The most popular top down games

Before Doomguy started ripping and tearing, there was Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. A stealth game where sneaking is mandatory, disguises are fashionable, and stabbing Nazis is encour...

Empire Deluxe is the kind of strategy game that politely pretends to be simple while quietly stealing entire weekends from your life. On the surface, it’s a turn-based war ga...

Taito’s Puzznic (1990) takes the idea of matching tiles and injects a surprising amount of strategy. You slide blocks to align pairs, but each move requires forethought&mdash...

In the 25th century, bureaucracy is still awful—but now you also have laser guns. Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday is a surprisingly solid sci-fi RPG that blends space oper...

John Madden Football was the first of a series of american football sports games sponsored by the coach of the same name. The first John Madden Football is an abandoned game develo...

Remember ALF? The sarcastic alien who really had it in for cats? Well, in ALF: The First Adventure, you get to live the dream—or nightmare—of controlling the furry mena...

Space Rogue is what happens when Elite and Ultima decide to have a baby… in space. You’re dumped into a universe of hostile aliens, smugglers, and zero-g dogfights, an...

In Ambush at Sorinor, tactics meet fantasy in a land where ambushing people is apparently the national sport. You’re a mercenary commander picking the right team to win missi...

Pizza Tycoon is a 1994 business simulation that asks a very important question: can you build a pizza empire while dealing with competition, customers, and the occasional questiona...

Released in 2000, Dark Reign 2 took the futuristic RTS series into full 3D territory. While other games were content with flashy visuals, this one focused on tactical depth and res...

Little-known but oddly captivating, Kurtan (1990, DOS) feels like someone’s ambitious homebrew fantasy experiment gone right. You play a wandering warrior exploring a pixelat...

NHL Hockey is a 1993 ice hockey game that delivers the essential experience of the sport without requiring players to memorize an encyclopedia of rules before taking to the rink. T...

Sports management usually involves tactics, budgets, and serious planning. M.U.D.S. - Mean Ugly Dirty Sport decides those are merely optional suggestions. This delightfully outrage...

Pinball Illusions is a 1995 pinball game that represents another impressive step forward in the famous digital pinball series. It features beautifully designed tables, smooth anima...

If you’ve ever thought, “What if Pac-Man got lost in a modernist art gallery?”, then A-Maze is your oddly specific dream come true. Released in 1989 for DOS, this...

Simple concepts often age remarkably well, and Mah Jongg Solitaire proves the point beautifully. The objective is straightforward: remove matching tiles while ensuring each selecti...

SimEarth is a simulation in which you can shape and mold a planet in almost every way you can imagine. In SimEarth our planet is simulated as a whole: life, climate, atmosphere are...

Chessmaster 9000 is a chess game developed by Ubisoft and released in 2002. It's part of the Chessmaster series, which has been around since the 1980s. Chessmaster 9000 was known f...

Goal! is one of those football games that reminds you how far sports simulations have come—and how much fun they were before realism took over. The controls are simple, the p...

Black Hole (1993) is a space shooter where you're thrown into the gravitational madness of, you guessed it, a black hole. The physics are wild, the enemies are relentless, and you&...

Fleet Command invites you to command modern naval forces with the calm authority of someone who definitely read the manual. This is strategy on a grand scale: radar screens glowing...

In Atomino (1991), you’re not blowing things up — you’re building atoms. That’s right: this puzzle game puts you in charge of creating molecular structures ...

By Ultima 3, the series had discovered the magic of party-based adventuring. No longer a lonely trek, now you command a ragtag group of heroes who bicker only in your imagination. ...

Pinball Dreams 2 continues the digital pinball tradition with new tables, improved presentation, and the same addictive gameplay that made the original successful. Released in 1994...

Ascii Sector is what happens when someone takes Privateer, removes the graphics, and replaces them with pure ASCII and sheer willpower. It’s open-world space sim meets roguel...