I’m rewatching Babylon 5 and it’s putting me in the mood for an immersive game where I get to command a spaceship and blast stuff with lasers or plasma cannons or whatever.
I fondly remember playing Tie Fighter, Elite 2 and Privateer, and I was wondering if there were good games from this side of the millennium? I’ve tried playing Tie Fighter Total Conversion, but without a joystick I found it very hard to control. I’ve played some Elite Dangerous, and enjoy a bit of trading, but the combat is a bit too hard for me.
I’m a very casual gamer, and not looking for an mmo, or anything particularly challenging. I just want to zoom around in a spaceship as epic battles rage around me, and have a bit of a power fantasy.
Any suggestions?
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Freelancer is still the best of its genre, IMO.
It’s abandonware, so you can download it for free, and the community has released a ton of mods over the years.
Oh no, mods… If it’s anything like skyrim I’ll spend more time messing around with mods than playing the game… But a bit of reading suggests that just the HD mod is a good choice for a 1st time playthru?
I’ve never played them myself, but I’ve seen some mods that completely overhaul the game.
That being said, I would recommend playing the vanilla experience first, with an HD mod if you’d like.
but the combat is a bit too hard for me
I haven’t really played since I was at most a teen so maybe the later battles aren’t actually as hard as I remember, but if this is a bottleneck then OP may find later sections of the game’s main story frustrating. I think the game itself is a good vibe fit and has broadly aged well, but something to keep in mind for OP!
NO Mans Sky. You can dogfight space pirates. I need to spin the game up again now that custom ships are a thing.
The custom interiors and crew based stuff is really interesting and I want to see it as a light no fire testbed if nothing else after they said it was the same core tech as their ocean faring ships.
Unless they did a proper rework of space combat, it’ll get old fast, just like ground combat. I also remember you could pile up dozens of “Kill space pirate Whoever” from several systems, travel super far away so that you could reset the quests, reset said quests, then manage to complete ALL of them by killing only one target
Everspace is very cool - it’s a rouge like where you upgrade your ship as you progress with very unique skills and different branches.
I’m also in love with Cosmoteer - 2D game where you can build, rebuild, salvage enemy ships, eventually create a small fleet and experiment a lot with different designs.Star Wars Squadrons is pretty good fun.
This was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the Tie Fighter mention. Though OP mentioned not having a joystick and I don’t have direct experience playing on controller so YYMV.
The single player campaign is short but fun and very nostalgic for enjoyers of the X-Wing/Tie Fighter era of games!
The online (if anyone even still plays) is anything but casual so I don’t necessarily recommend that unless you are super invested in it.
That looks fun! I am a sucker for games set in classic SW.
Fun in VR, too
If you don’t mind a bit of a grindy ARPG aspect to it and REALLY annoying progression for traversal? Everspace 2 is probably THE best space combat in a modern release… which is sad but it is still actually really good and has some great set pieces. It is basically Freelancer 2, if that helps. If you just want shooty shooty boom boom then the original Everspace may be a better fit but… there is a reason so many of us slept on 2 after trying to like 1.
If you want something that is basically a love letter to Privateer? Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. I personally don’t vibe with it but I think that is because it is too close to what I expect to be using a HOTAS with (it is very much a gamepad/m+kb game) and the “vibes” of the Rebel Galaxy series are more “space redneck” than “space western”.
I have yet to actually get around to it (just been, what, eight or nine years now?) but I hear that some of the player origins in X4 are really good for getting into combat. I sincerely doubt that because the X series has always had REALLY good combat… broken up by 10 hours of trading so you can afford repairs and the missiles you use. But worth a look.
If you don’t mind getting out of a fighter and into a corvette or even a capital ship?
I REALLY like Cosmoteer but it is pretty grindy to start with. Space Pirates and Zombies, shitty acronym aside, has much better onboarding and similar gameplay but also much less control or a sense of “this is mine”.
And it is a love it or hate it kind of pseudo-series (really more like major functionality patches sold as a sequel) but check out Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2. You control capital ships in the 40k universe and Tindalos very much understood the assignment Just understand that 40k doesn’t pretend that space combat is anything other than romanticized WW1 naval fleet combat and it really feels like you are controlling ships of the line as it were.
FTL
I’m a very casual gamer, and not looking for an mmo, or anything particularly challenging.
Putting aside anything else, I doubt FTL meets the requirements just because it’s firmly on the hard side of things. Might be a good suggestion to check out for some others reading the thread though!
I haven’t played it in years, but I have fond memories of FreeSpace 2 and its open source community version. A quick search turned this up.
There was also a Babylon 5 mod for Free Space 2
In increasing order of casualness I recommend: Elite Dangerous->X3/X4->Everspace/Everspace 2-> No Man’s Sky.
Everspace 2 is a spiritual successor to Freelancer, so probably your best bet ( Everspace 1 is more roguelike, but holds up nicely ). Speaking of Freelancer, I hear the game is still alive and has a vibrant community around it.
If you ever want to revisit Elite shoot me a message, I may help you with starting up. They say Elite doesn’t have a learning curve but a cliff, so help is usually needed. Luckily the game has the most welcoming and helpful community I’ve seen in/around a video game.
Other than these, there’s Chorus, but I haven’t played that one and it seems more story driven than open-ended.
For a game that’s themed as space battles and isn’t an action game, check out Cobalt Core. It’s a deckbuilding adventure about a space crew trying to escape from a time loop. The characters and story moments are fun and combat is like a turn-based puzzle of trying to position the ship to line up with enemy weak spots or to dodge missile barrages.
If you want bigger ships than fighters:
Rebel Galaxy(its completely different compared to RG Outlaw) - big ships, can hire a single mercenary, combat for you happens in 2D and its more of naval style with broadsides and automated turrets.
Between the Stars - you have a spaceship with a crew and can also hire 2 more ships to help you out(once you gear them), game got plenty of quests with some puzzles to boat, “ground combat” which is using dice(or can be disabled completely) and space combat takes a bit to get used to.
+1 for Rebel Galaxy.
It came out a few years ago but it’s still a really good game that I’ll pick up every now and then. The combat is surprisingly good for a space game that’s on a 2d plane.
Completely offline which is nice also.
+2
It’s also got a badass soundtrack
The X series (X3 and X4 in particular) might be fun. Very sandboxy. The late-game turns into more of a management game than a ‘fly around blasting stuff’ game, but you don’t have to go that route if you don’t want to.
FTL and star command come to mind.
Isn’t FTL more of a base (ship) builder than a space dogfight type game?
If you want something a bit closer to Starfox, rather than an all-range flight arena, try Rogue Flight. It definitely evokes the power fantasy feeling, living up the classic arcade trope of “one ship being readied on a mission to save humanity”. There’s some very big-name voice actor work in it, as well.
Another good game for the “power fantasy” trope, though it’s a bit more outside the target, is Ace Combat 7. Or, perhaps any games in the series, but this one is pretty accessible. The combat is close to what you’d get in X-Wing/Tie-Fighter, but with fighter planes. It breaks from realism a little bit where needed to make the stunts fun. And, the story very much orients around the silent player character being “scary tough” in a fight, to the point enemy fighters are retreating just from seeing your wing markings.
House Of The Dying Sun is pretty good for casual fun from what little I’ve played of it.
+1 for Rebal Galaxy
