Ship piloting games

Not only does it offer a meaty challenge to your space-faring exploits, but its attempts at deploying tailored, counter-strategies makes it feel all the more personal each time you play. Contrary to popular belief, the X-Wing series wasn't a direct assault on Wing Commander.

It was an attempt to transpose the systems and success of Totally Games' first series onto what would be its second. That they all featured a mission builder, combat recorder and historical missions only serves to underline that fact.

Instead Totally and Lucasarts opted to flip the story to the Dark Side, in so doing allowing players the opportunity to fight for the Empire for the first time while avoiding the mistake of painting everyone in it as wholly and irredeemably evil. Even though we knew we were on the wrong side, the game had us believing our hearts were in the right place, even if our guns were pointing at the good guys.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is that rare space sim that manages to capture the thrill and wonder of exploring a star system without wildly over-promising on what to expect. It may only be set in a single region of space with odd star systems to peruse, but within those limited confines is a game packed with dogfights, bounty hunts, underhand deals and fraught delivery runs.

Action is the name of the game here, and Double Damage Games makes you get you're able to get your hands dirty at every possible opportunity. Thanks to Outlaw's clever targeting system and auto-pursuit system, dogfights are brilliant fun.

You can turn off auto-pursuit if you prefer to go old-school with your space fights, but leaving it on makes every skirmish feel like a nail-biting battle of wits rather than chance pot-shots into the void.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw also manages that rare feat of giving us a character we actually care about, and a story that gives them a place and purpose in this vast region of the unknown. A lot of it covers familiar ground, but it makes a refreshing change from your No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous types. Lovingly crafted and always stunningly pretty to look at, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw always has us coming back for more.

Space captains are better served than ever for 2D Elite-ish games, but Star Traders: Frontiers is by far the best out there. Create your captain, pick a ship, and fill it with a crew of pilots, navigators, swordsmen, and whatever niche experts suit your needs. Getting on your feet can be hard, but once you've got a little money and the favour of some political figures, the galaxy is yours to adventure in.

Your ship and crew define you more than in any space RPG, as you can refit and reorganise them as you see fit. Almost everything you do in Frontiers can affect the economy, status, and political relations of local characters, planets, and factions, whether you want to dig into its multi-threaded story jobs or not.

And you'll inevitably end up doing more than you planned for when opportunity knocks. Your unarmed spy ship might make a great smuggler. Your ship-disabling pirates might create perfect opportunities to start taking on bounty hunter jobs.

Or you might just stumble across some exotic goods, and find yourself waylaid in a chain of unexpected events on your way to find a black market to sell them at. Plus, you can hire a sniper who wears pink thigh high boots in space. What's not to love? If you're happy to trade off realism for sheer spectacle when it comes to space battles, then Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 the definitive Warhammer 40, navy 'em up is going to be your happy place.

Despite all the cinematic 3D camera work, its battles play out on a resolutely 2D playing field. It's essentially a sea battle game with bombastic, giga-scale space stylings, and it pushes a lot of the same buttons as Total War games in terms of play feel - you build up fleets on a campaign layer, then position them on a tactical map and shove them into the enemy to start knocking lumps out of each other. Conflict in BFGA2 feels huge: hundreds of individual turrets batter away at each other, while fighters zip around like clouds of dust, and massive ships explode gloriously with a groaning sound like a whale reading its credit card bill.

You can play as 12 of the major 40k factions in BFGA2's skirmish mode, while four get their own campaigns. The strategic game sometimes feels a little light, but not so much that it feels stripped down, and there's an impressive level of storytelling and lore involved, when it didn't necessarily have to be.

The big draw, however you choose to play, and whatever you choose to play as, is that you're guaranteed one hell of a light show. Ironclad Games' RTS pinches the scale of a 4X game and pits massive armadas against each other in orbital laser light shows. All the diplomatic, trade and research systems borrowed from 4Xs prop up the constant war, funding and upgrading increasingly diverse fleets.

At first you'll just be throwing light attack ships at planets you want to gobble up, but eventually you'll be surrounding worlds and enemy fleets with capital ships the size of small moons and a whole host of support vessels, carriers, tiny fighters and bombers.

Sins' smartest trick is the use of restrictive lanes to connect worlds. It forces fleets to travel down predetermined paths, appearing in specific places. Even in space, then, there's terrain, with the lanes' entrances and exits acting as choke points around which weapons platforms can be constructed and fleets positioned.

The Rebellion standalone adds the additional wrinkle of new playable rebel factions and their accompanying victory conditions, but also powerful Titan-class ships and overhauled vanilla factions. Oh, and it's quite a bit prettier! Although it started out as a rather humourless and unhurried take on Elite, the X series has carved out an impressive niche for itself over the course of 15 years or so, becoming the go-to game for space captains who'd rather explore a capitalist frontier than venture beyond anything physical.

Egosoft would no doubt argue that there's been more to its games than first-person Industry Giant in space, pointing to the series' motto and the prominence of fighting ahead of thinking. The truth is that that it took a few attempts for the German developer to properly nail combat.

The X3 games seemed to nail it though; each release offering a more evolved OS-styled control setup that managed to avoid falling into the FPS mouse trap while complimenting the complexities of the trading simulation underpinning the game. Some might protest that the Albion Prelude expansion went a step too far, with too much slow-burning intricacy and not enough explanation, but by setting the X universe at war with itself ahead of the slate-cleaning Rebirth, it offered players the best opportunity in the long-running series to make good profit at the expense of others.

For all its infamous high stakes drama and ruthless corporate betrayals, there's room for a lot more in EVE than most people think. The enormously complex player economy is ultimately about loads of random players all doing their own thing, after all. More so than perhaps any other game, EVE is about interacting with others, but that too can be done as you see fit.

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Find Past Certificate Lookup a copy of your state certificate. Aircraft Carrier Pilot Simulator. Read more.. What are the best Pilot Games on tablets and mobile phones? What are the newest Pilot Games on SilverGames? Our crazy addicting ship games will let you sit in the captain's chair and steer your cruise ship through stormy seas.

Use rocket propulsion to get your space ship to distant planets, and fight alien invaders in a galactic war for domination. If this is all too stressful for you, live life as a simple sea merchant and deliver cargo to small islands to make money.

The possibilities are endless. From exciting action fights to strategic plotting of travel routes. Become the greatest commander these ships have ever seen in our fantastic collection of multiplayer ship games.