I love Endless Sky, it’s honestly one of my favorite games! I have a pack of cool SciFi art that I found on Nexus and I’ve been slowly replacing the stock photos for my personal game. I’m also a sucker for TeeWorlds, it is delightfully infuriating and hillarious to play. I know that’s baby’s first FOSS games but I’m new to open source games. That’s why I want to hear your recommendations and see what are some other good ones out there.
Battle for Wesnoth is really good.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon the most active fork of pixel dungeon, a rogue like dungeon crawler:
Pros: Simply fun
Polished AF
Has a lot of well balanced items, enemies and unique classes/sub-classes (giving it infinite replayability) actively updated
Also has a lot of great and unique forks (commonly called “Mods” by the community) such as Rat King Adventure
Has good support for both PC and phones (I also think it works well with controllers)
Cons:
You will die
You will die a lot (don’t worry, it’s worth the pain)
I love Mindustry
Ooooh! I should have mentioned that. Mindustry is so good. It’s also quite polished on my android.
Start from Doom. Well, not quite the original release, but rather Doom Legacy. From this base, create a 3D Sonic platformer styled after the Genesis era games. That’s Sonic Robo Blast 2 (because yes, it’s a sequel from a previous fangame named Sonic Robo Blast from all the way back in 1997).
We’re not done yet. Mod it further… into an online kart game. That inherits the same modding abilities Doom Legacy has. You’ve got Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, sometimes nicknamed MUGEN Kart to the dismay of its developers due to the sheer amount of addons for increasingly weird characters its forum hosts. If you’re interested, said forum, hosting both the addons for SRB2, SRB2 Kart and the SRB2 Kart releases themselves can be found here (for some reason the main website is down as I’m writing this. Oops.)
For SRB2 Kart in particular, the thread to get your hands on it is here and you can find its repository here.
The game is wacky, very fun, runs on a stale potato and it’s easy to set up a server to subject an unsuspecting community to your specific choice of insane mods among the hundreds if not thousands available.
I like simutrans a lot (maybe the most elaborated TTD-like transport game), and I am trying to learn freeciv, but it is a bit “technical”. I also like minetest, I have constructed a lot of big houses, the only FOSS game where you can cook a lot of recipes.
I just got back into OpenTTD (it comes in waves) and have had many sleepless work nights 😵 I just love it so much. I haven’t tried Simutrans, I think I will give it a try!
FreeCiv is a bit technical yeah. What I’ve been trying to master is FreeOrion. It seems really cool but the interface is hard to use.
What is Mine Test like and how does it compare to Minecraft? I’ve been meaning to try it for myself. :)
I believe minetest is made in Lua, and it does not need restart to apply mods. Minetest is FOSS, does not has all the UI and graphic enhancements of Minecraft, but it runs in very old machines, is lightweight (maybe 100 mb or less), it has a lot of people playing everyday (more than 200, big servers usually receive less than 64 players), has a lot of modding community…
Minetest is mostly implemented in C++, but its mods and game content (which are also just mods) are implemented in Lua.
My personal favorite advantage of Minetest over Minecraft is the larger world height. Minetest’s worlds are 62000 blocks high, compared to Minecraft’s 384 blocks.
You certainly don’t need most of those 62000 blocks, but 384 is quite limited, especially with only 128 underground. It means that Minecraft’s caves are all rather flat and there’s practically no challenge in getting to the rarest minerals.
With Minetest, it’s actually worth going down the more vertical caves rather than just digging, and it’s worth building intermediary bases. Minetest was the first time I felt minecarts and ladders were useful while mining.
It makes mining challenging and fun, even without mobs.
- Flare: best hack and slash RPG
- Hedgewars: best coffee break
- Neverputt (from Neverball): also coffee break but peaceful
- SuperTuxKart: fun racing game if you have a controller
- Extreme Tux Racer: relaxing skiing
- Xonotic: most popular fast-paced FPS
- Red Eclipse: similar, but parkour!
I love SuperTuxKart! I really like the user generated content, I had a mod that let me play as the F-Droid character. I ended up having a whole cast of FOSS mascots that aren’t in the base game.
I’ve played a decent bit of 0ad over the years, I’m a big fan of Thrive, and NZ:P is a pretty neat open-source PSP clone of CoD’s Nazi Zombies.
Thanks for the recommendation on Thrive. I’m playing through it at the moment and I’m kinda excited and overwhelmed by the game already!
I’ve heard of Thrive. I might need to check that out.
Here’s my favourites:
Blob wars is a 2d platform/shooter that is great fun (great sound effects and hilariously excessive gore).
Warzone 2100 is an RTS with a “neoclassic” appeal (something that would have felt like “the future of RTS” back when you played Command&Conquer).
Battle of Wesnoth is a hex-grid strategy games with loads of mods and campaigns.
The Battle for Wesnoth is my all-time favorite FOSS. Can’t understate it.
My personal favourite is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, although it’s quite tricky to get into and still brutally difficult, even if you are in it.
It’s similar in concept to Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which others have mentioned here. Maybe try that one first. 🙃
Wait wait wait, is it the game where barbarian is a character that allows you to get pretty far into the game as a beginner or something like that? If so then there’s a korean comic inspired by this game: https://www.asurascans.com/manga/4569947261-surviving-the-game-as-a-barbarian/
Holy shit I love fantasy webtoons and I love roguelikes. This is amazing!
Not the same game, unfortunately. DCSS is here: https://crawl.develz.org/
edit: I’m an idiot, I see it’s based on it hah!
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looks like nobody mentioned Warzone2100 yet. SciFi rts. I don’t know how many hours I lost to OpenTTD. Bitburner was FOSS too, I guess. I might check my library later to extend the list…
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is currently the one that has me gripped most.
Apart from that it’s probably those derived from id engines. Last one I played was Jedi Outcast.
Unciv
osu!lazer
I’ve never heard about it. Tell me more. :)
If you don’t know what osu! is, it’s a really popular rhythm game where you click circles to the beat or rhythm of a song.
“lazer” is their new open source client they’ve been developing for several years now.
For me it’s OpenRCT2. I’m not sure if it counts since it’s basically a mod that requires the base Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 game to play.
Man that sucks! I used to play with my mom when I was little. I’d love to play again. That is an excellent choice.