Best Space Sim Games on Steam

Space sims cover a lot of ground: dogfighting between capital ships, running cargo across a living economy, welding your own station together bolt by bolt, or just drifting through a nebula with the radio on. What ties them together is that the ship is the interface, and learning to fly it well is most of the game. The list below spans arcade-leaning combat, hard-edged sandboxes and one or two things that only barely count as flying, and every game on it has a Steam achievement list to work through.

1

X4: Foundations

The deepest economic sandbox in the genre: you can fly a single fighter, or step back and run fleets, stations and supply chains across a simulated galaxy. Its 172-achievement list is enormous and rewards long-term empire building rather than reflexes.

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2

EVERSPACE 2

Traded the roguelike structure of the first game for a full open-world action RPG with loot, perks and hand-built locations. The flight model is arcade-fast but the combat has real depth once you start building around specific ship classes.

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3

STAR WARS: Squadrons

The most focused pure dogfighter here, built around power management between engines, shields and weapons. Short campaign, but the cockpit fidelity and the five-versus-five fleet battles are the draw.

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4

No Man's Sky

Years of free updates turned it into a genuinely enormous exploration and base-building game with seamless planet-to-space flight. A compact 27-achievement list means it is one of the more approachable completions on this list.

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5

Chorus

A fast, stylish combat flyer built around drift-strafing and unlockable psychic abilities that let you phase, stall and teleport mid-fight. The movement is the whole appeal and it feels like nothing else in the genre.

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6

Avorion

Build your ship block by block, then send it out into a procedural galaxy to trade, mine and fight. The construction system is the star: your fleet is only as good as what you designed.

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7

Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Not a flight game at all, but the best zero-gravity work sim ever made: cut derelict ships apart with a laser and sort the pieces without depressurising yourself. Tense, methodical and darkly funny about corporate debt.

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8

EVERSPACE

The roguelike original, where each run pushes deeper into a hostile sector and death feeds upgrades for the next attempt. Sharper and more punishing than the sequel, and much shorter.

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9

Space Engineers

A physics-driven sandbox about welding, wiring and eventually flying whatever you managed to bolt together. Closer to engineering than piloting, and the achievement list is short enough to finish alongside a survival save.

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10

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

A trucker-with-guns space western: haul cargo, take bounties and fight in a slick, mouse-friendly dogfight system. The soundtrack and bar-room atmosphere carry as much of it as the flying does.

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11

House of the Dying Sun

A short, brutal wing-commander-style game about ordering a strike squadron and dropping into whichever fighter you need to be in. Tiny in size, unusually pure in design, and its achievements are a real skill test.

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Updated 2026-08-25. Every game links to its full SteamVault page with achievement stats, rarity and community completion times.