What are the best space games on PC in 2023? Featuring the biggest Steam games, like Kerbal Space Program, and the best free games, such as Eve Online, these are the most sensational space epics around.
Trying to pick out the best PC space games is a galaxy-sized question. Developers have been churning out space adventures since the ‘70s, and with everyone getting excited about Jupiter, and with Kickstarter and crowdfunding allowing studios to strike out alone, we’re currently just a teensy bit obsessed with what’s beyond our little blue and green marble. While we wait for E.T. to return our numerous missed calls, let’s kill time by playing some amazing intergalactic adventures in some of the best games on PC.
The best space games are:
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Star Trek Online
In movies and online, Star Trek has come a long way in a comparatively short space of time, though arguably it’s the initially troubled MMO that’s had the longest journey. Ravaged a little upon release for effectively being a bad fit, Star Trek Online has ended up filling its replica uniform rather well, and is now regarded as one of the best MMORPGs around.
It’s helpful to think of Star Trek Online not just as a game that manages to capture the spirit of the Roddenberry-enforced universe – with its pioneering forays into the unknown, tactical one-on-one battles, and meeting with curious aliens with an abiding love for human history – but as being part of an online fan convention. Players display their affiliations for TOS, TNG, or DS9, indulge their series knowledge and take part in various games on the side, namely via structured away team missions and battles in space. Being a game funded by microtransactions, you can also buy loads of tat, but the point is that Star Trek Online is not so much a sim for gamers who like Star Trek, but a hang-out for Star Trek fans who like to game.
And there’s a lot of game to like, from the way in which you develop your character and bridge officers, to playing through regular episode missions. It’s akin to riding an open-topped shuttle around every nook of Trek lore and history. Where the game excels, however, is during open team space battles, in which small groups of player ships combine to bring down indomitable NPC vessels. With a need to manage shields and power levels, and consider speed and positioning, veteran fans of the Starfleet Command games will find much to engage, especially when part of a well-drilled team of frontline and support vessels tearing up the galaxy.
While Star Trek Online came out many, many years ago, it’s still receiving regular content updates and even expansions. The most recent one, Rise of Discovery, tells the story of a pivotal moment in the lives of both Gabriel Lorca and Ellen Landry. You get to experience the events that lead to the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery, plus there’s an overhaul to how you unlock the best ships in the game, making this a much kinder update for new players.
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Star Conflict
Star Conflict is a dogfighting free MMO that sees pilots clash amid asteroid belts and above planets in fast-paced scraps. While it’s mostly concerned with PvP battles, you can grab a few quests, explore ruins, and dabble in a spot of crafting.
It’s the ships that make the game, of course. From nimble fighters to beefy frigates and bulky destroyers, there are a copious number of vessels to unlock and upgrade, determining your role in whatever conflict you find yourself duking it out in. There are over a hundred ships to choose from, but getting access to them all takes some doing.
There’s a metagame, too, as you fight for your chosen faction, hunting down foes and getting in pitched battles in an effort to spread your group’s influence and net yourself some lovely rewards.
Starfield
Starfield’s vast expanse of explorable environments, including over 1,000 Starfield planets, houses to buy and sell, resources to gather, and Starfield companions to know and love (yes, we mean Starfield romance exists), is like no other space game you’ll ever play. Our Starfield review talks about the mind-boggling array of activities, the sheer vastness of space, and how Bethesda Game Studios have taken a mighty swing at what seemed to be an impossible task.
If you’ve already jumped into the space game, check out our Starfield walkthrough – it will keep you on the straight and narrow if that’s your type of thing. We’ve even put together the best Starfield builds so you can jump in and start blasting.
EVE Online
This has been the preeminent space game for so long that you might be forgiven for thinking it’s the only space game in existence. Unquestionably, Eve Online is one of the most interesting, partly down to the fact that its half a million online inhabitants play on the same mega-server rather than having to endure the severed realities offered by its many fantasy contemporaries.
Players join together to form fleets that number in the thousands, and alliances in the tens of thousands, all laying siege to entire regions for months on end, supported by an extensive supply chain of miners, traders, researchers, and manufacturers. In terms of scale and substance, there really isn’t anything else like it. For example, an Eve ship worth 309 billion ISK – one of just one of three in existence – was destroyed by a spy embedded in the ship’s owner’s organization. Yes, there’s nothing quite like the stories generated by Eve’s astonishing community.
Online games of this scale aren’t without their downsides. It has a reputation for being bastard-hard to get into, but after updates to the user interface, graphics and the near-constant streamlining of some of the game’s more obscure systems, the Eve of today is no more difficult to approach than its single-player bosom buddies X and Elite.
It’s also receiving regular updates like the recent Eve Online: Invasion expansion, the second chapter of which will be arriving November 26. Earlier this year players were blindsided by the sudden aggression of a previously passive NPC faction, The Drifters, in a move designed by the developers to stir up trouble, proving the dangerous world of New Eden requires constant vigilance and cooperation.
The new player experience is being continually streamlined, but can still be challenging, especially if your aim is to carve out a small empire for yourself within a few weeks. Give yourself a fighting chance with our Eve Online beginner’s guide.
No Man’s Sky
Space is an unconquered and never-ending vista. That desire to explore the unknown also forms the attraction of Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, which uses procedural generation to ensure that you’ll never reach the end of its recreation of space, which has over 18 quintillion planets to explore.
Exploration isn’t all you’ll do in No Man’s Sky, however, as you’ll need to find ways to survive. Paramount to your success in doing that is mastering the game’s trading and combat. No Man’s Sky didn’t have the smoothest launch, but a heap of updates has steadied the ship since, adding everything from deep sea exploration to base-building – maintaining a dedicated and loving fanbase that bought a billboard to say thank you.
The No Man’s Sky: Beyond update this year massively overhauled several aspects of the game, introducing near-unlimited inventory space, VR compatibility, and a much more significant multiplayer component. You can now play No Man’s Sky on PC Game Pass, and it continues to see regular, huge updates, like this one that “doubles the variety in the game”.
Stellaris
Stellaris, Paradox’s 4X grand strategy hybrid, makes space surprising again thanks to event chains that are, at first, evocative of Crusader Kings II, but end up going much further. In Stellaris, you should expect mutant uprisings, robotic rebellions, and the discovery of alien texts that make your citizens question their place in the galaxy.
It’s not just a 4X game; it’s a galactic roleplaying game and empire sim, bestowing a vast array of options upon players, allowing them to create unique, eccentric, space-faring species. You can play as a fundamentalist society built on the backs of slaves, or hyper-intelligent lizards that rely on robots whether they are fighting or farming. The robust species creator and a multitude of meaningful decisions mean that you can create almost any aliens that you can imagine.
And underpinning all of that is the game’s focus on exploration. While most space 4X games stick with one method of interstellar travel, Stellaris gives you three to choose from, each with its own strengths and counters. In one game, the galaxy might be a network of hyperlanes, but in the next, you might find yourself building wormhole stations and blinking across the galaxy.
Stellaris’ multiplayer isn’t to be overlooked either, transforming decent human beings into Machiavellian alien tyrants at the drop of a hat. Check out our guides to The best Stellaris DLC and our Stellaris guide: tips and tricks for beginners.
Kerbal Space Program
The first order of doing anything in space is, of course, to get there. Unfortunately, most games in this otherwise splendid list make the rather wild assumption that rocket science isn’t all that important and skip to the business of spreading violence, free-market capitalism, and all manner of other human diseases to all corners of various galaxies. Thankfully, the space program to which the Kerbals fatefully apply is rather more grounded in reality, in the sense that the aim of the game is to avoid crashing into the stuff.
Kerbal Space Program is ostensibly about trial and error, first in building a vessel capable of getting its payload off the ground, which is relatively easy, and second by actually getting the damn thing launched and steered into some kind of orbit. You soon realize that getting past the Karman Line is one thing while delivering your payload safely to its destination is another entirely. Thankfully, because your gurning passengers seem quite happy to be sacrificed for the greater good of the basic understanding of astrophysics, the trial and error is every bit as involved and entertaining as any fleeting success.
As you’ll read in our Kerbal Space Program PC review, there are plenty of successes to aim for. Reaching the Mun (née Moon), deploying a modular space station, and mining on distant planets are all attainable, albeit after a great deal of crushing but entertaining failure, made bearable thanks to a combination of hard science unpinning a soft and cute interior. As well as being a bloody good space game, KSP may well be the most entertaining community-enriched sandbox games since Minecraft – massively helped along by Kerbal Space Program mods.
Homeworld Remastered Collection
Homeworld is the sort of game that gets inside your head and just stays there. It originally came out 15 years ago, eventually spawning an expansion, an excellent sequel, and most recently, the Homeworld Remastered Collection. It’s a series that remains unsurpassed. It’s also one of those rare strategy games that has a great story; both tragic and hopeful, filled to the brim with tension. It’s a voyage of discovery, of learning about the past and desperately struggling to create a future. It’s beautiful and a bit sad.
Thanks to Gearbox’s Homeworld remastering efforts, one of the best old games is even more beautiful. Now the game looks like it does in our memories, even those clouded by nostalgia, with its beautifully detailed ships and its gargantuan space backdrops. And, thanks to its minimalist UI, none of that beauty is obscured.
Watching the game in action is like viewing an epic ballet. Tiny ships fly in formation in all directions; massive, heavily armed capital ships float around the vast mother ship; diligent resource gatherers work away to fuel a massive undertaking. Even the biggest vessels are dwarfed by the size of the 3D maps, and when the camera is zoomed out, they look alone and vulnerable. Which is exactly what they are.
Outer Wilds
Not to be confused with The Outer Worlds – another awesome space game from 2019 – Outer Wilds casts you as an astronaut anthropologist out in the wilds of space exploring ruins across your solar system. Your goal is to learn as much about the mysterious alien race, the Nomai, as possible, but it’s pretty much up to you how that mystery unravels.
There are several distinct planets to explore and a 20-minute time loop that bookends your adventures neatly, so each run you’ll aim to discover a little more about the world before your progress partially resets. Soulful and packed with mystery, Outer Wilds goes down a treat whether you gobble it all up in one sitting or treat each 20-minute time loop as a fresh bite.
Elite Dangerous
30 years since it first graced the BBC Micro, the Elite series returns in the form of Elite Dangerous. It’s been around for a while in alpha and beta forms, enough time to be written about thousands of times and played by countless pirates, bounty hunters, traders, and explorers. So we already knew it was going to be a bit impressive.
Our playground is a whole galaxy. Not just any galaxy, either. The Milky Way is the setting of Elite Dangerous, built to a terrifying scale. It’s a galaxy populated with black holes, gargantuan suns, space anomalies, and spaceships that flit around like tiny specks of dust on an inconceivably big table. It’s still familiar and authentically Elite, but elevated by tech that would have boggled minds in 1984 when 256 planets were massively impressive. How you carve out a life in this galaxy is much the same, though, whether you become a trader, filling your cargo hold with algae and microchips, or a mercenary, fighting in an interstellar war.
It’s great, and thanks to Elite Dangerous mods, players are improving it with things like chatting ship AIs that react to voice commands. Frontier also continues to fatten it up with free updates along with the Elite: Dangerous Horizon expansion. And if you’re lucky enough to have an Oculus Rift, then you’re in for a treat, right up to the point where your ship spins out of control and you dive head-first into a sick bag.
If that’s got you excited to strap into a Cobra and hurtle into the inky black, get your space adventure started with our Elite: Dangerous guide.
Endless Space 2
The story, a 4X designer would probably say, is something that emerges naturally from the interplay of systems in a strategy game – the clash of borders, an unplanned war. Amplitude Studios doesn’t think that’s much of an excuse. They’ve stuffed Endless Space 2 with as much science fiction as it can contain – and given that it’s got whole galaxies to fill, that’s plenty.
Here you’ll meet living crystals, tiny dragons, recycled war machines and millions of clones of a bloke named Horatio. It’s a universe teeming with offbeat ideas to enjoy, and then enslave if you’re that sort of explorer. If not, you can play as a bunch of sentient trees and spread olive branches throughout known space.
There’s less left to the imagination than in conventional grand strategy – scraps are resolved in a beautiful 3D battle engine that sees your elaborate ships drift together in the void in a dramatic, interplanetary ballet. It’s like Football Manager, but with chrome, faster-than-light monoliths. Isn’t that what Sega’s catalog has been missing until now? If you still need convincing then just read our glowing Endless Space 2 review. It’s been years since the game launched, but still, the Endless Space 2 player counts are looking strong.
Master of Orion 1 + 2
Fans have been arguing since last century over which of the Master of Orion games is the better of the series and they only seem to agree that the third most definitely isn’t it, which makes the widely-available double pack featuring the first two MOOs something of an essential and stress-free purchase – at least until Wargaming finish their MOO reboot with the help of some “key members” of the original team.
Released in 1993, Master of Orion took the concepts of Sid Meier’s classic turn-based Civilization and applied them across a galaxy of planets rather than one, so that instead of various flavors of human settlers and terrestrial biomes, players were given a wide range of planets types and races to control and conquer, such as the Silicoids; able to thrive in the most hostile of environments, albeit at a glacial reproductive rate.
While the driving force behind Master of Orion and all of the best strategy games since has been technological advancement and colonialism, this was the first game of its type to really nail diplomacy and offer a route to victory in which some measure of galactic peace could be achieved. The sequel went even further, with customizable races and a political victory that required you to be elected as the Supreme Leader of the galaxy.
What is undeniable is that MOO I and II are important historical references, as seminal an influence on turn-based space conquest as the first two Doom games were establishing and defining the FPS. Unlike Doom, however, MOO has cast such a long monolith-shaped shadow over the entire space game genre that many would argue that the Orion games have yet to be eclipsed.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Mass Effect Legendary Edition remasters the original games into one neat bundle and provides the ultimate experience for space explorers. As Jen says in her Mass Effect Legendary Edition impressions, “it’s the new best way to play the trilogy”.
For Mass Effect newcomers, admittedly, there’s not much fizzing and wooshing of spaceships to be enjoyed in the trilogy, but it’s still a planet-hopping, alien-seducing space adventure, and one of the best sci-fi RPG games you’re likely to play.
Mass Effect boasts a strong story and set of characters and, in spite of a complete lack of direct spaceship control, you’re command of a functioning ship with the ability to explore the galaxy.
Parallels have been drawn – not least by Bioware themselves – between the Mass Effect trilogy and the classic exploration series Starflight, which was notable in the late 1980s for being one of the very first space exploration games and is notable today for not having been better in that regard since. In terms of storyline, with all that ancient technology end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it gubbins, Mass Effect’s storyline is remarkably close to Starflight’s. Indeed Starflight could almost be seen as the ’70s original to Mass Effect’s BSG-style gritty reimagining, only without the risible Galactica 80 spin-off series to besmirch its reputation.
FTL: Faster Than Light
Space is awful and will probably kill you: that’s the lesson FTL attempts to impart to brave spacefarers. The permadeath ship management game is, on the surface, a simple race to deliver information to the hands of your allies, but you’re being chased. With every diversion explored, the enemy fleet gets closer and closer, and even if you do stay ahead of them, random death lurks around every corner.
Random violent encounters, shopping sprees, new worlds and races, unlockable ships and configurations, loads and loads of weird and wonderful weapons and tools – there’s so much in FTL that every game has the potential to be dramatically different. One could see you managing a tough vessel that employs ion cannons to disable enemy systems and drones to pepper them with lasers. Another might inspire you to use mind control to defeat your enemies, or teleporters to fill their ships with your own crew.
So much can go wrong. Sometimes it’s your fault, like when you mess up a fight and end up rapidly attempting to patch up hull breaches and put out fires. But sometimes luck just isn’t on your side, like when you agree to help a space station deal with a plague and one of your crew gets sick. But every failed attempt is a complete story full of adventures and misadventures, and a great excuse to make another valiant attempt.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
A game that successfully manages to combine the very best of 3D real-time strategy – albeit without a proper single-player campaign – with the kind of empire-building offered only by the very top 4X games.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is played across a user-defined network of stars. Players begin forging an empire around the gravity wells of planets with shipyards, research outposts, extractors, and defense systems, then assemble fleets combining frigates, corvettes, cruisers, and capital ships to map and eventually conquer neighboring systems.
In earlier versions of Sins of a Solar Empire, conquest was largely achieved in the time-honored RTS fashion of dragging a huge box around every single damn ship you owned and directing them towards the enemy systems so as to allow the sheer force of numbers to win the day. However, with the introduction of diplomatic victories in a previous expansion and research and occupation victories as part of 2012’s Rebellion standalone – not to mention new Death Star-like titan ships as a much-needed counter to the ultra-defensive starbases structures – the stalemates that would often cause games to peter out can be pursued as potentially winning strategies. And let’s not forget about the mods that let you play out your Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica fantasies.
X4: Foundations
If you’re after a realistically simulated universe filled with spaceships, stations, and plenty of trade, X4: Foundations has everything you need. X4 gives players the opportunity to live out their space fantasies by providing a variety of game starts, each with its own set of variables to make each save completely different.
Despite launching back in 2018, Egosoft, the developer behind X4, has continued to support the game throughout the years with huge updates. Not only did we see the launch of the 6.0 update which upgraded the game engine, but there was also a push for the modding scene as the community received Blender Modding Tools for the first time. Expect to see big things coming from the game’s biggest fans as they get to grips with the modding tools.
Whether you’re playing as a space pirate who attacks rogue ships with little regard for human life, or a business person looking to make a fortune, X4 is designed to let you shape the universe in the way you want it. Even if you’ve spent thousands of hours trying to solidify your station, just know that all it takes is one aggressive batch of fighters to stop you in your tracks. If you ever wanted more from Starfield’s space combat, consider picking up X4: Foundations to experience space from a new perspective.
For more space games, here are the best star wars games on PC and strategy games in 2023. Don’t forget, there’s a fairly big space game on the way that will likely become a mainstay of this list when it launches in September, so keep your eyes peeled for that entry.