Ew, not like Fortnite, I mean like indie launchers
Beyond All Reason (BAR) A spiritual successor to supreme commander made by a team of fans. It’s free and had LAN and online multiplayer. Really fun if you enjoyed the source material.
I’m surprised no one mentioned it yet, but Kitten Space Agency
It’s a free spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program that tries to be everything that KSP2 wasn’t. It’s still in early development by its progressing fast and it already looks great and allows you to do a lot of cool things, and it’s also built using their own engine instead of Unity and has modding support.
And it’s not on steam.
Probably because it’s not really a game yet. You can play it, but there’s really nothing to do at the moment. It’ll be on a list like this when there’s actual gameplay.
However, the studio also make Stationeers, which more people should play. It is on Steam though, so it’s not for this list. I’m a pretty big fan of their studio. They seem to be doing everything right.
Seems to have the things KSP had when I first played it in 2013, before career was added
Not really. I played in the first version that had the Mun, which was just a stationary object straight above the launch site, and it’s missing stuff from that even. It does have more than that too though.
You can build rockets now, as of a very recent update, so it is actually something you can play with. Before then, the only thing you could really do was fly around a premade craft with unlimited fuel, so it’s progress. KSP, before career, had more parts and more mechanics for the parts though. It also had reasons to explore, with secret locations all around the system. KSA is just the Solar system, which is cool but also you know what there is to see.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t play it if they’re interested. It’s free, and it’s a cool look at the tech they’re building. It just isn’t much of a game yet, especially if you already have KSP1. I fully believe it will get there though.
Is stationeers actually done yet? Last time I played the best station was a single cube with as few features as possible.
Done? No. They keep adding content. It may never be “done”. It is feature-rich though.
A cube probably still is the best shape, as it is in real life often. It maximizes the volume-to-suface ratio. However, there’s tons of reasons to build other shapes. Usually you’re expanding organically, so you end up things tacked on all over as you add more features.
You can get to a livable base pretty quickly (especially on the normal start on a planet like Mars), and then just stop playing. The game is mostly about what you do beyond that though. Automating your furnace, backup power, mining, farming, etc. is the real goal. Stopping at just the basics is like stopping Minecraft after you build a farm.
Vintage story. Much grittier minecraft with a larger emphasis on survival
Dwarf fortress is on steam, humble bundle, itch io and free on their website.
Dwarf fortress is an essential gaming experience.
Should be played until your most common cause of fortress failure is FPS death
And then you should start to experiment with science!
StarSector
Bought it myself. On my 5th playthrough and its such a blast still. Mods keep the game fresh. All ya gotta do is.download a folder from the game’s forums and put it in the right place. If thats to much work, there is always TriOS mod manager
Starsectors website: https://fractalsoftworks.com/
Freelancer. Basically abandonware at this point, but tons of community support, with some great mods and servers.
Love this game.
I really wanted Freelancer 2. Star Citizen was meant to be it before Chris Roberts did… well I have no idea what he did, what he is doing or the state of Star Citizen any more, its got so out of hand.
Elite Dangerous just wasnt it for me. The ship and space stuff is amazing but the world just isn’t as fun as Freelancer. I know its come a long way after I played it just after release but it doesn’t seem to quite fill the same niche.
Same. And star citizen isn’t necessarily bad. But the scope creep has gotten out of hand. I started playing back in the mid 3.0 releases, back when delamar was still part of Stanton, and I thought the future state of the game was clear and obvious. But man CIG, or Chris, just keeps going bigger and bigger and bigger. A lot of people talk about SC without playing it, and that’s a shame because it has so much going for it. They truly are developing amazing things… But I have to agree. The vision is super muddy. Freelancer 2 it is not. I don’t even think they know what the ultimate goal is. I keep saying its an indefinite test bed for things they want to develop. No end goal in sight. Just play and QC our development sandbox please.
Unciv (https://github.com/yairm210/unciv) is a great low graphics but with nothing to be jealous of Civilization 5 free and open source alternative. It also has a great mod scene with mods that add undead and fantasy armies and so much more.
Hytale, Tibia, Escape from Tarkov, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Brogue
Super tux kart
Xonotic
Aurora 4X if you are into very complex strategy games about building an interstellar empire.
I’ve heard good things about star citizen
I played it in one of their free play weekends, and it had so many glitches. I spent an afternoon and evening trying to play it and have never bothered with it again.
It’s got the kernel of something amazing in there, but it’s insanely buggy (and essentially unplayable when it’s busy, like the Free Fly events or right after a patch) and the pace of development is absolutely glacial. And you really can’t trust anything the devs assure you is happening/on the way. It’s unclear whether they’re just bullshitting everyone or they somehow genuinely believe their own hype about deadlines, even after consistently missing all of them for over a decade, by a lot.
That probably makes it sound worse than it is TBH. There’s a really cool game in there somewhere, but you have to be extremely patient with it.
2xko by riot games. Not indie but it is a free fighting game through the riot launcher. Sadly, riot been fumbling with it but I hope they give it a few years of love & development. I genuinely love it.
Any game made by Riot sadly uses the same shitty kernel-level anticheat (read: spyware), doesn’t it? The game looks good, expecially as a free to play, but it’s a hard pass.
Yeah, that’s the only issue. I just play it on PS5 but I know not everybody has/wants one. Sadly, we are the minority when it comes to the anti cheat given the playerbase in league & valorant.
If you can put up with the (unending) bugs and performance issues, there really isn’t something that hits white like Star Citizen for me. A friend bought it for me but I would happily pay the minimum $45 when it finally releases in a stable and reliable playable state.
If they could just get the base systems down and do a big push on bug fixing instead of adding flashy events and more ships it would make such a difference.
