Action games may come and go, but the best among them remain playable to this day. Thanks to open source development, dedicated fanbases and timeless gameplay, a few of these classic titles are among some of the best games any gamer will ever get to experience. From a list of dozens of titles, I’ve selected the cream of the crop—the top five free action games for the PC.
I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that Tribes and its sequel were two FPS titles that needed players to be at the top of their game. From launching discs at moving targets hundreds of feet in the air, to capturing a flag at breakneck speed, the Tribes games rewarded players for their skill.
Sierra made a mistake by sacking the game’s developers and churning out Tribes: Vengeance. It had been a vastly unpopular game, which drew more influence from console shooters than its series predecessors. The fanbase did not take kindly to its release.
Fans were up in arms about their perceived ransacking of the Tribes franchise, and spread word of the game’s lackluster quality, ensuring its failure in the marketplace. The game’s creators, Irrational Games, went on to make Bioshock—a much better game.
Despite the debacle of Tribes: Vengeance, the Tribes community stayed loyal to Tribes 2. Sierra couldn’t give less of a damn about the community and eventually shut down the WON matchmaking service that was used to host Tribes 2 online.
The fanbase devised a way to continue playing the game with the development and release of TribesNext, a fan-made matchmaking service that offers Tribes 2 players the ability to play online, with fully integrated accounts.
The best part in all of this is that Tribes 2 is now completely free to play.
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Dividing my time between Subspace and Diablo was a perpetually choice I had to make as a teenager. Every session of these games was a break from the monotony of school and homework.
Subspace, a top-down shooter, was like multiplayer Asteroids. Played online with hundreds of other players, one could blast their way through opponents, often in heated dogfights. One could even earn kills by firing blindly and killing players all the way across the map.
Playing styles could be further customized by the fact that players can choose between a variety of different ships, which vary by armor, speed, damage, and the types of bullets and bombs they can fire.
Many advanced players found themselves in dedicated squadrons who roamed throughout the zones (servers), claiming dominance over turfs, while others preferred to duke it out as lone wolves in the Chaos Zone.
Subspace may be a part of my youth, but the fact that I can return to the game—which is now free, in the form of Continuum—is a fantastic fact.
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Two decades ago, the shoot-em-up genre was among the most popular. Most titles in the genre were bland, sci-fi themed shooters and simply early versions of the “bullethell” games that now grace the PC. The Bitmap Brothers’ Xenon II came along and introduced the concept of currency and ship upgrades to the genre.
A few years later, Apogee developed Raptor: Call of the Shadows. It took the genre to the next level with its high quality graphics, 16-bit music and large variety of weaponry.
It wasn’t long before the genre found a successor in Tyrian, released in 1995. The game delivered more than just a rudimentary RPG system that allowed the player to upgrade their ship—it had a story, told through datacubes scattered throughout the missions, as well as branching missions.
Spread across five episodes, players traveled throughout the galaxy, players earned credits to purchase new equipment, upgrades, and even entirely new ships.
Aside from its full story mode, the game came with an arcade mode that supported two players, replacing the game’s RPG mechanics with in-level ship upgrades, inspired by arcade shoot-em-ups like Raiden 2.
Tyrian has since been released as OpenTyrian, after the source code for the game was licensed to a small group of developers to rewrite it for modern computers. It can be downloaded and played for free, and remains one of the most enjoyable shoot-em-ups to ever exist.
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