I have been playing a lot of Operation Harsh Doorstop, a free multiplayer shooter with realistic combat and vehicles. Recently the game has really started to come together into a fun experience (and it runs decent on my steam deck).
Nebulous has a conquest mode that is in testing at the moment that sounds extremely promising. The base gameplay is so good the game doesn’t need much, just a bit of progression between battles and choices to make about who to fight next.
Transcendence is a classic, the dev is still working on the game and the first early version came out in 1995 so rest assured if the game peaks your interest there is a lottttt to sink your teeth into there!
I don’t know how I came across Star Sector but games it reminds me of:
Mount and Blade obviously (the open world with roaming bands you encounter)
Transcendence is a game where you only play as a single ship but this is one of longest developed 2d top down ship games and it deserves mention.
Battlevoid Harbinger is much simpler but the game is well suited for mobile and the tactical battles are actually extremely interesting, there is a lot of thought to how you approach situations and which direction you choose to go through sectors.
Silent Sector, I haven’t played this one but it seems to be well reviewed. This is a game where you fly mostly one ship I think.
Subspace Continuum is a deep cut lol, old multiplayer 2d spaceship combat game with really realllllllly deep combat mechanics and a very high skill ceiling. You pilot a single ship. Mostly dead :(
Nebulous Fleet Command is a good pick if you want Star Sector but 3D. It actually controls fantastic on my steamdeck and I am reallly REALLY impressed by the UI, tutorials and general control scheme as this game is basically as in-depth with radar, targeting, guided missiles as you can get without going for a modern day military sim (like command modern operations or something).
Space Rangers HD: A War Apart looks bonkers, haven’t played it but it deserves a mention for just being so off the wall and obscure
(Microsoft) Allegiance is an old space combat game kind of like Empires Mod or Natural Selection 2 where one player per team is the commander who plays the game like an RTS and all the other teammates play the game like it is a spaceship combat game. It is 3D and multiplayer but I feel like there is some shared DNA here with picking the right fights so you can upgrade your fleet and then taking enemies more head on.
Armored Brigade is worth a mention, yes I know it is an entirely different genre of a Cold War gone hot realistic military game, but the top down visual style and the really interesting delayed orders system I think might be interesting to check out as a fan of tactical spacecombat games. The effective range of main battle tanks in this game alone is terrifying.
The Last Federation by the makers of AI War also deserves a mention here because I LOVE the clever twisting of game mechanics (these developers are great at that, see Tidalis lol) where you play a single spaceship amidst warring factions but that your goal is to UNIFY them. You are an extremely powerful alien from a dead race with a powerful ship and you want to stop the galaxy falling into war but you are only one ship and you have to think about the political/diplomatic implications of every move you make. It gives the game structure of star sector or mount and blade where you roam around fighting and negotiating with much bigger factions than yourself a broader shape and arc to the experience. Very cool game, I haven’t tried it yet either though.
Star Traders: Frontiers sigh imagine if it had combat like star sector??! Or imagine Star sector had its non-combat elements fleshed out this much?
Helium Rain looks very very interesting in the way it simulates economies and let’s you interact with an open world but it is 3D
Children Of A Dead Earth is probably the only actually realistic space combat game, I want to try it
x4 series or whatever seems like it has great options for building up companies with automated ships going everywhere never tried it though
3030 Deathwar Redux is a great singleplayer 2d space game with a well done story and fantastic looking grim cyberpunk pixel art. I love the commitment to going with a point and click style art scheme for everything outside of the spaceship cockpit. This game nails the vibes and I think other game developers making space games should take another serious look at just how efficiently point and click games can convey the feeling of place with a single backdrop or two and some music (imagine if a space game like Star Traders: Frontiers had the art style of The Sea Will Claim Everything?? Ooooff that would be dope).
The Dominions and Conquest Of Elysium series, I know this is a different genre but there are a ton of shared mechanics and strategies here and I need to mention them in case a space strategy fan hasn’t stumbled onto them yet.
ΔV: Rings of Saturn rightfully takes a closer look at space mining as being something that is fun, exploding spacerocks with lasers shouldn’t be like a more boring version of a basic MMO quest right? It should be like playing a game of pool but you are ON the pool table and the pool balls can crush you (I suppose Hardspace: Shipbreaker deserves a similar nod for making us consider how foolishly we handwave away the fun of disposing of our unwanted starships by abstracting all the fun plasma-torch cutty bits into a single “sell” button) .
sigh ok sorry one more deep cut and I will stop, I am just having too much fun going through the cobwebs of my brain lol
Approaching Infinity is a turn based roguelike game where you play a spaceship captain roaming the universe with very very simple graphics but the gameplay is absolutely superb and deep as hell. Yes, the graphics are awful hahaha but the abstracted tile based nature of the game means that complex systems can more easily be built and developers have more time to focus on balancing those mechanics so that a player always feels like they have interesting choices to make. A difference here though is that a big part of the game is exploring a wildly different planets with different hazards and resources, this game is kinda a bit like No Man’s Sky if it had completely opposite design goals.
FYI, the biggest thing Biden had done for climate change is indefinitely halt approvals for LNG export terminals in the US, this headline went completely under most people’s radar (Biden did a trash job of even trying to make a big deal out of it) but environmental activists and experts like Bill Mckibben say this is actually a massive deal. Decades of investment won’t be put into export terminals and so the incentive to keep going down the LNG road becomes significantly less attractive for energy companies.
I am sorry, voting has no measurable impact on what and how the military and government of the US chooses to commit genocide and fight wars.
Edward Snowden would be put away in jail for the rest of his life for the second he stepped on US soil for speaking up against the US government.
I am equating living under a typical military dictatorship with living in the US? No, but honestly we aren’t very far from a military dictatorship given how incredibly, incomprehensibly powerful the military industrial complex is in the US. There has never been a more powerful military either in absolute terms of force or in relative terms of force compared to similar peer militaries, it doesn’t really matter that we can vote, the votes don’t have any meaning against that degree of entrenched power.
My criticism of Helldivers 2 isn’t just that it doesn’t say it to your face that the things it depicts and represents are bad. It’s just that if it is a satire (and I don’t really have any reason to doubt that given a lot of context), I don’t know that it’s that effective at conveying its message.
I think one of the biggest problems with Helldivers 2 is actually the same one with Star Wars. For a fan that doesn’t really care about thinking through the implications of the lore of a game/movie, and wants to identify themselves with the game/movie franchise what is the coolest looking imagery from that game/movie that they can slap on their car as a bumper sticker and associate themselves with? The fascists.
That is actually a pretty serious problem, and saying “but the text of the art clearly points out the fascists are the baddies” doesn’t matter because fascism is a content devoid political ideology that is obsessed with the superficial aesthetics of power without any desire to examine anything past a surface level.
Great point about the bugs, though I think gamers are really dumb as fuck, and tend to have a hard time examining the political implications of games. Most really can’t understand how saying orcs or bugs are inherently Evil and deserve to die is clearly problematic, even if it is done in a lighthearted way.
The whole concept of space bugs itself is interesting in that they are a creature designed to be so aesthetically repulsive and threatening that we don’t extend empathy to it. Take for example my pet peeve with factorio, the game never examines for even one tiny nano second how fucked up it is to trash an entire planet and slaughter countless wildlife trying to stop you, just so you a single individual can go home. The wildlife are creepy space bugs, ewwww, kill them!!
None of the factory survival genre of games do and it is honestly pretty disturbing in the context of the insane amounts of damage being done in real life to our planet in the name of more and more resource extraction. It is like Helldivers without the layer of self awareness.
Which is a very on the nose parody of the US foreign policy regarding the middle east, and the US crucially isn’t a military dictatorship.
*looks over at the Palestinian genocide being supported so hard by the US military industrial complex it might actually cause the sitting President to throw their entire campaign over refusing to budge to voters REALLY not wanting the US to support Israel in committing ethnic cleansing…. *
You sure about that one? Yeah it doesn’t say “Military Dictatorship” on the tin but ommm….
Yes, the difference is called historical context and the people mad that other people might be upset by the imagery of a white guy shooting up a town full of black people basically define their views on a willful ignorance of historical context.
So is our pathological disregard for destroying our most precious natural spaces, and I will take belief in a higher power as a mental illness over utter destruction of the only planet we have.
It is a misnomer calling a rotting corpse “infected”, it’s just rotting. If foreign powers like Russia join in on scavenging on the rotting flesh of the Republican Party they aren’t “infecting it”.
These foreign agents are only distinguishable from the internal forces of rot by virtue of having originated from outside the body, but in behavior and function they behave identically to the organisms waiting within that had been begun feeding the moment the surrounding entity died.
In my comment I attempted to point out that yes the profit from micro transactions never really goes to the artists and developers, but if it did in theory I would actually be really supportive of artist run cosmetic stores for multiplayer competitive games.
I want 3D modeling artists to be valued, and competitive multiplayer games providing a canvas in which artists can continually express themselves and create outfits/skins for players and items in game is an incredible opportunity to reaffirm the value of the labor of 3D modeling artists.
The opportunity is currently totally captured and subverted by shitty corporate control, but in theory it is still there.
For singleplayer games, no horse armor crap is lame, I just want developers working on expansion content.
To be clear, I am not for “watching the world burn because F%#* it”.
The questions are what is effective resistance? Whose fault it is if that resistance isn’t happening? Who polices who about what acceptable mainstream strategies and narratives for resistance are?
People are answering these questions and you don’t like the answers.