5 games you might be interested in if you can’t wait for No Man’s Sky

1. Elite: Dangerous (2014)

Picture Courtesy: xboxonedaily.com

In December 2014, after almost 9 years since the release of Frontier: First Encounters, came one of the most ambitious space exploration simulators in decades. Elite: Dangerous, the fourth game in the Elite series, takes advantage of the generation's graphics capabilities and combines it with near seamless MMO style gameplay and tight space flight controls to give us one of the most satisfying and realistic space simulators to have ever existed; until No Man's Sky at least.

The game offers a 1:1 scale fully open world galaxy that has been modelled after our very own Milky Way galaxy and you tend to travel through empty space for the most part of your experience.This makes the satisfaction of finding that rare trading post or space station or even a fellow player that much exciting.

You can, of course pick your play style and partake in trading, mining, exploration and bounty hunting missions, but be weary of the fact that the moment you attack another player, even if by accident, you accrue bounty and other players or even NPCs (non-playable characters) will try to hunt you down.

All in all, this is a sci-fi lover's delight and on many occasions I found myself pretending to be Han Solo on a mission to hunt down the space equivalent of John Dillinger. This is easily my favourite pick in this list; not just for the graphical fidelity, but for the incredibly open-ended choose-your-own-story style gameplay.

Honourable mentions

I intentionally kept big AAA titles like Mass Effect and Starcraft out of this list because you’ve probably played them already and my goal is to inform you about lesser known older or Indie games that you probably have never come across. Here are some space based games that didn’t quite make the list but deserve a few words anyway.

Universe Sandbox2 (2014)

Picture Courtesy: brashgames.co.uk

Just in case you haven’t heard of this low-key astrophysics simulator, Universe Sandbox2 is exactly what the title of the game suggests: a sandbox style universe where you can do whatever might tickle your fancy.

Want to spawn a black hole in the middle of our solar system and watch the planets slowly drift away from their orbits? Why the hell not? Want to watch the moon slowly crash into the earth? Go for it. Want to watch our sun collide into another copy of itself causing a fiery supernova of gas and plasma? Hell yeah! You can even spawn planet-sized objects like a kettle, or a bowling ball!

The possibilities here are endless and only limited by your imagination or your computer’s rendering capabilities, whichever runs out first.

Kerbal Space Program (2015)

Kerbal Space Program puts you in control of a spacecraft building program controlled by Kerbals, little green humanoid aliens probably at the peak of their technological progress. The gameplay involves building a craft with the huge supply of parts and then testing it in a launch pad while trying to avoid catastrophic explosions or failures in the machinery. The aim is to come up with a technologically sound spacecraft design that you can safely launch and manoeuvre around nearby celestial bodies.

While this is not the most realistic physics simulator by far, it still has a sizeable cult following and has earned praise from the likes of NASA and Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX.

Do you know of a game that should be on this list but isn’t? Tweet me at @doobierain to tell me what you’re playing right now or if you think there’s a game that I really should play.