10 PS2 Open-World Games That Reward Exploration

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Published May 11, 2026, 2:41 PM EDT

Daniel Trock is a Writer at DualShockers specializing in PC games, lists, and reviews. He has been writing professionally since 2018 and covering games since 2020, with previous work spanning guides, news, lists, and reviews across multiple publications.

Before joining DualShockers, Daniel contributed guides to GamerJournalist and lists to TheGamer. He currently covers tech topics for SlashGear and BGR. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Marist College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University.

The jump in processing power and game scope between the fifth and sixth console generations really can’t be overstated, and the PlayStation 2 is a pretty good illustration of that. The PS1 was by no means a slouch, of course, but the PS2’s big-box games, by comparison, were like living in a four-story home versus a three-room apartment.

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Naturally, with this greater processing power came the true emergence of the open-world game, with games now being capable of having worlds that were actually open in the truest sense of the word. Not only that, but these open worlds were rife with opportunities for scavenger hunting, whether it was incidental bonus collectibles, tangible character upgrades, or entire sidequest chains. The point is that it wasn’t just a world you walked from point A to point B in, these were open-world games where really, thoroughly exploring around would yield all kinds of perks.

10 Spider-Man 2

Web-Swinging is its Own Reward

Spider-Man’s definitely got a reputation these days for heading up quality open-world games, but perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s been doing a pretty good job of that as far back as 2004. After all, that’s when the tie-in game to Spider-Man 2 came out, gracing the world with its excellent web-swinging mechanics.

Spider-Man 2 features a sizable recreation of Web-Head’s home turf of Manhattan, around which are scattered all kinds of collectibles and side activities to encourage you to swing around. The most iconic side activity is, of course, the pizza delivery missions, which serve as a good way to practice with the swinging mechanics and familiarize yourself with the neighborhood, though there are also photo missions, traversal challenges, and arcade mini-games.

There are also lots of tokens scattered throughout the city, with several types corresponding to different locales, like skyscrapers, buoys in the bay, and criminal hideouts. Finding tokens gets you hero points, and you can never have too many of those.

9 Sly 2: Band of Thieves

A Thief’s Work is Never Done

What is being a thief if not exploring the world and collecting stuff in a professional capacity? There’s certainly plenty of that in Sly 2: Band of Thieves. Where the original game was a strictly linear affair, more in line with Crash Bandicoot, Sly 2 uses a handful of open maps that you’re more or less free to navigate around, each with goodies hidden here and there.

One particular holdover from the first Sly Cooper game is the Clue Bottles, a set number of messages in bottles scattered haphazardly around each map. By exploring a map and smashing all the bottles, you’ll receive a combination to a safe hidden in a specific spot, within which is a special ability that you can’t obtain with cash. These include the Long Toss upgrade for Sly and Bentley, or the Music Box gadget that puts guards to sleep.

Additionally, every episode in the game has at least one special treasure item that can be found out in the map. If you swipe this treasure and successfully get it back to the hideout undamaged, you can fence it for a big cash payout, which can save you the effort of pickpocketing lesser trinkets from guards.

8 The Simpsons: Hit & Run

Springfield, Springfield, It’s a Helluva Town

As The Simpsons has been on the air for almost four decades, the series’ setting of Springfield, state withheld, has naturally grown in scope and complexity. It’s a big town with a lot of stuff to do, and the first chance we ever got to really explore it thoroughly was in The Simpsons: Hit & Run.

Hit & Run contains… well, I don’t know if you’d call it a “faithful” recreation of the show’s setting, as Springfield doesn’t really have a static layout, but a comprehensive one, certainly. You can find most of the show’s iconic locations, many of which feature amusing little interactions with the cast. For example, you can find Jasper frozen in the back of the Quik-E-Mart, Rod and Todd Flanders waiting for the apocalypse in the Flanders’ emergency shelter, or Hans Moleman going blind from a camera flash at the DMV.

Finding all these gags earns you coins and increases your level completion rate, alongside smashing all the Wasp Cameras and collecting all the Collector Cards and character costumes. It’s a smorgasbord of Simpsons exploration, and all set before the show started getting worse!

7 GUN

The Wild, Wild West

I’m no cowboy buff, but I understand the general appeal of Wild West settings: frontier towns eking out lives amongst vast, wild wilderness, with courageous frontiersmen galloping between them. Before we had the likes of Red Dead Redemption to get our cowboy fix from, there was 2005’s GUN to enjoy.

This open-world game has you traveling all across the wild frontier, visiting the small towns that have cropped up along the way. It’s a lot of space to get lost in, but with plenty of reasons to do so, including both side activities and a couple of particular collectible jobs.

If you’re looking for practical work, you can sign up as a ranch hand, aid law enforcement as a federal marshall, or deliver parcels for the fledgling Pony Express. If you’re looking for cash rewards, you can hunt down rare specimens of wild game, bring in infamous ne’er-do-wells as a bounty hunter, or even pick up a pickaxe and go hunt down some unclaimed gold ore veins.

6 Bully

Terrible Town, Neat Stuff

Even if you live in an interesting town, when you’re a kid with no car or independent purchasing power, there’s rarely anything of particular interest to get up to. At least, that’s the case for well-adjusted kids, but if you have a flexible moral compass like Bully’s Jimmy Hopkins, you can find some more… constructive ways to pass the time.

In addition to the game’s more elaborate sidequests with their own setups and cutscenes, Bully’s boarding school setting and the surrounding township are densely packed with shenanigan potential. There are various extracurricular activities you can get up to for cash, like mowing lawns or delivering papers, you can get into the various bike racing circuits, or even just take miscellaneous errands from passersby, doing them favors or just causing trouble.

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There are also several categories of seemingly innocuous collectibles that can yield big rewards. For example, collecting every discarded rubber band in the game unlocks the powerful rubber band ball weapon, while destroying every lawn gnome in the neighborhood unlocks a funny gnome outfit.

5 Yakuza

What Happens in Kamurocho Stays in Kamurocho

If there’s one thing that the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise is known for these days, it’s endless supplies of side content, some of a debatably larger scope than the critical path. While the newer games have gone pretty heavy on that aspect, even the very first Yakuza game had a healthy spattering of incentives to explore Kamurocho.

The main reason you’ll want to get the full lay of the city outside the main missions is, of course, the substories, the various wacky shenanigans Kiryu can get up to as he meets the citizenry of Kamurocho. Besides being generally entertaining, completing these substories usually rewards items, experience points, and cash payouts, all of which feed into Kiryu’s continued development.

Even if you’re not pursuing substories, it’s fun to just bum around the city and do whatever you want, whether it’s playing on the UFO catchers in the arcade or hunting down the lost keys to the storage lockers. If you look really thoroughly, you can even find hidden shops with rare items that the other, regular stores don’t carry.

4 Shadow of the Colossus

Even a Wasteland has Stuff Worth Finding

Considering a big part of Shadow of the Colossus’s design philosophy is its impressively massive, yet distinctly empty open world, it might feel like exploring in any capacity would be comically missing the point. However, if the world wasn’t there to be explored, they wouldn’t have bothered to include it, even just for thematic purposes.

Even if we focus exclusively on critical path content, the game still encourages you to explore in a roundabout way, as the path to any given Colossi is rarely a straight line. You have to take detours, long-cuts, and navigate around impassible cliffs and canyons to actually reach the spots your sword is pointing you toward.

Shadow of the Colossus isn’t exactly bursting with reasons to explore, but there is at least one, and a very good one at that: lizards. There is a small gaggle of lizards scattered around the Ancient Lands, difficult to spot with the naked eye, but distinctive thanks to their jet-black coloration. Hunting and consuming these lizards permanently increases Wander’s max stamina, which is invaluable during the encounters with the Colossi.

3 Destroy All Humans

Probes Hard at Work

The entire mission statement of Destroy All Humans is right there in the title: destroy all humans. While that’s the stated goal, though, actually subjugating humanity takes a surprising amount of elbow grease, so you might as well have a little fun with your work.

Destroy All Humans has several types of challenges you can track down and complete in each invasion site, including destroying buildings with your saucer, completing races, killing specific types of enemies, and harvesting a certain number of brain stems in a time limit. Each of these challenges rewards more DNA upon completion, and serves as good practice for your weapon and movement mechanics.

Every invasion site also has a handful of Furon Probes scattered here and there, each rewarding 75 DNA upon acquisition. Apparently Pox sent all these things to Earth prior to Crypto’s invasion, but they’re not built to automatically return, which feels like an obvious oversight. Still, more DNA means more upgrades, and it’s a good reason to explore, so who’s complaining.

2 Okami

Every God Deserves Offerings

Okami takes several design cues from the Legend of Zelda games, including its large, open world and the quantity of assorted items and currencies you can find scattered about. If you like hunting around for secrets, there are few better PS2 games for the job, and it means you get to spend more time in its beautiful world.

In addition to basic money and consumables, there are specific rare items you can find here and there that have more overt practical purposes, making them worth seeking out. These include the Stray Beads which, when combined, become one of Amaterasu’s most powerful Divine Instruments, as well as the Mermaid Springs, which serve as one of the game’s unlockable fast-travel systems. Don’t forget the hidden Sun Fragments, which can be assembled into additional units of health.

While not as big of a focus as some other open-world games, Okami also has side activities and quests, such as feeding snacks to every type of animal in the world, completing the devil gate trials, and finding all the optional Celestial Brush techniques. That last one is especially useful, as it’s how you’ll learn some of Ammy’s most powerful attacks.

1 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Never a Dull Moment in this City

Of course, when it comes to open-world games that encourage exploration on the PS2, Grand Theft Auto is the first and last name in any given conversation. Just about any GTA game on the system fits the bill here, but if we had to focus on just one, I’d say San Andreas has the most interesting variety of incentives.

Besides the baseline fun of driving around the seamless, enormous map and making a nuisance of yourself for its own sake, San Andreas is jam-packed with both side missions and unique collectibles. In the case of the former, we have not just individual side missions, but entire sub-categories of side missions, from burglary missions to vehicle missions to good old-fashioned race tournaments. All of these pay out cash, of course, but some side mission chains yield bonus stuff like power-ups for specific types of vehicles.

For collectibles, you can spray over other gangs’ graffiti tags, take snapshots of distinctive landmarks, track down lucky horseshoes, and perform unique stunt jumps, just to name a few examples. All of these are great ways to pad out your wallet and gradually boost your completion rate as you traverse the map between main missions.