Alongside the feel of exploration, nailing combat is equally important for open-world games, including RPGs, as you’re expected to fight often throughout your journey. Given how long these games are, it’s vital to make combat both approachable and deep enough. Newcomers need to grasp the essentials quickly for the action to click and keep them going, while the mechanics should offer enough flexibility to pursue unique late-game builds and meaningfully evolve with new layers like weapons and abilities.

For this list, I rank open-world RPGs with virtually perfect combat systems, based strictly on their combat flow — not the games themselves. The key focus is mechanical depth, responsiveness, variety, and room for mastery, as well as the potential to sustain your interest for the dozens of hours these games usually take to beat.

Combining the best traits of Batman: Arkham, Mad Max, and earlier Assassin’s Creed games, Middle-earth: Shadow of War adds layers upon layers and sets it all in a vast open world with enormous freedom to fight as you like. From excellent fast-paced crowd combat and powerful executions to interactions between almost OP ghost-like abilities and enemy vulnerabilities, Shadow of War is definitely flashy and oh-so-satisfying.

Shadow of War is also quite undemanding mechanically due to its contextual automation, with numerous spectacular moves happening at the press of a single button, so even inexperienced players can feel strong from the get-go. On the other hand, its robust skill and ability tree and randomized loot offer deep possibilities for unique buildcrafting, while the Nemesis recruitment system and mounts (you can ride a fire-breathing dragon) add new layers later on, making the endgame the most exciting part of the experience.

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