Welcome to my second Top 10 list! Recent lists of "Top 10 levels" are based on older eras of gaming, particularly the 16-bit period. Nothing wrong with that but I wanted to change this and celebrate modern games, which are oft-criticised, sometimes unfairly, so - read on!

The main draw for me with Test Drive Unlimited is the ability to cruise. Taking leisurely drives and clocking up mileage (reaching the hundreds for me at the moment) just to see the sights of the quiet island of Oahu is fun in itself. Thankfully, this kind of simple enjoyment of just one part of a game that offers many gameplay choices is no longer rare in games, as most on this list will attest.

An underwater city. An underwater city with a quaint, yet authentic retro feel. An underwater city with a quaint, yet authentic retro feel that has been mostly abandoned, destroyed or is in the process of both. An underwater city with a quaint, yet authentic retro feel that has been mostly abandoned, destroyed or is in the process of both, based on Ayn Rand and moral choices. What more could you ask for? It can be said only one way: Rapture will enrapture you and you simply MUST pay a visit.

Skate made gamers everywhere reconsider how they approached city environments in games. It, and other games (notably Crackdown and Assassin's Creed) really makes you pay attention to the environment around you, and look for your best path through. To be brief with my praise I shall say this: if there's an obstacle, pipe, ramp, hill, kerb, gap, drop, rail or staircase, the chances are, with persistence, you can trick off it. It's that simple, and it's that which makes it brilliant.

Spooky, abandoned, dilapidated, filled with crazed criminals that want to batter your head with big sticks...This is a cross between Silent Hill and Crackdown in some ways. It's a first person game with a very scarce number of guns and even lesser amounts of ammunition. The frights are often helped by atmosphere and setting with the usual darkened locations to explore. There are also some excellent "tricks" played on you that are themselves a mix of Silent Hill and Eternal Darkness. Surprisingly, in the modern development climate, the game did well enough to warrant a sequel. Recommended for survival horror enthusiasts, AND first person enthusiasts.

Crackdown can be paired with the next entry, Assassin's Creed for broadly similar reasons, just as Call of Duty 4 can be paired with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl later on in the list. Pacific City was a place many were quick to write off alongside Saints Row as GTA clone games or games to fill the time before Grand Theft Auto finally made its newest "next-gen" arrival. I can't comment on Saints Row but in Crackdown you're not the criminal, you're the justice. There's an entire comic-book look to the game with neon lights blinking far across the distant horizons. And I do mean distant. The draw distance in Crackdown is superb, as is the combat and the driving brings back memories of arcade-style madness. Anyhow, the point of comparison with Assassin's Creed here and the reason Crackdown is so much fun is that it married a platforming game with a open city formula. Your skills progress each time you use them so if you like to jump to reach places, your jumping gets higher and higher until you're able to scale most skyscrapers with relative ease. And what a blast it is climbing the never-ending Agency Tower! If you haven't already done so, do so!

There are a lot of things to dislike about Assassin's Creed: repetition of tasks and combat, samey pedestrians, the bland colours of the cities - however, the cities themselves are stunning playgrounds. Altair's athleticism allows you to soar, climb with great speed, race across rooftops and generally run around freely, reminiscent of the also excellent Spiderman 2. It's always good fun to jump down from a fairly high rooftop into a startled crowd only for them to look at you and make comments about your sanity, health or possible injuries they won't care about when you sustain them climbing around like a madman. As standard, the graphics are rather stunning, and if you take the time to genuinely explore on foot and examine some of the brickwork, architecture and textures of the cities, you're sure to be impressed. A real 3D platformer from the masters behind the (new, now old) 3D Prince of Persia trilogy of the PS2 days.

This is where you start to pick up my penchant for urban decay and abandonment. The Chernobyl of Call of Duty 4 is incredible - not least because you're having to play stealthily but because a number of well-known "landmarks", if I can use such a word for them, are reproduced. There's the swimming pool with rays of light shimmering through the gaps where windows used to be, one of the road entrance gates (just before you have to crawl through the field to avoid the patrolling troops,) and the ferris wheel you end up having a tight shoot-out at. The graphics engine powering CoD4 is incredible in itself and it makes these environments simply stunning - capturing at once the silence, emptiness, and shells of homes left behind. This is perhaps the closest you can get inside the Zone of Exclusion without picking up a Ukranian tour guide and an unhealthy dose of radiation.

Some 30 square kilometres of desolate wasteland are up for your exploration and enjoyment in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and, though it's a wasteland, there's still plenty to see and do. Whether it's looking for loot in abandoned homes, warehouses or shelters, killing bandits and talking to various factions near rusted hulks of machinery and left vehicles or tracking wild beasts through woods - you're sure to have an engrossing experience. Developers - we need more marriages between FPS and RPGs!

A train station, a "Breencast", a town square with out of places structures dotting the near and far horizon. Half-Life 2 excels in revealing small details and revels in looking so right. The architecture always tries to stay true to a distinct eastern European style so that anything put into City 17 by the Combine (the bad guys) immediately stands out. Dilapidation and a worn look complete the aesthetic of City 17, but it isn't taken to the extremes of urban decay seen in games such as Condemned or the Silent Hill series. It's always worth taking a trip to City 17 to soak up the sights and sounds.

The main reason this game makes it to #1 is this: I was incredibly skeptical and slightly irritated when I first heard, some two years ago that GTA IV would go back to Liberty City. "Boo, hiss!" I cried. "Lazy designers!" I thought; Liberty City has been seen three times in the series already - in the original GTA, a wildly successful 3D re-imagining in GTA 3 and a PSP spin-off in Liberty City Stories. Thankfully, I was stunned when I took my first steps into the Liberty City of GTAIV. The graphical detail is incredible, the lighting is incredible, the new less 'cartoonish' more 'realist' look of GTAIV's Liberty City is truly a sight to behold. Another success for the Rockstar team - now get cracking on Tokyo, Rome, Paris, Sydney - a new city, please!

Most of the games on this list are getting on for their 2nd birthdays; as such, they are cheap so I suggest you go shopping if you haven't played any of them already. There are many, many runners up that could be mentioned - Rapture from Bioshock was a last minute replacement for Sera in Gears of War, "the Universe" from Mass Effect was left out because I wanted to at least try and vary the genres included. I've only just gotten my hands on a PS3 after the UK release of an 80 gig unit with a proper (rumbling) controller. As such, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune sits unplayed as I while away the hours on Metal Gear Solid 4 so...maybe next time - thanks for reading!

List by bry159