The best top down games

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...

Released in 1988 for DOS, Feud is a wonderfully weird strategy game about two rival wizards who absolutely refuse to get along. Each turn, you gather resources, cast spells, and tr...

Few titles announce their intentions as clearly as Fire Power. This is top-down tank warfare with all the subtle grace of a marching band in a library. You roll into battle, shells...

Great Napoleonic Battles is the kind of game that assumes you are ready to command armies and possibly rewrite history before breakfast. In Great Napoleonic Battles, strategy is ev...

Released in 1987, Lords of Conquest is strategy in its most distilled, no-nonsense form. This is a game that drops you onto a map, hands you control of armies, and essentially says...

Shamus is a maze action game developed by William Mataga and published by Synapse Software in 1982. The game became popular on various home computer platforms of the early 1980s. I...

Bigger, deeper, and just as punishing, Gengis Khan 2: Clan of the Gray Wolf (1992) expands the formula with more maps, more rulers, and more ways to fail spectacularly. Want to uni...

Aspar GP Master is a 1989 motorcycle racing game that invites you to tear up the track with the same grace and control as a caffeinated squirrel on rollerblades. Loosely inspired b...

In Command Adventures: Starship (1995, DOS), you’re the captain, the admiral, and occasionally the guy who has to fix the hyperdrive when it’s on fire. This obscure gem...

By 1992, Vol. 3 wrapped up the trilogy with even more complex scenarios. At this point, the series had become less of a game and more of an interactive textbook—though that&r...

Dungeons of Kroz 2 didn’t reinvent the wheel—it sharpened it and rolled it over your face. Released the same year as the original, it’s tougher, faster, and even ...

Ah yes, the game that crawled so Ultima could run. Akalabeth is a wireframe dungeon crawl where you descend into monster-infested labyrinths with the elegance of a lost spreadsheet...