Military-based Sci-Fi games have become a massive genre for the industry, especially with the rise of first-person shooters. That said, the genre owes a lot of its popularity to the many war games that came out during the ’90s and ’00s, most notably massive strategy games like StarCraft. Unfortunately, some of the better sci-fi war games either went under the radar or have mostly been forgotten about by modern fans who weren’t around when those games were at their peak. Here are five great sci-fi war games that deserve more love. Remember, I’m mostly focused on games that capture the large-scale feeling of war, so don’t expect many shooters on the list.
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5) Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction
The Aliens Vs. Predator franchise has been ripe for video game adaptations. Most of those are shooters, but Extinction switches to real-time strategy. It’s not quite the grand scale of war you’ll get from the other games on this list, but the constant struggle between the various factions is just enough for me to include it here.
What’s neat about Extinction is that it’s a relatively early attempt to bring RTS gameplay to consoles, which means the team at Zono had to make some concessions. Unlike most strategy games of the 2000s, you won’t be doing much base-building, and resource-gathering is also minimized. Instead, this one is more about unit management, and importantly, all three factions (Aliens, Predators, and Colonial Marines) all have unique units that you’ll need to properly deploy onto the battlefield. Mastering that push and pull between unit types is key to coming out on top in this slugfest.
4) Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising
Developer Rage Software spent most of the 1990s working on soccer games for its UK audience. In 2001, the team was starting to branch out and decided to create Hostile Waters. It’s a mix between strategy and vehicle-based combat, and has largely gone unnoticed by most players. That’s a shame because Hostile Waters has a few things working in its favor to make it an underrated gem.
Maybe most importantly, Hostile Waters was written by Warren Ellis. The famous comic book writer has written dozens of seminal works in that space, but hasn’t been afraid to jump into video games either. Hostile Waters was his first attempt, but he co-wrote the sci-fi horror classic Dead Space seven years later. Ellis’ involvement isn’t the end of Hostile Waters‘ good vibes. The vehicle-based combat is also quite good, helping it stand out from most strategy games of the era. If you can get your hands on this forgotten classic, it’s definitely worth a go.
3) Age of Wonders: Planetfall
This is, by far, the most recent game on this list. Planetfall launched in 2019, so this is more about it going overlooked than it being forgotten. Still, as the Sci-Fi spin-off to the long-running Age of Wonders series, it’s too bad that Planetfall isn’t discussed more widely. Don’t get me wrong, fans who played Planetfall know it’s great. Just look at the critical reviews. Not only does it own an 87% approval rating on OpenCritic, but it was nominated for “Best Strategy Game” at the 2019 Game Awards.
However, it was never able to attain the large audience it might have had if it had come out a decade prior. Simply put, strategy games aren’t as popular as they were during the ’90s and ’00s, so it’s not a huge surprise to see how quickly Planetfall‘s player count fell off the map. Still, if you’re looking for a classic 4X strategy game set in a thrilling sci-fi universe, you cannot go wrong with Planetfall. Best of all, it is, unlike many games on this list, still easy to pick up.
2) PlanetSide
The original PlanetSide might’ve been ahead of its time. The MMOFPS pitted three factions against each other in battles that could easily include hundreds of players. Unfortunately, many fans’ internet speeds weren’t quite ready for PlanetSide’s brand of intense FPS action with that many players. Remember, this game set world records for player count in a single battle, once having 600 combatants at once. If you were still running on dial-up internet at the time, chances are high you were not having a great experience.
That said, I have to applaud Sony Online Interactive for its ambition. When it was working, PlanetSide was one of the best and most novel experiences on PC at the time. PlanetSide 2 came around a decade later, when internet speeds were much better, and it upped the number of onscreen players even more, once having nearly 1,200 people in a single battle. It’s technically still around, but like the first PlanetSide, it burned bright out of the gate, but has quickly cooled off in the years since. And efforts to revitalize the brand with PlanetSide Arena were quickly scrapped thanks to even lower player counts.
1) Battle Isle
The Battle Isle series got its start in 1991, and the original strategy game was played on a hexagonal grid. You need to take out enemy forces on each island to claim it as your own. That first version included 32 scenarios and a two-player mode, giving fans plenty to do. Then, developer Blue Byte introduced a few expansion packs to build on the game world, and many fans at the time saw Battle Isle as the perfect adaptation of classic war board games to the digital world.
After that first game, Battle Isle fans got several more games, which flipped between strategy and tactics. That includes the Incubation spin-off, which puts you in the shoes of a squad of fighters taking on an alien threat. However, the final game in the series, Battle Isle: The Andosia War, launched in 2000. There was a planned reboot in 2013 called Threshold Run, but it was cancelled before seeing the light of day. It really is too bad that a classic PC series completely died out after just a decade, but that’s not exactly a rarity of the ’90s. Regardless, Battle Isle was a great Sci-Fi war series, filled with different options to suit your tastes.
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