It’s difficult to measure Freelancer’s overall quality today, as the game has been commercially unavailable for years. Despite its flaws elsewhere, in both these elements Freelancer delivered, and that made it a significant achievement at the time. Suffering from a troubled development that saw it shed many of its more interesting features before release, today Freelancer looks like an unremarkable example of the space-sim genre.īut what made Freelancer such a thrilling prospect was how it merged the trading and open space exploration of Elite with the cinematic story-telling and spectacular action of Chris Robert’s earlier Wing Commander series, two very distinct interpretations of the genre which hadn’t interacted much prior to Freelancer’s release. With all that said, let’s start the countdown to ignition.Ĭonsidered today, it can be hard to see what made Freelancer such an exciting prospect when it originally launched 14 years ago. Finally, I’ve limited the list to one game per series, mainly to stop myself from filling it with Star Wars games. It includes games that focus on combat, exploration, and even the strategies of space-flight itself.

That said, the list isn’t limited to Elite clones either. Hence, you won’t see games like Homeworld or FTL in this list, as although they are set in space, they don’t really simulate the nuances of spaceflight. In assembling this list, I’ve interpreted the term space sim to mean “games that attempt to simulate space-flight in some form”. They’ve since re-emerged in the last decade or so thanks to a combination of alternative funding models and general renewed interest, resulting in a new golden age for the genre. Incredibly popular in the nineties, space sims died out almost completely in the 2000s, barring a handful of major exceptions. The space sim genre also has a turbulent history. The original Elite and its imitators also offered a glimpse of how expansive and multifaceted games would eventually become, offering multiple ways to advance through its large, open universe. One of the first genres to tap into that innate human desire to explore, space sims allowed us to escape confines of earth and investigate the far reaches of our solar system, our galaxy, and beyond. Space sims epitomise the wish-fulfilment element of games better than any other genre.

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