is familiar: trading with stations, fulfilling requests for goods and assistance, chasing down bounties. But this is all taking place in our own simulated galaxy, where everything is to scale. When you leave supercruise and are faced with a gargantuan glowing sun, it feels like you’re facing a real sun, something so massive that it’s almost inconceivable.

Even simple trips feel like significant undertakings. With every jump to supercruise, there’s the risk of interdiction, leading to a lot of flailing around as you attempt to align with the escape vector, which plonks you right in the middle of deep space. Fail, and you’ve got a dogfight on your hands. Don’t worry if that danger is too much for you, though: our Elite Dangerous guide will help out any beginners.

KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM

Kerbal Space Program is the only sandbox in this list where having a solid grasp on maths and physics will be a boon. It’s an ambitious simulator that tasks players with sending rockets into space, colonising planets, mining asteroids, and fooling around with moon buggies. How you go about all of this is pretty much up to you.

Kerbal Space Program spent a large stretch of time in Early Access but has now emerged as one of the best indie games around. With its full feature set of missions and free-form sandbox mode, it provides practically endless opportunities to fiddle with big-budget science. It’s a game where your experiments and successes have extra weight, as they aren’t taking place in a fantasy realm but one grounded in real-life science.

ARMA 3

Military simulator Arma 3 is, like Minecraft, as much a tool for game creation as a game itself – one where much of the heavy lifting has already been done. It looks great, making the fictional Greek islands it takes place on eerily real, and the combat has benefited from this eye for detail too. It’s a combined arms war game, where you can dabble in commanding tanks, try to play it like one of the best plane games, or take advantage of the detail of this sniper game to skulk and take your foes out from the shadows.

While it comes with a three part campaign and multiplayer, the meat is the huge editor that gives creators countless tools and assets with which they can craft their own worlds. As it allows for anything from persistent multiplayer campaigns to military operations to be created it has birthed some of the best PC games ever, including DayZ and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

JUST CAUSE 3

Just Cause 3 is ridiculous. Sure, it has the trappings of the modern open-world shooter – killing dudes, driving around, ploughing through hundreds of missions – but that’s not what makes Just Cause 3 sparkle.

The whole point of the game is to sow chaos throughout the island of Medici. How you go about that is up to you. Most of the joy comes from attaching the grapple hook to things. Attach it to a car and then to a statue and you’ve got a simple means of toppling this symbol of tyranny. Create an attachment between oxygen canisters and soldiers and you can watch as they’re dragged off before exploding. Then there’s the rocket mines, which can be attached to anything and everything for high-velocity, explosive violence. The game really could just be about doing silly things with the grapple. But a gorgeous island and flexible missions means there’s more to Just Cause 3 than silly chaos (well, not too much).

It’s like a Pepsi Max ad from the ‘90s but with a much higher body count. No wonder we voted it one of the best games of 2015. We got more of an iterative update with the sequel, however, but we found in our Just Cause 4 review that it didn’t stop it from being just as bombastic and fun.

MOUNT & BLADE II: Bannerlord

After eight years in development, the sequel to the first Mount & Blade game is finally out on Steam’s Early Access program. Despite it being about as buggy as Warband was back in 2010, it’s – ironically – a much more polished experience that expands on pretty much everything that made the first game such a standout for the sandbox games genre.

Bannerlord, like its predecessor, is all about letting you roleplay in a systems-heavy medieval sandbox. Perhaps the showman in you will inspire you to become a master jouster and champion of many tourneys. Maybe your eye for a good deal will lead you down the path of the wealthy trader, using your mountain of gold to fund a mercenary army to protect you and bring you glory. Or perhaps you’re just a good for nothing crook, and if so, then it’s the bandit’s life for you.

Bannerlord guides:
How to use Bannerlord cheats
Bannerlord caravans guide
How to make money fast in Bannerlord

The blend of macro-scale management and being able to directly control your character and party gives you an unrivaled level of control the gameplay, to the extent where you can either lead an army of hundreds from above, or command them from the over-the-shoulder perspective of your medieval hero/warlord/dastardly baron.

EVE ONLINE

If you’ve never played EVE Online you’ll have heard its many stories. Thousands of players and fleets of ships fighting out in space, alliances toppled by traitors, spies murdering CEOs, and lots of theft. All of this is without developer involvement, and led by incredibly talented EVE fleet commanders from the comfort of their home PCs.

It’s a living galaxy with a complex player-run economy, filled with corporations and alliances that rise and fall, and opportunistic pirates, soldiers and businessmen waiting to fleece or destroy you. EVE fights the good fight by making its world a true sandbox – helping it become one of the best MMOs on PC.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed check out our EVE Online beginner’s guide. It’s in the corporations, though, that EVE’s heart really lies. The intrigue and wars that arise from them would fit neatly in the pages of The Twelve Caesars.

THE SIMS 4

Creepy dollhouse and terrifying social experiment, The Sims is one of EA’s big cash cows, squeezing out expansion after expansion. It’s difficult to reconcile the game with the business model, but it’s better to simply put the latter to the back of your mind and not go crazy with the expansion purchases.

The creation tools are simple and tactile but you can do a lot with them, and the crazy Sims 4 mods and DLC means the toolset keeps expanding the potential of one of the best management games. But it is the emergent stories that happen to and within your creations that makes The Sims so damn compelling even after you’d expect the well to run dry.

Hackerman: List of Sims 4 cheats

You could follow the route of the creepy, sociopathic puppet masters by creating dungeons and then setting fire to Sims once they’re inside. Yes, you could, but we’re not going to encourage that kind of behaviour. Instead, why not help your Sims follow their dreams, be that hooking up with the hot person from the bar down the street, or building their own Sims space rocket and blasting into the universe.

GARRY’S MOD

Garry Newman’s physics sandbox is really just a giant toy box. Absent of objectives and rules, it furnishes players with props, character models, and a whole load of tools from which can spring all manner of oddities and crimes against nature.

Wrongdoing: The best crime games on PC

Everything can be stuck together and fiddled with to the point that it’s often used to make hugely creative videos and bizarre shows. And it’s a game design tool, giving birth to single-player adventures, multiplayer worlds, and a heap of player-created content.

It can be an introduction to game design, countless games, or just something you can mess around with when you’re pissed. But, most importantly, you can give NPCs very silly faces. Intrigued? Discover the origin story of the game with the making of Garry’s Mod.

DON’T STARVE

Don’t Starve starts with one goal: staying alive. That’s easier said than done in a hellish purgatory, however. Foraging for berries and carrots is easy enough, but as they grow scarce and the hunt takes survivors further afield, the risk of death intensifies. Wild pig men, monstrous arachnids, and unspeakable horrors abound at night.

Don’t Starve is a great survival game, but its no slouch as a sandbox, either. The world might be cruel and deadly, but it can be somewhat tamed and moulded into something a bit more comfortable. A simple fire and tent can flourish into farm, fortress, or laboratory. Erstwhile nightmares can be transformed into allies that can protect you from the worst the world has to offer.

There you are, enough of the best sandbox games to get your creative juices flowing for a long time yet. We’ve supplied the bucket and spade and now it’s up to you to use your newfound videogame freedom to make your own fun. If you’re now more in the mood for destruction than inventive creation, check out the best FPS games around. Oh, and of course you’ll never go wrong with our list of the best old games that continue to age better by the day. By now our creative juices have been well and truly depleted, and we’re excited to see how you push the boundaries of creative PC gaming.