Sometimes you want to get out there and explore, but at the start of the year the weather is often a bit rubbish and who has the time for a feature-length adventure nowadays? Instead of getting your shoes muddy, might we suggest playing a video game instead? There are hundreds of video games that have an adventure at their core and this is our pick of the ones that are simply the best.
1429 Uncharted Seas
If you love a seagoing adventure and want to be up and playing in seconds instead of hours, then 1429 Uncharted Seas is probably a good choice for you. This pirate-themed adventure takes the form of an online slot game, offering players an expanding wild (beast), bonus games, and free spins too. The theme is present in the music, the reels, and the characters that you’ll come across as you play. Some of them, like the Mermaid, are worth befriending as she can pay you up to fifty times your original stake. There’s a lot of variety thanks to all of the features in this game and, though it’s quick to learn how to play, it’s not the sort of game that you’ll only enjoy for five minutes or so.
If you’re interested in finding out about the percentages involved in slots, then it should be transparent in any slot game that you play. This is known as the return-to-player ratio and it tells players on average what percentage of their stake they should expect to receive back. In the case of 1429 Uncharted Seas, the RTP is 98.6%, so if you played 100 rounds of a dollar each, you’d expect to have $98.60 from $100 worth of starting money. Of course, this isn’t always the case as the RTP is worked out over thousands upon thousands of rounds, just as a coin toss wouldn’t necessarily be 50 heads and 50 tails over the course of 100 flips.
Civilization IV
There are plenty of gamers that believe a professional gaming rig is the answer to a great gaming experience, but the rest of us know that all that’s required nowadays is a half-decent PC. Civilization IV is one of those games that really proves this point. With relatively low operating requirements and the ability to fill hundreds of hours of your time, this game is a great option for the adventurous gamer. If you’ve not played any of the previous five iterations of this game before, then here’s what to expect.
You begin the game by choosing which leader from history you’d like to play as and then selecting from options around the difficulty of the game and the size and shape of the map. Once this is over, your explorer is dropped into unfamiliar territory and it’s up to you to direct them where to form the first city. With this out of the way, you’ll want to invest in some warriors and infrastructure to enable your civilization to spread far and wide, conquering those in your way. You win the game by completing either a science, domination, religious, or tourism victory, each with its own parameters of success. It sounds simple, but it’s a very strategic game that takes hours to grasp and even more hours to master.
Red Dead Redemption II
Sometimes you want an adventure that you can be fully immersed in and, for this, a game with top-quality graphics and a staggeringly realistic world helps a lot. Thankfully Rockstar Games are there to answer all of our prayers with Red Dead Redemption II. This game puts you as an outlaw in the Wild West, roaming through magnificent landscapes on your trusty steed. Sometimes you’ll be robbing trains, other times you’ll be casting into crystal-clear waters in search of a record-breaking fish. The gameplay is varied, fascinating, and as fast as you want it to be. In order to fully complete the game, you’ll likely be devoting hundreds of hours to it, but we promise it feels as though you’ve only been playing for five minutes.
