The most popular science fiction games

Based on the film that made air guitar cool (briefly), Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is a time-traveling puzzler where history class meets stoner logic. Gather historical figu...

In Captain Comic 2: Fractured Reality, our fearless spandex-wearing space explorer returns—but this time, he's bouncing between dimensions like a malfunctioning microwave. Th...

Xargon is a platformer that feels like it was built with equal parts creativity and cheerful chaos. Levels are packed with secrets, strange enemies, and mechanics that sometimes se...

Guardians of Infinity: to Save Kennedy is the sort of time-travel adventure that casually suggests you might want to prevent one of the most infamous assassinations in history befo...

Blasteroids is a video game developed and released by Atari, Inc. in 1987. It's a sequel to the classic arcade game Asteroids, which was released in 1979. In Blasteroids, players c...

Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier is the most ambitious—and arguably strangest—entry in the series. Released in 1995, it blends traditional adventure ga...

The trilogy concludes in Master Cain, where Snake Logan faces the ultimate evil: a villain with a name that sounds like a Bond bad guy and a plan straight from Saturday morning car...

William Shatner's TekWar takes the futuristic crime world of the TekWar novels and turns it into a first-person shooter filled with gunfights, technology, and suspiciously dangerou...

With a name like Blort!, you'd expect a fart joke or a kids’ cartoon gone wrong, but no—it’s a 1987 arcade-style blaster for DOS. You play as a cosmic defender sh...

Adapting movies into games is always tricky, but Predator 2 gives it a shot with mixed results. You play as a cop cleaning up the mean streets while occasionally being stalked by t...

Archipelagos is like a fever dream after watching too much Myst. You’re dropped onto strange, floating islands inhabited by stone monoliths and evil terrain-infecting sludge....

Subtrade: Return to Irata is a space trading adventure that combines exploration, commerce, and the ever-present temptation to become considerably richer than you were five minutes...

OverKill is a 1992 action game with a title that makes its intentions remarkably clear. Players are placed in a hostile environment and given the opportunity to deal with enemies u...

Electroman is a cheerful little platformer with a big grin and zero interest in realism. You play as a cartoonish superhero zipping through levels full of gadgets, traps, and enemi...

Wing Commander: Armada takes the familiar space-combat formula and adds a strategic layer, turning the war against the Kilrathi into something considerably larger than a series of ...

Fire and Forget: Final Assault is the kind of game that asks a very specific question: “What if driving a heavily armed car was your full-time job?” Released in 2013, i...

Thexder 2: Firehawk expands the original transforming-robot formula with larger environments, new enemies and a greater emphasis on combat. The basic trick remains wonderfully simp...

Alien Crucible is an ambitious science-fiction role-playing project built around exploration, combat and the discovery of a dangerous alien world. Developed during a period when co...

No, not that Battlestar. Battlestar (1996) is more obscure than a reboot that never happened. Set in deep space with a top-down view and UI only a Windows 3.x user could love, it m...

Before Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, the world only knew of one man who could mow down Nazis in a maze of corridors — then Blake showed up with a laser gun and a mission to ri...

Before Michael Bay got his hands on the franchise, Autobots (1989, DOS) offered a more... subtle approach to transforming robot mayhem. Well, not subtle exactly — more like c...

Galactix continues the grand space-shooter tradition with enthusiasm and a healthy disregard for your survival odds. You control a small but determined ship facing waves of enemy f...

Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road in 1988 continued the tradition of heroic soldiers storming impossible odds while carrying enough ammunition to challenge basic physics. This sequel ...

By the time Earthworm Jim hit DOS, its reputation already preceded it, and it largely lived up to the hype. This is a platformer that thrives on absurdity: a worm in a spacesuit, b...

Snake Logan is back, and this time the lab is... hidden! The Hidden Lab cranks up the challenge with more grotesque mutants, more lethal traps, and slightly improved sarcasm. It&rs...

A moody sci-fi adventure drenched in neon gloom, The Orion Conspiracy (1995, DOS) tosses you into a futuristic murder mystery where everyone seems to be hiding something—ofte...

Total Carnage is a wonderfully unsubtle top-down shooter in which the solution to almost every problem is to fire more ammunition. Lots more ammunition. You control heavily armed s...

System Shock drops you into a space station run by an AI that has clearly read too many villain manuals and decided to try them all at once. SHODAN, the game’s iconic antagon...

Armada 2525 is what happens when a spreadsheet decides it wants to conquer the galaxy. This is classic 4X strategy with all the bells, whistles, and menus your early '90s heart cou...

Vectorball is a futuristic sports game that takes the basic idea of ball games and throws it into a neon-soaked science-fiction arena. Players compete in fast-moving matches where ...