Top-down perspective sorted by release date

The Basket Manager is a basketball management simulation for players who would rather control the team from the bench than personally chase the ball around the court. Released in 1...

The Lost Patrol (1991, DOS) drops you into the brutal jungles of Vietnam, where survival depends on strategy, luck, and maybe divine intervention. You lead a squad of exhausted sol...

The Magic Candle 2 (1991, DOS) expands the world, story, and ambition of its predecessor. With forty heroes scattered across a sprawling realm, you’ll spend as much time mana...

Strategy fans, sharpen your wits: The Perfect General (1991, DOS) marches onto the battlefield with hex-based tactics, satisfyingly crunchy mechanics, and a strict “no button...

The Taking of Beverly Hills turns the famous California neighborhood into the setting for a fast-moving action adventure with a distinctly late-1980s Hollywood flavor. The story re...

Tristan Pinball is a digital pinball table from an era when computer hardware was expected to imitate a real arcade machine despite having considerably fewer pixels and absolutely ...

Tunneler is a wonderfully simple two-player game built around one extremely important idea: dig toward your opponent and try not to crash into the scenery first. Each player contro...

Then there’s Martian Dreams, the Ultima game where you travel to Mars in the 19th century with none other than Sigmund Freud and Nikola Tesla. Yes, it’s as delightfully...

V for Victory: D-Day Utah Beach is a turn-based wargame that puts you in command during one of the most important military operations of the Second World War. The game focuses on t...

Vengeance of Excalibur is a fantasy role-playing adventure built around the legendary sword Excalibur and a suitably grand quest involving magic, monsters, and medieval intrigue. P...

Volfied is a deceptively simple arcade puzzle game in which drawing lines is far more dangerous than it sounds. The basic idea is straightforward: your little craft moves around a ...

Wild West World is a western-themed action game that drops the player into a world of dusty towns, gunslingers, and the sort of problems that cannot be solved by writing a strongly...

X-Men 2: The Fall of the Mutants is a curious blend of action and light strategy, where Marvel’s famous mutants get to stretch their powers across a series of loosely connected m...

Xenopods offers a quirky take on space exploration, combining elements of strategy and action in a way that feels both unusual and oddly charming. You control small pods navigating...

ZZT (1991, DOS) looks like it was drawn by an enthusiastic ASCII artist with too much time and not enough colors. And yet, it’s brilliant. Part action game, part puzzle adven...

A Line in the Sand (1992) is what happens when a board game about modern Middle Eastern warfare gets turned into a DOS strategy title with all the subtlety of a cold war memo. You ...

In Air Force Commander (1992), you don’t just fly planes - you run the whole air force. Think of it as being a general with a spreadsheet addiction. Assign squadrons, manage ...

Amberstar is a fantasy old school RPG very similar to Ultima 6 that uses a top-down view for interiors and small locations and a first person pseudo 3D view for everything else. Un...

If you’ve ever thought The Lord of the Rings needed more ASCII and fewer hobbit feelings, Angband is your jam. Since 1992, this dungeon-crawling roguelike has been throwing p...

Think of Bass Tour (1992) as the road trip version of virtual fishing. More simulation than arcade, it lets you travel, pick locations, study conditions, and obsess over bait types...

Battlestar is a science-fiction game that puts the player in command of a starship facing the usual collection of cosmic problems: hostile forces, dangerous situations and a univer...

Ready to get your heart racing with the world’s slowest competitive sport? Bicycle Bridge brings the thrill of bidding, trick-taking, and utter confusion straight to your DOS...

Don’t let the title fool you — Blitz Draughts isn’t a military simulation but rather a gloriously intense checkers game from 1992. This DOS brain-bender turns the...

Bolo Ball is a DOS game from the mid-1990s. It features a physics-based gameplay where the objective is to knock opponent balls out of an arena. When you start the game, you find y...

It’s Bomberman (1992, DOS), the legendary bomb-dropping game where you play a suspiciously cute guy with an infinite bomb supply and questionable indoor safety habits. You mo...

Finally, a game for people who think solitaire is just too wild. Bridge 7.0 is the digital equivalent of sipping tea with your grandparents while arguing about trumps and bidding s...

This sequel takes the same D&D-in-space formula and tries to go bigger, bolder, and... okay, maybe just more complicated. Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed continues the galactic strug...

If you ever wanted to command the Pacific fleet without getting wet, Carrier Strike is your game. Set during WWII, it’s a turn-based wargame where numbers, radar, and weather...

Carriers at War is a detailed naval strategy game focused on aircraft carriers and the brutal arithmetic of Pacific warfare. Players command fleets, plan operations, launch aircraf...

It’s Pac-Man, but with sunglasses. CD-Man v2.0 (1992) is a slick, souped-up clone that trades in yellow cheese for 90s attitude. Maze-chomping, ghost-dodging, and the occasio...