24
votes
What are your favourite space games?
I'll start -
Kerbal Space Program
Orbiter ( http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ )
SpaceX Docking Simulator ( https://iss-sim.spacex.com/ )
I'll start -
Kerbal Space Program
Orbiter ( http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ )
SpaceX Docking Simulator ( https://iss-sim.spacex.com/ )
FTL: Faster Than Light
The Humble version is on sale, and comes with the Web Version available at the Humble Store.
I'm curious. I've never heard about this games before. What makes it memorable for you?
Also not the person you replied to, but I'm a huge FTL fan. The setting, music, art style, and core gameplay loop are all really top notch, but what keeps me coming back to it is variety, replay value, reasonable level of challenge, and low friction. Games aren't a huge time commitment at an hour or two, the game is still reasonably challenging after years and hundreds of hours, and every game can be totally different from the last, every galaxy is randomly generated and there's 28 different playable ships. On higher difficulties, you pretty much have to cobble together a build out of random garbage, and it's really satisfying making those builds work.
I'm not the person you replied to, but for me what makes it memorable is the emergent storytelling. You get attached to your crew, and you follow them in space exploration, wacky adventures, and intense battles.
Pretty much what everyone else has already said, Roguelike elements keep the game from being stale, and keeps you wanting to do one more run, no matter how many times this thing kicks your behind.
I have still never beaten the game. I have many hours in it. It's somehow still fun, and it's kept me coming back for years. Great way to spend an hour or two when I don't have much else to do.
FTL is beautiful, infuriating, satisfying and addictive.
Sometimes a plan comes together. Most of the time you die. Sometimes unbelievable luck strikes in your favour or against it. Either way, it's a winner, and one of my favourite games.
I had to play on easy, but I still have a lot of memories of it, it's a great game. Into the Breach is pretty great too, btw! (though not a space game)
Both games are fantastic, and I've had a lot of mileage out of making them pseudo co-op. My friends and I used to throw up the games onto the TV and work out our plans as we went through. Great fun to do, and makes playing the games on higher difficulties a bit easier too!
Without question, it is Freespace 2. Epic storyline, great combat with huge capital ships duking it out with ginormous weapons as you fly around in your tiny fighter, it's just great.
Currently, I am enjoying the hell out of Avorion. Custom ship building, economics complex enough to be challenging but not Eve-level complicated, fun combat, also did I mention custom voxel ship building?
Without a doubt the game series that started it all for me was Escape Velocity, and its two sequels, Escape Velocity: Override and Escape Velocity: Nova.
Really surprised no one has mentioned Stellaris yet. It's the best 4X space title IMO. Easy to sink tons of time into.
Or Sins of a Solar Empire! Definitely more RTS focused than most other space games, but it has a pretty solid following and was quite popular a decade ago.
Speaking of Stellaris, it's currently on sale and free to play through this weekend, since it's the fourth anniversary of the game. Now's a good time to check it out!
Then check out Endless Sky if you haven't yet. It's in the spirit of the Escape Velocity series. (It's basically a copy of the gameplay but with all new stories.)
Thanks, I have! I would also recommend the relaunch of Escape Velocity Override, rebranded as Cosmic Frontier: Override.
Endless Sky.
FTL: Faster Than Light is also good.
I played endless sky for a while. I don't know if I was just missing something but it got old pretty fast. I got to the point that I was able to upgrade from the basic freighter that I originally picked, but it took a lot of grinding for what felt like a small reward.
FTL is great, though.
To get more out of the game beyond basic grinding (trading, transporting or bounty hunting), you need to visit the spaceports of the worlds. There is a lot of story that can be explored, and this is what makes the game really good.
re: slow grind for small reward: Note that there is a spectrum of ways of making money. Some slower, some faster. In the early going, I found it helpful to make sure I scanned the full list of missions from a given world (job board) so as to be able to find the most lucrative ones and zero in on those.
Came here to post this! I played the originals (Escape Velocity and EV:Nova). I had so much fun playing those games back in the day. Endless Sky is very true to the originals. I highly recommend it.
Glad to see someone who also enjoys ES! I'm just wondering, but what do you think of Cosmic Frontier: Override? I was looking into playing EV: Nova (and the other EV games) when I found it.
I hadn't heard of it until just now! Looks pretty cool!
Endless Space, both 1 and 2 are pretty cool. It's a regular 4X title, so prepare to sync a lot of time into it. The music is amazing, the fights in the first one -- not so much.
Space Rangers - I love this game from afar. It has quirky humor, cool text quests, but I suck at figuring out what to do, with whom to trade and how to not get blown up by the pirates.
Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages - it seems that literally no-one has ever heard of this game. I don't know why. It's an 2D RPG/racer/shmup in space where you construct your own ship. I honestly not sure how to describe it. Get it on sale for half a dollar you might be surprised
The Last Federation - so, basically you're a space hydra and you have to convince all of the 8 races of your solar system to know shoot you dead with nuclear missiles. You may convince them to fight one another. You may unite them. You may make them drop nuclear waste on your enemies so they die horribly. You may run their market to the ground. It's pretty unique
SPACE RANGERS FUCK YEAH
Got it for a gift as a kid. Enjoyed the first one to bits. Got the second one immediately when it came out.
I sunk so much time into the game's quest system... I think this is where I fell in love with this sort of CYOA-style adventures in the modern shell.
Kerbal Space Program
Elite Dangerous, often described as a trucking simulator in space. The gameplay hasn't ever been particularly complex or deep, but the atmosphere and sound design is second to none, especially when playing in VR.
Space Engine, which is less a game and more an educational tool; it procedurally generates every star in the milky way (and other galaxies besides.)
I have a weird memory of Space Engine. Me and my friend used to call each other on Skype, open up Space Engine and just fly around telling each other what we see, or how "there's this cool black hole, you've gotta see it!!"
I played star trek bridge crew for the first time a few days ago. It's great, and I can't wait to get in there again with my buddies. One of them has a vr headset and says it's the best vr game he's played.
I've had that game in my VR backlog for ages and haven't touched it on account I'm holding out hope my friends will eventually get VRs to play with.
Otherwise, the few times I've done the multiplayer stuff, I'm always paired with someone who knows the missions backwards and forwards which-- while being a nice way to get introduced to stuff (beyond the tutorial)-- kinda saps the fun from it.
While I hear it's great in VR, I still really enjoyed it without VR. We had a friend who kept bugging us to play and when we finally did, it was a blast. Good luck convincing your friends.
I played a bit of bridge crew when I first got my headset but never got into it. What would you think about setting up a tildes play group to play sometime?
I'd be down if we got a third player-- I can't think of any other games right now, but co-op story games imo are best experienced with someone who hasn't played them before. I hated the partners I'd get it in Resident Evil 5 who came so decked out in endgame gear it sapped all the fun from it, or the Division games who pair me with people who've played the missions thousands of times and know precisely where everyone's gonna come from.
I agree completely. I haven’t played many coop games because of that. It’s unfortunate because I think coop offers the best gaming experiences. My steam name is Weldawadyathink. I am still working through this, but I have Thursday and Friday off, and most evenings PST.
Don’t know if that counts but Starfox and Terminal Velocity (old MS-DOS game).
Critical Mass has been one of my favourite games since the mid 90's. It's a simultaneously executed tactical space combat game, where you lead a squadron of ships in a variety of mission type (attack, defend, support, patrol, etc). It's tense and exciting, without being stressful.
I also find it a very good game for when I'm (supposed to be) working from home, because everything (game startup, mission initialisation, loading, saving, AI processing, etc) is instant, and being turn-based it doesn't require constant attention. It's well suited for ultra-short game sessions, of just a few seconds to a few minutes. And because every decision in the game is so small, it doesn't give me analysis paralysis like many other turn-based games do.
Those games were ruthless. IIRC there were a whole bit in the first Space Quest wherein you read the manual on how to refuel an escape pod to get off a self-destructing ship. You'd follow all the instructions to the letter, get in the escape pod, take off and... die. Why? Because you didn't buckle up. Which wasn't going to be an instruction manual for refueling the pod, but is just common sense.
Good stuff.
Homeworld 1 & 2
I suck terribly at both games, but will often just play it on an easy skirmish on account I just really like the atmosphere.
I played through the first campaign, didn't make it through the second, but the sheer atmosphere is amazing. Deserts of Kharak were pretty cool too, but didn't finish it as well
I've been enjoying Elite Dangerous, and find it pretty enjoyable. You can be a miner, a trader, an explorer, a bounty hunter, a hired gun, a pirate, a quester... there's a lot of options. The ships are pretty cool, and I enjoy just wandering around looking at different star systems.
I think it's still Freelancer for me. Nothing else ever matched it in terms of chilling atmosphere. I'm talking ASMR-tier, turn the lights down and poo your pants at a door knock kinda stuff.
Being that many others have already stated games I'd list (Freespace 2, FTL, etc.) I'll toss another that's difficult to find, legally, but I always found to be amazing: Hardwar
Aside from Kerbal Space Program, PULSAR: Lost Colony.
It's a multiplayer-only(afaik) space simulator game which is probably similar to that star trek one. Everyone has a specific role, like captain, pilot, engineer, gunner; everyone can do every task, but only the one with the appropriate role can increase their skills in that task. It's fairly complex though not annoyingly so.
You travel as a team to pick up quests, trade goods, explore space stations/planets and of course, space battles.
It's been a while since I played it (friends don't have much time) but it's really fun. For example, I usually play engineer. You're mostly in the engineering floor where the reactor, power controls, fuel management and jump drive controls are.
The ship reactor has a certain power capacity, but your ship systems demand more than that, so you have to balance power demands based on the situation.
For instance, in battles I turn off everything that's not necessary like lights, climate control, then give more power to weapons, shields and thrusters (so the pilot can evade better).
However, the ship reactor also produces heat. If the reactor reaches a certain temperature, it'll automatically shut down and cool off, which is not something you want in the middle of a battle, so you can provide a flow of coolant to the reactor. There's a limited supply of that, so I tend to use that only in heavy battles.
Another option would be to turn off the thermal overload protection; there's a counter near the reactor screen that displays stability; if this reaches 0, the reactor melts down and has to be ejected (and you'll have to move away pretty fast). This isn't game over (unless your enemy kills you); you'll just run to the nearest space station on your auxilliary power system to get a new one.
There's more systems like this in place, but I don't really know much about them since I've only played as engineer so far.
I'd like to punch one in here for the Wing Commander series - it's probably very old/outdated now but I had a blast playing through all of them back in the day.
I was hyped for the sequel. Not as hyped after all the delays.
Allegiance: an online multiplayer space combat & RTS where a group of pilots and a commander fly different specialized ships (e.g. scouts, interceptors, fighters, bombers), expand and develop tech trees and ultimately try to destroy/capture the enemy team major bases.
Games are still running specially during the weekend at around 3 pm EST. There’s a discord channel you can join for live banter.
The game was originally developed by Microsoft but they released the source code and you can now play on steam for free:
http://www.freeallegiance.org/
I personally love KSP to no end. It's got endless replay value for me, and so I've been playing on and off for many years now.
I'm honestly pretty terrible at it (only figured out how to consistently rendezvous and dock about a week ago, for instance), but it's so much fun to build something and launch it, hoping it doesn't blow up but being fully prepared for it to fail in some horrific way.
Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky and RimWorld.
All of them are a fun way to kill time and the first can be very chill and relaxing to play. RimWorld is just funny random craziness (also MODS!!!).