20 Best PS2 Open World Games

Total Overdose puts you in the boots of Ramiro Cruz, a man on a crazy mission through Mexico's drug-fueled underworld. The fighting is the whole point. You can shoot dodge, diving in any direction in slow motion, and the game has a combo system for maximum carnage, with some very silly special moves on top. Between missions you can explore the open world, though some regions are open only during certain missions.

Reviews were mixed when it came out. Critics liked the combat and picked on the graphics and the storyline, which is fair, because nobody plays it for the plot. The players who love it treat it as a game to go back to, and its fights still feel quick and loud next to the bigger crime games on this list.

Steambot Chronicles is the odd one on this list, and that is a compliment. Irem made it in Japan and Atlus brought it to North America. Its sandbox runs on steam-powered mechs called Trotmobiles, which you use to get around, and they are also how you trade goods and fight.

You play Vanilla, who starts out as a solo musician on the street until the Garland Globetrotters ask him into the band. Music plays a major role in the plot. Each good concert earns tips and posters of the other Globetrotters, plus sheet music for new songs. It is a slow, friendly game where a mech fight and a gig can happen on the same afternoon.

Players who found it call it a gem. A sequel, Bumpy Trot 2, was shown at the 2006 Tokyo Game Show and officially cancelled in 2011.

In True Crime you play the cop. Nick Kang is an LAPD detective recruited into the Elite Operations Division to look into a series of bombings in Chinatown. Activision first announced it as an action racing game inspired by Hong Kong action films, and the shootouts and car chases lean hard into that.

To build the city, the developers used satellite imaging and GPS, and the map stretches from the Hollywood Hills to Santa Monica. It was one of the first open world games after Grand Theft Auto III that was not a Grand Theft Auto, and it sold over 3,000,000 copies across all platforms. Players still point newcomers to it as a good one that gets forgotten. A sequel, True Crime: New York City, followed in 2005.

Liberty City Stories goes back to the city of Grand Theft Auto III, this time in 1998. You play Toni Cipriani, a mobster first seen in GTA III, as he works his way up the Leone crime family and gets pulled into a power struggle between the city's Mafia families. The map is the one you remember, changed for the year. The Callahan Bridge is unfinished in 1998, so a ferry is the main link between Staunton Island and Portland.

It started out as one of the best-selling PlayStation Portable games, with over 8 million copies sold by March 2008, before coming to the PS2. Frank Vincent came back to voice Salvatore Leone. Players who love the PS2 Grand Theft Autos name the two Stories games right after the big three.

Mercenaries drops you into a war in North Korea as a gun for hire with ExOps. You pick one of three mercenaries, voiced by Phil LaMarr, Jennifer Hale and Peter Stormare, and hunt down a deck of cards made of wanted men. Capture a target alive and the cash is usually doubled. Kill them and you get half their bounty.

The factions decide how the war goes for you. The first four start out friendly, but cross them enough and they turn hostile, and then you have to bribe the guard at their HQ before they will give you contracts. Critics praised its focus on explosive mayhem, and players still recommend it with the best action games on the console. A sequel, World in Flames, came out in 2008.

The sequel sends Crypto after the KGB, and this time it is personal: he wants revenge for the destruction of the mothership. His boss Orthopox died, but not before he downloaded his consciousness into a hologram called the HoloPox Unit, so he still nags you from a little floating screen.

This time Crypto travels the world. He visits Bay City, a stand-in for San Francisco, Albion for London, a Japanese island called Takoshima, Tunguska in Siberia and a Soviet base on the Moon. It was the last game in the series from Pandemic Studios, which Electronic Arts bought in 2007. A remake called Reprobed came out in August 2022. Fans of the series put it on their personal best lists, sometimes at the very top.

Treyarch followed Spider-Man 2 with a game based on the Ultimate Spider-Man comic, which Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley started in 2000. Like Spider-Man 2, it lets you roam an open world version of Manhattan, and this time Queens is in it too. The story is set three months after the Venom arc from the comics.

The big change is that you also play as Venom, and his half of the story crosses over with Spider-Man's. Venom gets around by performing massive jumps, he can throw cars, and his health drains over time, so he has to feed on people to stay alive. It is retrospectively regarded as one of the best Spider-Man games ever made. Players often name it right after Spider-Man 2.

Gun is a Western, set on the American frontier in 1880. You play Colton White, voiced by Thomas Jane, with Kris Kristofferson as his adoptive father and Lance Henriksen as Major Thomas Magruder, the villain. Many of the other names come from real frontier figures, such as Clay Allison and Hoodoo Brown.

Most of your travel is on horseback, and you can fight from the saddle or hunt buffalo between jobs. Kill enough enemies and you can trigger Quickdraw, which slows down time like bullet time and gives you unlimited ammunition for a short while. It sold over 1.4 million units in the United States by October 2008. One player put its place in Western games best: "Gun walked so RDR could run."

Vice City Stories goes back to Vice City in 1984, two years before the first game set there. You play Victor "Vic" Vance, a minor character in Vice City, who starts the game as a corporal at the army base, Fort Baxter. The big new idea is empire building. There is also Beach Patrol, where Vic knocks bikers off the beach in a beach buggy or throws life preservers to drowning swimmers.

It came out on the PSP first, as the follow-up to Liberty City Stories. Rockstar announced the PS2 port on 7 February 2007 and released it on 6 March. It is an almost straight port, and IGN criticised it for having the same coding as the PSP version. Players still put it with the main Grand Theft Autos when they list the PS2's best.

The Getaway is a British gangster film you can drive around in. It takes after Get Carter and Snatch, and Team Soho rebuilt 16 square kilometers of London for it. The plan was to release it with the PS2 in 2000, but recreating large areas of London in high resolution held it up by over two years.

The team would not break the city up into separate regions with loading between them, the way Grand Theft Auto III did, so the programmers had to perfect an engine that could constantly stream the city in as you move. By E3 2002 the project had exceeded its development budget many times over. Players who know it call it one of their favourite PS2 games and wish more people talked about it. Its spin-off, Gangs of London, later became a TV series.

Spider-Man 2 is the game that made swinging around New York feel right. Its open world covers Manhattan, Roosevelt Island, Ellis Island and Liberty Island, and the box called it the biggest city created in any super hero game to date. The story follows the movie: two years after the first game, Peter Parker struggles to balance his civilian life with being Spider-Man, and Doc Ock refuses to shut down his reactor.

Critics praised the realistic Manhattan and the web-swinging, and swinging between the skyscrapers is still the best part. (The PSP version used the engine from the 2002 game, so this is the one to play.) Players hold it close, and for many it is the best movie tie-in they ever played.

Destroy All Humans! is a 1950s alien invasion movie played from the alien's side. It is set in 1959 in the United States and pokes fun at the pop culture and politics of the time. You play Cryptosporidium 137, a Furon spy who comes to Earth to harvest DNA from humans for his species' cloning. Furons are named after diseases, which tells you a lot about them.

All buildings can be destroyed, and an alert system much like the wanted level in Grand Theft Auto brings the police, the military and finally the Majestic down on you. Soldiers call Crypto a commie, and the news covers up his attacks as communist ones. Players count it as a must-have, and they say it is as much fun now as it was when they were kids.

The Godfather puts you inside the films as a small-time crook taken into the Corleone family. James Caan voices Sonny again and Robert Duvall is back as Tom Hagen, though Francis Ford Coppola condemned the game and said Paramount never asked for his input. It was also EA's first ever M-rated title.

You climb the family's ranks from Outsider all the way to Don of NYC, and earning respect lets you level up and spend skill points. The story missions only take you as far as Underboss. The last steps you earn yourself, by bombing the compounds of the other families and taking the city from them. Players count it among the crime games every PS2 owner should play, next to Scarface and the Grand Theft Autos.

Bully trades the big city for a school. You play Jimmy, the new kid at Bullworth Academy, a corrupt and crumbling prep school, and you stand up to bullies, get picked on by teachers and play pranks along the way. It is the gentlest Rockstar game here, and still the one that caused the most noise before release.

Groups such as Bullying Online said it glorified school bullying before anyone had played it, and Jack Thompson filed a lawsuit to get it banned from store shelves in Florida. When it came out on 17 October 2006, the reviews were positive, with praise for its missions and characters, and it sold over 1.5 million copies. Players recommend it right next to the Grand Theft Autos. A Bully 2 went into production in May 2010 and was dropped before the end of 2013.

Scarface starts in the film's final scene, with Tony Montana's mansion being raided, and changes one thing: Tony senses the assassin behind him and shoots him down. From there you rebuild his empire. The game uses Al Pacino's likeness, but Pacino felt his voice had changed too much since 1983, so Tony is voiced by André Sogliuzzo, who was personally selected by Pacino.

Money is the heart of it. Cash you carry is lost when you die unless you launder it in a bank, and the bank takes a bigger cut the more heat you have from the cops. Critics compared it favorably to Vice City and San Andreas and liked how well it kept the tone of the film. Players admit it borrows a lot from Grand Theft Auto, and they still call it one of the best on the PS2.

Grand Theft Auto III is where it all started. It was the first 3D game in the series, set in Liberty City, loosely based on New York City. You play Claude, a silent protagonist pursuing revenge against his ex-girlfriend, who ends up working for the Mafia and then the yakuza.

The game began on the Dreamcast, and the team shifted to the PS2 after four months, once it was clear the Dreamcast was not commercially viable. The radio was built so you could hop between stations like in real life, which every GTA since has kept. It was the best-selling video game of 2001, with over 11.6 million copies sold on the PS2. Players still name it in the same breath as Vice City and San Andreas.

Vice City moved the series to 1986 and a city based on Miami. Tommy Vercetti gets out of prison, gets caught up in an ambushed drug deal and decides to take over the place. The team did extensive field research in Miami to get the city and the era right, and the radio stations playing hit songs from the era do a lot of the work.

Critics praised its music and its open world design, and it became the best-selling game of 2002, with over 14.2 million copies sold on the PS2. The talk radio callers are worth a long drive on their own. Players put it on their lists next to the biggest games on the console, often right beside the other two PS2 Grand Theft Autos.

Hit & Run is a Grand Theft Auto for people who grew up on The Simpsons, and it is often considered the best Simpsons tie-in game. Radical Entertainment had made Road Rage before it, and for this one the 60-person team kept only the driving and rebuilt everything else, borrowing the open world design from Grand Theft Auto.

Springfield has wasp-shaped spy cameras and a new flavor of Buzz Cola that everyone seems a bit too excited about. The plot gets as silly as the show, with aliens and a Halloween night when the undead climb out of the Springfield Cemetery. It sold over 3 million copies by June 2007. Players rank it above Vice City and Grand Theft Auto III.

Shadow of the Colossus is the quiet one on this list. There are no towns and no side jobs, only a huge, empty forbidden land with sixteen colossi spread across it. You play Wander, and a being called Dormin offers to bring a girl named Mono back to life if he destroys all sixteen.

Fumito Ueda and Team Ico made it as a spiritual successor to Ico. You cross the land on foot and on your horse, Agro, who also helps in some of the fights. Most colossi are in remote areas, on top of cliffs or inside ancient structures, and some are peaceful until you attack them. The game won several awards for its audio and design. Players put it near the top of their PS2 lists, with the biggest names on the console.

San Andreas is set in 1992 in a whole state based on California and Nevada. Carl "CJ" Johnson comes home to Los Santos after his mother's murder and ends up crossing the state to rebuild his life. There are three cities, Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas, based on Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas. The story draws on the Bloods and Crips rivalry and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

A 75-person team spent nearly two years making it. Modders later found the hidden Hot Coffee minigame on the disc, and the game was briefly re-rated Adults Only. It is the best-selling PlayStation 2 game, with over 17.3 million copies sold. Players recommend it more than any other open world game on the PS2, and for many of them it is the best game the console has.