Best Flight and Aerial Combat Games on Steam

Flying splits cleanly into two hobbies that happen to share a control scheme. One is the study sim, where the reward is a clean approach into weather you chose on purpose and the checklist is the game. The other is the arcade dogfight, where the plane is a weapon and the only altitude that matters is the one your missile needs. This page takes both seriously, plus the odd crossover that is really a management game with wings. Achievement-wise they behave very differently: the sims lean on long, unmissable travel and landing counters that tick up while you enjoy the view, while the combat games hide their hardest unlocks behind ace-difficulty mission clears and weapon-specific kills. Nothing here is on the list without Steam achievements attached.

1

Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) 40th Anniversary Edition

Still the reference point for what a consumer flight sim can look like: real-world terrain, live weather and live air traffic, flown anywhere on a planet-sized map. Its achievements are almost entirely about racking up flight hours, landings and destinations, so a completion run is genuinely relaxing rather than punishing.

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2

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

The follow-up trades some of the sandbox for career structure - aerial firefighting, medevac, search and rescue - which gives the flying an objective instead of a destination. The shorter achievement list is built around those career activities, so it is the more focused clear of the two.

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3

ACE COMBAT 7: SKIES UNKNOWN

The purest arcade dogfighter on Steam, and unapologetic about it: physics that let a fighter turn like nothing real, missiles that arc across the sky, and a campaign that is happy to fly you through a canyon in a storm. The achievement list reaches deep, asking for mission clears on the hardest difficulty and kills with specific weapons.

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4

Project Wingman

A small team building Ace Combat for people who wanted more of it, and in places sharper than the game it is answering. Conquest mode is the standout - a roguelite campaign layer that makes the arcade flying replayable rather than a one-and-done story run.

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5

War Thunder

Free to start and enormous, with an aviation tree running from biplanes to jets and a flight model that gets genuinely demanding in the simulator battle modes. The long achievement list rewards breadth across nations and eras, and the grind is the honest cost of entry.

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6

Heliborne Collection

The rare helicopter game that is neither a study sim nor an arcade shooter - troop insertion and objective control flown from a cockpit that always feels a moment away from losing lift. Rotary flight has its own rhythm, and nothing else on this page teaches it.

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7

SimplePlanes

Less a flight sim than a physics sandbox about whether the thing you built will hold together, which is its own kind of engineering puzzle. A big achievement list, and most of it comes from experimenting rather than from flying well.

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8

Bomber Crew

A management game wearing a flight sim: you are running a lancaster and its crew rather than flying it directly, triaging fires, injuries and jammed turrets while the mission continues around you. Permadeath for the crew gives routine sorties real weight.

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9

Sky Rogue

A short, bright, low-poly roguelite where flight is fast and the runs are disposable - the entry point if the genre normally means an hour of pre-flight setup. Small achievement list, and the most realistic full clear on this page.

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Updated 2026-09-15. Every game links to its full SteamVault page with achievement stats, rarity and community completion times.