There's something magical about the idea of being in space that everyone experiences at one point in their lives. When you look up into the sky, it's hard not to imagine being an astronaut exploring new planets. With the best space games on PC, you can finally live out that fantasy.
Featuring Steam titles like Kerbal Space Program and some great free titles such as Eve Online, these are the most sensational space epics around. With so many options, trying to pick out the best intergalactic adventures is a galaxy-sized question. So, before you escape Earth's orbit, here's what we recommend playing.
Here are the best space games on PC:
1. Dune Awakening
In space, no one can hear you scream, but on Arrakis, they can hear you, but you'll probably be screaming a lot more. While there are the inevitable Sandworms that pop out of the sand, or the random hostiles you may encounter, most of Dune Awakening's world is barren - a sand-covered world with two suns scorching the ground, but sometimes its the elements themselves that make the perfect backdrop for the best survival games.
A survival game set in one of sci-fi's most iconic franchises, Dune Awakening takes you into a world where Paul Atreides never lived, but Arrakis is still as dangerous as ever. If you can live to tell the tale, you'll be able to scavenge resources and build a base, but make sure you bring plenty of water. Hydration is your friend here. Check out our Dune Awakening base building guide if you want a bit of help getting started in this inhospitable environment.
2. Starfield
Starfield's vast expanse of explorable environments, including over 1,000 Starfield planets, with plenty of houses to buy and sell, resources to gather, and companions to know and love (yes, it has a romance system), is like no other space game you'll ever play. Nat Smith's Starfield review describes the game as "a true behemoth of an RPG, and in many ways it's the logical endpoint of Bethesda Game Studios' well-worn formula."
Since then, the game has only improved too, with quality of life updates, and new DLCs to enjoy. We suspect that it'll be improved and built-upon for years to come, and of course, there are loads of Starfield mods that provide a wealth of unique fan-made experiences and hone the game further.
3. EVE Online
This has been the preeminent space game for so long that you might be forgiven for thinking it's the only space game in existence. Unquestionably, Eve Online is one of the most interesting, partly down to the fact that its half a million online inhabitants play on the same mega-server rather than having to endure the severed realities offered by its many fantasy contemporaries. It certainly charts out unique territory among the best MMO games.
Players join together to form fleets that number in the thousands and alliances in the tens of thousands, all laying siege to entire regions for months on end, supported by an extensive supply chain of miners, traders, researchers, and manufacturers. In terms of scale and substance, there really isn't anything else like it. For example, an Eve ship worth 309 billion ISK - one of just one of three in existence - was destroyed by a spy embedded in the ship's owner's organization. Yes, there's nothing quite like the stories generated by Eve's astonishing community.
Online games of this scale aren't without their downsides. It has a reputation for being bastard-hard to get into, but after updates to the user interface, graphics, and the near-constant streamlining of some of the game's more obscure systems, the Eve of today is no more difficult to approach than its single-player bosom buddies X and Elite.
The new player experience is being continually streamlined, but it can still be challenging, especially if you aim to carve out a small empire for yourself within a few weeks. Check out the Eve Online system requirements if you want to make sure you can run the game.
4. No Man's Sky
Space is an unconquered and never-ending vista. That desire to explore the unknown also forms the attraction of No Man's Sky, which uses procedural generation to ensure that you'll never reach the end of its recreation of space, which has over 18 quintillion planets to explore.
Exploration isn't all you'll do in No Man's Sky, however, as you'll need to find ways to survive. Paramount to your success in doing that is mastering the game's trading and combat. No Man's Sky didn't have the smoothest launch, but a heap of updates has steadied the ship since, adding everything from deep sea exploration to base-building, maintaining a dedicated and loving fanbase that notably once bought billboard space outside Hello Games's offices just to say thank you.
In our No Man's Sky review, Fraser Brown said that the game's world offers "a piece of digital tourism[…] it is an impressive and a genuinely pleasant place to escape to when you're craving some quiet solitude in a stunning environment." If you're tempted to dive into this world yourself, make sure you check out the No Man's Sky system requirements before buying.
5. Stellaris
Stellaris, Paradox's 4X grand strategy hybrid, makes space surprising again thanks to event chains that are, at first, evocative of Crusader Kings 2 but end up going much further. In Stellaris, you should expect mutant uprisings, robotic rebellions, and the discovery of alien texts that make your citizens question their place in the galaxy.
It's not just a 4X game; it's a galactic role-playing game and empire sim, bestowing a vast array of options upon players, allowing them to create unique, eccentric, space-faring species. You can play as a fundamentalist society built on the backs of slaves or hyper-intelligent lizards that rely on robots, whether they are fighting or farming. The robust species creator and a multitude of meaningful decisions mean that you can create almost any aliens that you can imagine.
And underpinning all of that is the game's focus on exploration. While most space 4X games stick with one method of interstellar travel, Stellaris gives you three to choose from, each with its own strengths and counters. In one game, the galaxy might be a network of hyper-lanes, but in the next, you might find yourself building wormhole stations and blinking across the galaxy.
Stellaris' multiplayer isn't to be overlooked either, transforming decent human beings into Machiavellian alien tyrants at the drop of a hat. Its a large and tempting package, and in our Stellaris review, Fraser Brown said "From the stellar […] soundtrack to that warm feeling I get when I enslave a whole planet full of cute space turtles, Stellaris offers up a galaxy that I can't not immerse myself in."
6. Kerbal Space Program
The first order of doing anything in space is, of course, to get there. Unfortunately, most games in this otherwise splendid list make the rather wild assumption that rocket science isn't all that important and skip to the business of spreading violence, free-market capitalism, and all manner of other human diseases to all corners of various galaxies. Thankfully, the space program to which the Kerbals fatefully apply is rather more grounded in reality, in the sense that the aim of the game is to avoid crashing into the stuff.
Kerbal Space Program is ostensibly about trial and error, first in building a vessel capable of getting its payload off the ground, which is relatively easy, and second, by actually getting the damn thing launched and steered into some kind of orbit. You soon realize that getting past the Karman Line is one thing, while delivering your payload safely to its destination is another entirely. Thankfully, because your gurning passengers seem quite happy to be sacrificed for the greater good of the basic understanding of astrophysics, the trial and error is every bit as involved and entertaining as any fleeting success.
As Steve Hogarty said in our Kerbal Space Program review, "the goals you set yourself are the most rewarding to complete, and Kerbal Space Program presents a blank canvas for the creative space-brain." Reaching the Mun (née Moon), deploying a modular space station, and mining on distant planets are all attainable, albeit after a great deal of crushing but entertaining failure, made bearable thanks to a combination of hard science unpinning a soft and cute interior. As well as being a bloody good space game, KSP may well be the most entertaining community-enriched sandbox game since Minecraft, massively helped along by its huge modding scene.
7. Hardspace: Shipbreaker
After destructive space battles, years of flying around the void of the universe, and dealing with asteroid fields, no one ever wonders where all of those broken, beat-up spaceships go. Well, Hardspace: Shipbreaker answers all of those questions, as you take on employment as a shipyard scrapper in space, cutting open old vehicles and salvaging what's worth keeping.
Armed with a variety of tools that make the process a breeze, you'll have to complete contracts in order to pay back your hefty debts. It's a fairly relaxing game when things go your way, but don't go in expecting your job to be a breeze. At the end of the day, the hard work still needs to be done.
8. Homeworld Remastered Collection
Homeworld is the sort of game that gets inside your head and just stays there. It originally came out 15 years ago, eventually spawning an expansion, an excellent sequel, and, most recently, the Homeworld Remastered Collection. It's a series that remains unsurpassed. It's also one of those rare strategy games that has a great story, both tragic and hopeful, filled to the brim with tension. It's a voyage of discovery, of learning about the past and desperately struggling to create a future. It's beautiful and a bit sad.
Thanks to Gearbox's Homeworld Remastered Collection, these classic PC games are even more beautiful. Now, the game looks like it does in our memories, even those clouded by nostalgia, with its beautifully detailed ships and its gargantuan space backdrops. And, thanks to its minimalist UI, none of that beauty is obscured.
Watching the game in action is like viewing an epic ballet. Tiny ships fly in formation in all directions; massive, heavily armed capital ships float around the vast mother ship; diligent resource gatherers work away to fuel a massive undertaking. Even the biggest vessels are dwarfed by the size of the 3D maps, and when the camera is zoomed out, they look alone and vulnerable. Which is exactly what they are.
9. Outer Wilds
Not to be confused with The Outer Worlds - another awesome space game from 2019 that we'll talk more about in a minute - Outer Wilds casts you as an astronaut anthropologist out in the wilds of space, exploring ruins across your solar system. Your goal is to learn as much about the mysterious alien race, the Nomai, as possible, but it's pretty much up to you how that mystery unravels.
There are several distinct planets to explore and a 20-minute time loop that bookends your adventures neatly, so for each run, you'll aim to discover a little more about the world before your progress partially resets. Soulful and packed with mystery, Outer Wilds goes down a treat whether you gobble it all up in one sitting or treat each 20-minute time loop as a fresh bite.
10. Elite Dangerous
30 years since it first graced the BBC Micro, the Elite series returns in the form of Elite Dangerous. It was around for a while in alpha and beta forms, enough time to be written about thousands of times and played by countless pirates, bounty hunters, traders, and explorers. So we already knew it was going to be a bit impressive.
Our playground is a whole galaxy. Not just any galaxy, either, but the Milky Way is recreated here to a terrifying scale. As Steve Hogarty said in our Elite Dangerous review, "[the game] is a giant spacey sandbox. The game's playing area encompasses the entirety of our galaxy, every star and planet and nebula and moon that we know about, plus billions of procedurally generated ones on top." It's populated with black holes, gargantuan suns, space anomalies, and spaceships that flit around like tiny specks of dust on an inconceivably big table.
The base game is a fantastic space sim, but it's thanks to its vibrant modding community, players are improving it with things like chatting ship AIs that react to voice commands. And if you're lucky enough to have an Oculus Rift, then you're in for a treat, to the point where your ship spins out of control and you dive headfirst into a sick bag. If you want to know more about what we think of the game, read our Elite Dangerous review. If you want it, our Elite Dangerous system requirements page
11. Endless Space 2
The story, a 4X designer would probably say, is something that emerges naturally from the interplay of systems in a strategy game - the clash of borders, an unplanned war. Amplitude Studios doesn't think that's much of an excuse. They've stuffed Endless Space 2 with as much science fiction as it can contain - and given that it's got whole galaxies to fill, that's plenty.
Here, you'll meet living crystals, tiny dragons, recycled war machines, and millions of clones of a bloke named Horatio. It's a universe teeming with offbeat ideas to enjoy and then enslave if you're that sort of explorer. If not, you can play as numerous sentient trees and spread olive branches throughout known space.
There's less left to the imagination than in conventional grand strategy - scraps are resolved in a beautiful 3D battle engine that sees your elaborate ships drift together in the void in a dramatic, interplanetary ballet. It's like Football Manager, but with chrome, faster-than-light monoliths. Isn't that what Sega's catalog has been missing until now? To some up, as Robert Zak said in our Endless Space 2 review, "the Endless universe of Amplitude Studios' imagining is a good one, brimming with evocative storytelling, wonderful design of races and creatures, and an adept understanding of the 4X genre."
12. Mass Effect Legendary Edition
For Mass Effect newcomers, admittedly, there's not much fizzing and whooshing of spaceships to be enjoyed in the trilogy, but it's still a planet-hopping, alien-seducing space adventure and one of the best sci-fi RPG games you're likely to play.
Mass Effect boasts a strong story and set of characters, and, in spite of a complete lack of direct spaceship control, you're in command of a functioning ship with the ability to explore the galaxy.
Parallels have been drawn - not least by BioWare themselves - between the Mass Effect trilogy and the classic exploration series Starflight, which was notable in the late 1980s for being one of the very first space exploration games and is notable today for not having been better in that regard since. In terms of storyline, with all that ancient technology end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it gubbins, Mass Effect's storyline is remarkably close to Starflight's. Indeed, Starflight could almost be seen as the '70s original to Mass Effect's BSG-style gritty reimagining, only without the risible Galactica 80 spin-off series to besmirch its reputation.
13. FTL: Faster Than Light
Space is awful and will probably kill you: that's the lesson FTL attempts to impart to brave spacefarers. This permadeath ship management game is, on the surface, a simple race to deliver information to the hands of your allies, but you're being chased. With every diversion explored, the enemy fleet gets closer and closer, and even if you do stay ahead of them, random death lurks around every corner.
Random violent encounters, shopping sprees, new worlds and races, unlockable ships and configurations, loads and loads of weird and wonderful weapons and tools - there's so much in FTL that every game has the potential to be dramatically different. One could see you managing a tough vessel that employs ion cannons to disable enemy systems and drones to pepper them with lasers. Another might inspire you to use mind control to defeat your enemies or teleporters to fill their ships with your crew.
So much can go wrong. Sometimes, it's your fault, like when you mess up a fight and end up rapidly attempting to patch up hull breaches and put out fires. But sometimes luck just isn't on your side, like when you agree to help a space station deal with a plague and one of your crew gets sick. But every failed attempt is a complete story full of adventures and misadventures, and a great excuse to make another valiant attempt.
14. Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
A game that successfully manages to combine the very best of 3D real-time strategy, albeit without a proper single-player campaign, with the kind of empire-building offered only by the very top 4X games.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is played across a user-defined network of stars. Players begin forging an empire around the gravity wells of planets with shipyards, research outposts, extractors, and defense systems, then assemble fleets combining frigates, corvettes, cruisers, and capital ships to map and eventually conquer neighboring systems.
In earlier versions of Sins of a Solar Empire, conquest was largely achieved in the time-honored RTS fashion of dragging a huge box around every single damn ship you owned and directing them towards the enemy systems to allow the sheer force of numbers to win the day. However, with the introduction of diplomatic victories in a previous expansion and research and occupation victories as part of 2012's Rebellion standalone - not to mention new Death Star-like titan ships as a much-needed counter to the ultra-defensive starbase structures - the stalemates that would often cause games to peter out can be pursued as potentially winning strategies. And let's not forget about the mods that let you play out your Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica fantasies.
15. X4: Foundations
If you're after a realistically simulated universe filled with spaceships, stations, and plenty of trade, X4: Foundations has everything you need. X4 gives players the opportunity to live out their space fantasies by providing a variety of game starts, each with its own set of variables to make each save completely different.
Despite launching back in 2018, Egosoft, the developer behind X4, has continued to support the game throughout the years with huge updates. Not only did we see the launch of the 6.0 update, which upgraded the game engine, but there was also a push for the modding scene as the community received Blender Modding Tools for the first time.
Whether you're playing as a space pirate who attacks rogue ships with little regard for human life or a business person looking to make a fortune, X4 is designed to let you shape the universe in the way you want it. Even if you've spent thousands of hours trying to solidify your station, just know that all it takes is one aggressive batch of fighters to stop you in your tracks. If you ever wanted more from Starfield's space combat, consider picking up X4: Foundations to experience space from a new perspective.
16. Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2 is the ultimate space game, taking players on a journey throughout the galaxy to get rid of the rising alien threat spreading across the universe. In this third-person shooter, teams of up to four players gather in groups to take on missions where they must eliminate specific targets. Equipped with an arsenal of bombast weapons, you must eliminate the threat, complete your objectives, and escape the planet without experiencing any casualties.
What makes Helldivers 2 special is the sheer amount of chaos that is caused on the battlefield. Whether it's giant bugs, waves of robotic creatures, or the strange Illuminate faction that was added to the game in December 2024, there's so much variety in every mission. Pair all this action with friendly fire, and you've got yourself a stage set for mayhem as teammates fight to stay alive from incoming stratagems.
17.Dead Space (2023)
Many games showcase the vastness of the universe and space with a sense of freedom, but in Dead Space, the threat of alien life is a horror that humans can't begin to comprehend. In this remake of the original game, you play as Issac Clarke, an engineer who is unfortunate enough to be on a ship overrun with vicious aliens called Necromorphs that, well, aren't exactly friendly.
Similar to horror games like Resident Evil, Dead Space forces you to enter tight hallways, with the scattering of monsters beyond your imagination scurrying through the vents of this desolate ship. Fortunately, you are armed with some awesome sci-fi weapons that make dealing with the threat easier, but don't expect it to be a walk in the out-of-this-world park.
As we said in our Dead Space remake review, "[the game] is a gloriously grotesque glow-up that embraces the original horror game's robust formula."
Want more? See our guides to the best Star Wars games and strategy games for more incredible experiences worth sinking hours into. In addition, check out the upcoming PC games of 2025 to see what space games might be in store in the future.