10 top sandbox games

Go back to the middle ages in a vibrant society with a breathtaking open world where you can be a jack of all trades — warrior, blacksmith, merchant, adventurer. You can engage in skillful combat, buy and sell in a completely player-run economy, work through thrilling quests in dangerous open world dungeons, and leave your mark throughout the ages as a formidable feudal lord.

With an entirely create-your-own-character progression system and a beautiful medieval European landscape, Gloria Victis is your own personal time machine to the days of King Arthur and Excalibur. Enter the universe of Conan the Barbarian in this survival sandbox game.

Forge your own household, grow your clan, and defeat your enemies. A world that can be experienced on your own or with others, Conan Exiles gives you the chance to evolve a weak, small settlement into an unstoppable tour-de-force with powerful weapons at your disposal and giants following your every command. Control Yourself: Keep yourself full, hydrated, and healthy with the various resources you find and items you craft.

Bloody Satisfying: Master the intense, combo-critical combat to become the greatest in the Exiled Lands. Experience death. Not just once, but in more ways than you ever imagined possible. In Project Zomboid, you struggle desperately to defend your house against endless undead hordes.

You must loot abandoned buildings, prepare hardy defenses, and plan carefully if you want to last through the apocalypse. Develop your skills in farming, hunting, trapping, cooking, crafting, and carpentry to prepare food, items, and defenses. To defeat the never-ending zombies, you will need to use , use anything and everything you can to stand your ground.

The game provides you with countless vehicles, tools, items, and locations to explore. In your quest against the zombies you are sure to have a unique, enjoyable experience. Build or find a good base and ward off the incoming swarms with the help of your guns and upgrades for your fortress.

Luckily, every plant around you can be harvested for resources. However, when day turns to night, you must be ready to fight the enemies and defend your stronghold. Choose your fighting style: sneak around and avoid enemies or charge them headstrong with your prehistorically simple weapons. Ripe for Scavenging: Gather wood from trees for your camp, shelter or defenses, and find food to ward off the threat of starvation.

The Clan Attacks: Use your crafted weapons and battle skills to defend yourself from horrific clan members that are frighteningly human. Use the resources of this strange world to craft many helpful items and structures that suit many kinds of play styles. Strange Beasts in a Strange Land: Encounter cute, wonderful, and occasionally terrifying creatures as you explore the odd landscape.

Bring friends along or embark alone to create your own unique story and characte Explore deadly dungeons or duke it out with fellow adventurers in epic battles with hundreds of players. True to Bethesda, the storyline that can be completed in whichever order you choose, with each choice each impacting your legacy.

A Dangerous Quest: Team up or go solo to take on perilous beasts of all shapes and sizes. As you teeter on the brink of death on the enigmatic island of ARK, do whatever you can to make it in this harsh mysterious climate.

You must harvest, craft, farm, hunt, research, and build. Tame over powerful prehistoric creatures around the island and use them to dominate unfortunate players and conquer the land. With boundless craftable items, character customizations, land to explore, and, of course, dinosaurs to command, ARK: Survival Evolved provides a hardcore, prehistoric sandbox-survival experience. Astonishing Beasts: Over a hundred creatures are there for you to tame; will you fall before their indomitable might or master their tremendous strength?

A Prehistoric Island: Explore the dangerous environment full of strange structures, rare blueprints, and many more secrets for you to find. Think real-life prisons could use an upgrade? Construct a maximum-security prison from which no one can escape. Make sure that your prisoners have their needs met; build a workout area, food court, infirmary, and other amenities to keep the inmates happy.

Be the boss over your own prison and allow justice to be served. Control the Break: The game allows you to use extreme force and torture to control your prisoners.

How far will you go? Build your Alcatraz: Craft a small, stable jail or an entire city of prisoners and guards. Bringing limitless crafting and world-building to the survival genre, 7 Days to Die combines elements of defense, role-playing, horror, and shooter games into a zombie-filled survival experience. In any of the numerous massive environments available, build an indomitable fortress by placing turrets, traps, fences, Craft over different weapons, armor, utilities, and vehicles as you upgrade your own character with over 60 unique skill groups.

With plenty of defenses and upgrades but plenty more incoming zombies in the hordes, can you stand your ground for the whole week? Forge Your Stronghold: Using existing buildings or from scratch, mold an undefeatable fortress.

Probably the purest sandbox experience of any item on this list, Kenshi allows you to create a truly unique character with almost any trade or career imaginable. Venture across the square-kilometer desert map populated with warring, power-hungry factions. Command a powerful squad that levels up with each battle won and quest completed.

Will you be a noble and friendly monk, or a despicable, war-mongering tribe with an unbreakable stronghold? In Kenshi, nearly endless possibilities await. Cities to Explore: Find numerous settlements across the desert, or even build your own buildings to use as businesses or safe havens. Three survivors have crash-landed on an unseen planet, and they need your help. With clever events that regularly happen to your colony, your game session will be a unique story of hardy colonists battling starvation and hostility.

With a new world with each playthrough and hundreds of mods to enhance the experience, Rimworld exemplifies wonderful management-survival loyal to Dwarf Fortress and the sci-fi genre. Your Own Colony: Make a home for your colonists complete with housing, medical centers, farms, and much, much more.

Naked, alone, and completely deserted, you must find food and water and craft your way to survival using only a rock at first to gather resources. Band together with other players to create settlements and help each other survive. Overcome dehydration, hunger, and frostbite with what you find. There are other dangers, though; non-friendly players are more than happy to kill you.

Intense, brutal, and dangerous all around, Rust puts you on edge at every moment. Face-to-Face: Craft weapons to prepare for deadly encounters with other players where only the strongest can survive. The land of Calradia is fragmented by endless war as the five factions each attempt to seize the throne. A newcomer to this land, you must assemble a band of troops and lead them into battle. Fight for the lord of a faction of your choice or lead your own army.

As you play you will gain strength, honor, and renown that will help you achieve the ultimate prize: lordship over the land. Upgrade troops and keep them satisfied so that they keep following your every command. Use your persuasive tongue to win the heart of a lady or the swords of vassals. Sieze the Strongholds: Use your powerful, diverse army to capture castles and cities for your lord or for yourself.

Many people enjoy the game as it can offer them some peace and quiet, or even a meditative moment while they're doing something else. It's also not overly realistic to the point where you can easily kill your plants. They require maintenance and you can choose from an assortment of plants and designs, but if you miss a day or two it's not going to mess anything up. If you want a certain type of plant that isn't available, you can purchase it for just a few cents. Crossout is a post-apocalyptic MMO action game where you get to craft and customize your own battle machines to destroy enemies in online battles.

It allows you an awesome level of customization that means your mechanics will be totally different from your friends. You have a lot of freedom to design your vehicles with a multitude of parts and weapons. You can also use a variety of armor and work in the privacy of your own workshop. Cheeky Chooks is an adorable game that will be perfect for anyone who likes farming simulation games like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon.

All you have to do is raise your precious Chooks and become the ultimate Chook rancher. Build a giant ranch, make your chooks happy and get better products from them like eggs -- meaning you get more money. There are no in-game purchases and you get to customize your ranch from nothing but a plot of dirt into an amazing ranch! The weather changes daily, too, so you'll need to take precautions to keep your animals safe. Fans of the Fallout franchise should definitely give Fallout Shelter a chance.

In the game, you get to build a Vault to try and keep your Dwellers safe and content from the many dangers outdoors in the Wasteland.

However, you can also explore the Wasteland to find resources and go on adventures. If you love to customize, you'll get the chance to do just that inside your vault as you try and make it the perfect setting to keep its inhabitants happy and thriving.

Find them jobs, find them outfits, help them train and improve their skills and weaponry. It's a 2D bit sidescroller adventure game but that doesn't diminish its sandbox quality one bit. For one, this game's indie developer lets players design their own levels, meaning you won't run out of playgrounds in this game as long as your creativity is working with you.

Designing them is also easy since they're mostly sidescroller levels. The best part is that you can invite some people over since it's massively multiplayer. You can also see each others' worlds or levels you've created and had your own adventures. Moreover, you get to enjoy some awesome RPG elements such as loot collecting for whenever you want to show off to your friends.

Think of The Sandbox Evolution as Minecraft but two-dimensional instead. Oh, and it also comes with more practical building options than that game since you get to see the whole game world instead of being confined to a first-person view of everything. In that regard, The Sandbox Evolution lets you build everything and even recreate the most famous 2D sidescroller games of the s and s such as Pac-Man. You also get the liberty to craft your own intricate 2D adventure world separated into several connected instances.

Like in Pixel Worlds you need not be intimidated as The Sandbox Evolution will hold your hand through the creative process and teach you the important parts of world-building. Now we're moving on to a different setting and frontier, space. It requires your time, dedication, and focus Regardless of your choices, Eve Online has something for players with different goals. Want to establish an oppressive corporate space empire?

Wage war on neighboring player-driven factions over a bunch of floating rocks? You bet. Corner the player-driven economy through guile and cleverness? A complete medieval sandbox, you can start as the count of a tiny French province and eventually rule the world, leading your nation on crusades, and establishing your own religion.

A game that spent four years in early access, Factorio is probably one of the most polished and complete construction management games ever released. It is complicated but in all the best ways.

You can spend hours and hours arranging your conveyor belts, feeding factories and engines, and manufacturing materials to expand your factory.

It's a never-ending cycle, and wow , does it feel good to be efficient. Amazon's first foray into games looks to be a special one. Following the New World closed beta, which hit , players on Steam within the first couple of days, the MMO promises a return to the classic social experience that MMOs have seemingly been missing recently.

The full game isn't out until the end of August, and if the devs can provide a fleshed-out roadmap it could be one of the more popular titles out in A sandbox game in most ways, you can spend forty hours cutting down trees, or working your way through Expeditions.

Plenty of different ways to play. An early-access indie breakout in , Going Medieval is a colony simulator that has some of the best building mechanics we've seen in a game like this, sort of becoming a 3D Dwarf Fortress with multiple building layers. Huge towers, deep cellars, that sort of thing. There's a lot the game still needs, but its massively positive response on Steam already shows that this game could be something great when it leaves its early access in a couple of year's time.

Build a colony, help your settlers survive, and build monstrous castles. No list of sandbox games is complete without mentioning RimWorld. There is no other game that lets you run an organ-harvesting operation from a base on a distant planet, surrounded by ice and angry raiders. Its recent Ideology update shows that the game will continue to receive DLC is just more proof that it has cemented itself as one of the best ever sandbox games, and it's arguably not even finished yet.

Plus, you can mod the game to ridiculous levels. Oh, Rust. Beset with problems pretty much all the time the performance on consoles is still pretty awful , it makes very little difference to the popularity of this game.

This sandbox survival game is best played with friends or a rogue solo mission into the chaos of a busy server. Build, survive, and interact with potentially over a hundred different players, the weekly server resets always make the game feel fresh, even if grinding out every week becomes, well, a bit of a grind. An indie superstar from early in , Valheim arrived with a Viking drumroll.

Its unique art style and compelling gameplay, which fuses the survival elements of Minecraft with the boss progression of Terraria, is the perfect example of a survival sandbox done right. While we're all waiting for the highly anticipated Hearth and Home update, supposedly out sometime by the end of this year, the game still draws in tens of thousands of players on Steam. There is nothing quite as satisfying as transforming your base character into a lord with several hundred soldiers under their command.

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord is the long-awaited successor to Warband, though the game has a long way to go before it cements its cult status like its predecessor. The game is currently still in Early Access, and probably still needs a few content updates. However, in its current state, there are potentially hundreds of hours of sandbox goodness, as you try to conquer the world of Calradia.

Red Dead Redemption 2 , and Red Dead Online , are both visually and mechanically one of the most complex games Rockstar has ever released.