Action games offer twitchy thrills, and strategy games test your ability to set up and execute combat schemes, but simulation games replicate activities—or life itself—in broad or precise strokes.
The scenarios that fall under the simulation umbrella are broad and varied; sims could be sports games, massive sci-fi fantasy games, bizarre niche games, or breathtaking flight recreations. Some simulation games are world-building games, a genre that challenges you to create and manage a town, city, nation, or planet.
The nature of these game, as you may suspect, play to a more niche crowd. These titles will never match, say, Call of Duty in terms of popularity or sales numbers, but their customer base keeps returning for that more measured, cerebral play.
As a platform, the PC hosts many simulation and world-building games. These are our favorites.
Elite Dangerous
If you want to rocket into space without enduring rigorous astronaut training sessions, play Elite: Dangerous. Frontier Developments' crowdfunded follow-up to the classic Elite space sim series gives you a ship, a handful of equipment, and a full tank of fuel, then sets you out on your own to explore an incredible 400 billion star systems. The goal? Amass wealth and power.
Being an MMO, Elite: Dangerous lets you play solo or partner with other star travelers to form factions. Politics and economics are the lifeblood of the galaxy, and every cargo run, government crackdown, and pirate raid influences the price of goods in a given system.
Football Manager 2020
SEGA's Football Manager series is an enigma to many outside observers, but its seemingly niche appeal has grown into a borderline obsession for a large, passionate fan base. This soccer simulation is an insanely detailed, text-heavy simulation of the world's most popular sport, wherein you take on the role of club manager overseeing player transfers, on-field tactics, staff instructions, and everything in between in a bid to lead your club to glory.
Football Manager 2020 builds upon the 2018 version we reviewed by including graphics improvements, new backroom staff roles, and an updated match engine. If you want to participate in the beautiful game, but lack Ronaldo-like skills, Football Manager is the next best thing to playing for your favorite squad.
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Simulator, the simulator of simulators, is back. Not only is it good, it's extremely good. In fact, we've hailed Flight Simulator as the year's most ambitious game, due to how it leverages Bing Maps and real-time weather and traffic to create an authentic in-game world.
This love letter to aviation is a one-of-a-kind experience made possible by a marriage of clever developers and cutting-edge technology. It’s a gift to the series’ dedicated fans, an appealing entry point for newcomers, and now the bar for the simulation genre. Grab a flight stick, and take to the skies.
Minecraft
Minecraft is a blocky, beautiful sandbox that lets you explore the depths of your imagination. The core gameplay involves exploring a hostile world made from blocks that you can use to build items as you please. But as you play, you'll quickly see that this game has so much more to offer than just architecture.
What Minecraft presents is a Lego-like space for players to enjoy their own kind of play. Dedicated players will love the sandbox's many possibilities, but even casuals will find pleasure facing off against an unfriendly wilderness.
No Man's Sky
The controversial and much-hyped No Man's Sky is a game that offers two opposing experiences. One is a beautiful and wholly fresh journey through space to chart, or conquer, undiscovered worlds. The other weighs down that joy with mundane and repetitive resource gathering and fighting.
That said, No Man's Sky is so much more than a sterile description of its parts and features. It's an astounding artistic and technical achievement that's worth playing.
Out of the Park Baseball 2021
Unlike the other baseball games mentioned here, the Out of the Park Baseball series focuses on deep simulation and management rather than button-pressing action. The 2021 edition, like the 2016 version we reviewed, is a numbers-driven, hardcore management game that has the official Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball Players Association, and Minor League Baseball licenses.
Fresh to Out of the Park Baseball 2021 are a ballpark construction tool, 2020 MLB rules, revamped player cards, in-season tournaments, new statistics, and much more. As a result, you can enjoy the sport's on-field and front office elements like never before.
The Pinball Arcade
Pinball—the classic game of reflexes, luck, and spatial recognition—isn't nearly as popular as it was 25 years ago, but its legacy of tables, flippers, and gaudy lights lives on in FarSight Studios' The Pinball Arcade.
The Pinball Arcade focuses on recreating classic real-world pinball machines from renowned manufacturers, such as Gottlieb and Stern (sadly Bally and Williams tables are no more). The result is a collection that looks, sounds, and feels like the pinball games of yore. Amassing all of your favorite tables could be a serious investment, however, tables are sold in separate DLC packs.
The Sims 3
With The Sims 3, the Sims series exited its adolescence and entered adulthood. No longer are the Sims just digital action figures in a big dollhouse; they have personalities, goals, and unique body types and hairstyles.
The Sims themselves aren't the only thing overhauled in this release, either. The game mechanics have been changed to make it easier to customize your environments and surroundings, giving users millions of ways to create the worlds of their choice.
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth
Building on our inborn desire to explore—and, of course, exploit our hunger for addictive turn-based strategy games—Civilization: Beyond Earth catapults you off the planet that's housed your kings, wonders, and wars for millennia.
The Firaxis-developed game lets you build a society on a new world by selecting a spacecraft and sponsor, determining if your culture goes high tech or exists in harmony with nature, and fending off attacks from alien creatures.