Most beautiful free games

Read more The assassins of Assassin's Creed, ranked from worst to best. While Rockstar seems mainly interested in bringing American cities to life, Sleeping Dogs is a strong attempt at replicating another part of the world. Read more Sleeping Dogs review. Read more Dark Souls 3 and the tragedy of a fallen knight.

You get a sense that Skyrim is a vast country, rather than a small section of a larger world. Each area has its own distinctive history, culture, and climate, from the bubbling, sulphuric hot springs of Eastmarch to the icy, snow-battered coastline of Winterhold.

Skyrim is still one of the most enjoyable virtual worlds to just exist in for a while. Read more An Illusionist in Skyrim. Rocksteady went from creating a convincing but isolated setting in Arkham Asylum to a wonderfully grim and complex urban sprawl in Arkham Knight. Read more Let's rank the Arkham games from worst to best. The Yakuza series has finally come to PC, and this prequel features two beautiful, atmospheric chunks of Japanese cities to explore: Kamurocho in Tokyo and Sotenbori in Osaka.

Both perfectly capture the feeling of being in a bustling, vibrant Japanese city, and the s setting is brilliantly fleshed out with era-appropriate technology and fashion. Read more Yakuza 0 review. Half-Life 2 has dated, inevitably, but its environments still have the power to dazzle. Over the course of the game a detailed picture of this bleak, hopeless world is subtly pieced together, and all through details in the environment. Read more Half-Life 2 review.

From a wrecked passenger plane, skeletons still buckled into their seats, to an abandoned, rain-soaked tenement block, misery has never looked quite so attractive. Sucker Punch's new IP, Ghost of Tsushima , was a large departure from anything the studio has done prior, and it was a massive success. Not only did it win the Player's Voice award at the Game Awards , it was also nominated for several other Game of the Year awards as well.

The island of Tsushima was beautifully crafted by the team at Sucker Punch, and it is easily one of the most visually stunning areas ever created in a video game. From the rolling fields of white flowers to the tall snowy peaks in the norther sections of the map, Tsushima has plenty of breathtaking landscapes for players to take in while they explore the island.

Not only that, but Ghost of Tsushima has an impressive photo mode that lets players truly capture beautiful moments in game or orchestrate their own amazing effects. It's a really phenomenal system.

If players want to really feel like a samurai straight out of an old samurai flick, the Kurosawa mode is also available, as this mode ups the film grain tremendously and turns the game monochrome. It retains the game's beauty, but in a completely different way.

No matter which mode players choose to embrace and they can be switched between on-the-fly , Ghost of Tsushima will be sure to take players' breath away. Supergiant Games always goes out of its way to make games with iconic and visually stunning art. Hades is certainly no exception to this practice.

Hades not only revolutionizes the rogue-like genre, but it also moves the needle for what fans expect in regards to art direction. It's no question that the characters in Hades are beautiful. Everyone is drawn in such a remarkable and iconic style that fans can't help but fall in love with all of these characters, and that infatuation is only helped further along by the strong character and story writing that Supergiant has brought to the game.

Every aspect of the game oozes style and beauty, so it's hard not to lose track of time when planning Zagreus' big underworld escape. The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the most popular and successful games of , bringing home several Game of the Year awards including the coveted Game Awards trophy for Game of the Year. Not only was The Last of Us Part 2 a riveting and well-performed narrative, but it also managed to be a visually stunning game to experience.

Naughty Dog really nailed the collapsed and overrun look that Seattle has in-game, with the beautiful nature overtaking all the man-made structures leaving players in awe, especially those familiar with the areas first-hand. Of course, the game does not take place entirely in Seattle, but as Ellie and Abby's journey takes them elsewhere, the environments still maintain their beautifully haunting atmosphere. Of course, The Last of Us Part 2 tends to keep players on-edge as they explore, so sometimes it's hard to stop and smell the flowers, but players should definitely take some time to stop and appreciate the beautiful landscapes Naughty Dog has put together for the next leg of Ellie's journey.

Players get to explore New York City right around Christmas time, and Insomniac truly captures the beauty of the city well in Miles Morales. Fidelity lets players experience the game in stunning 4K with raytracing, which makes the city really pop in the winter.

Performance trades some of the glitz and glamour for a stable 60 FPS. Infinitely silly and incredibly fresh, it's still one of the shooter genre's kings, free-to-play or not.

Of course, it makes sense to add it to our best free games list. As you might have guessed, there are some micro-transactions included. You can buy additional items, often used to personalize your character. You can even create your own.

It's fun, and gets you even more involved in TF2. Those cheeky devils at Valve obviously know what they're doing. This is a card game, after all. Originally a game inside The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Gwent has evolved into a standalone spinoff of the wildly popular fantasy game. You play against other players online in rounds, and to win each round, you need to gain more points than your opponent.

The player that wins two out of three rounds comes out the victor. However, iOS users can now partake. Abilities are upgraded based on a collectible card system, and can entirely change the way each character plays. While cosmetic items are available to buy using real-world currency, everything else can be unlocked just by playing. However, the rules are somewhat different, as it allows players to heal their allies in addition to allowing for the use of special abilities in combat after racking up enough action points.

Inspiring the creation of Minecraft was no small feat for 2D sandbox game Dwarf Fortress. Dubbed a construction and management simulator, Dwarf Fortress took simple text-based graphics and turned it into a reasonably modern, piece of software. This means Dwarf Fortress both randomizes its environments and makes the game's permadeath system a much harder problem to avoid.

This led to the unofficial motto for the game "Losing is fun," which was either ironic or an accurate description of what happens in the game. Hard to say either way. One thing's for sure. Can't say that for a lot of free-to-play games, making this one of the best free games has on offer. And, it pulls it off. With an esports league, you can rest assured that you'll always have people to throw down against.

Michelle Rae Uy is a Los Angeles-based editor, writer and photographer with a bad case of wanderlust. She has written for publications like Nylon, Fodor's and SmarterTravel, and is also the contributing editor for MiniTime. North America.

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