Pc games by genre

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Need help? We noticed you don't have JavaScript enabled. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to view our site properly. Show Me How. Big Fish Games. PC Games. Mac Games. Big Fish Casino. Android Games. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is the king of this genre. Players are free to make an entire abandoned warehouse their playground.

Cool tricks can be performed, huge jumps, and sweet grinds. There are also ramps where players can do impressive flips. Players can chain together tricks for massive points, earning new unlocks such as skaters and tricks. The fun gameplay of Pro Skater 2 perfectly captures skateboarding culture, encouraging players to just "go for it. Gran Turismo is a simulated racing franchise that rivals the arcade gameplay of Need For Speed.

The original Gran Turismo, published in , puts players behind the wheel in an action-packed circuit racing. There are nearly different cars to choose from, all real-life and licensed, and each car controls and feels different. Though the graphics obviously don't hold up to today's standards, at the time, it was as realistic as video games can get.

The physics and the controls were also realistic, making the racing experience authentic and life-like. For a game in '98, Gran Turismo did more than deliver. This earns it the highest rating given to a racing game, ever.

The game is a military strategy game with fog mechanics that encourages exploration. Players are guided with a live-action briefing before jumping into the game. Like any strategy game, players mine resources, construct buildings, and train troops to wage against the opposition. Players give orders to manned vehicles and on-the-ground infantry units, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For a '95 game, there is a lot of detail that goes into Command and Conquer's skirmishes.

The fourth entry in the Counter-Strike franchise first came out in , but it still boasts a very active community of competitive players. Other great options include hero shooters like Overwatch and hybrid titles like Valorant. Both of these also have or are developing vibrant competitive scenes and full esports leagues. For strategic multiplayer games, the options are much more limited. StarCraft 2 is still the best of the bunch, even more than a decade after release.

It boasts an active pro scene and ladder community, plus an engaging storyline that everyone should play through at least once. Still the most popular game in the world in , LoL puts you in control of one of more than champions in a 5v5 battle in a large battle arena. Both games are free-to-play, but DOTA 2 is a bit more friendly to pure f2p players with all characters unlocked from the get-go. Finally we get to a category that truly shines on PC. Strategy games, whether turn-based or otherwise, have a long history on the platform.

The Total War franchise has been around for more than two decades now, and TW games have always been among the best PC games you can buy.

Based on the hit tabletop game, it features dragons and other huge beasts as well as magic and more. Are you the type of person who loves optimizing and managing complex systems? If so, Factorio is a great choice. The whole game takes place inside a factory, where you mine resources, research new tech, lay down infrastructure, and fight off attacking enemies. The game rises in complexity exponentially as your factory grows, and now that the stable game is released it can support some truly enormous layouts.

Battletech is a strategy game in the same universe as the MechWarrior series, but instead of hopping in the cockpit it features turn-based battles with squads of giant mechs, tanks, and other war machines.

The game has an extensive campaign where you can customize mech loadouts and pilot skills, as well as online multiplayer play. Since the game came out in , developer Harebrained Schemes has released three separate DLC packs. Each one adds new mechs, weapons, maps, and missions to the base game. This category might be confusing, since pretty much every gaming experience is some kind of simulation.

A farming sim at its core, Stardew Valley has you planting and taking care of crops, catching legendary fish , battling monsters in the mines, and participating in social events to find a suitable spouse. It perfects the Harvest Moon formula, and the one-man developer ConcernedApe has kept the game fresh with frequent updates, all of which are included in a one-time purchase of the base game.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a game that needs no introduction, and not just because it does exactly what it says on the tin. In adventure games, players usually interact with their environment and other characters to solve puzzles with clues to progress the story or gameplay. Aside from an occasional mini-game, adventure games rarely involve any traditional video game action elements.

Fun Fact : Myst is considered the most successful adventure game of all time. The game was released at a time many consider the height of the genre—in —and became the best-selling PC game of all time.

Early text adventure games were called "interactive fiction. As computers became more capable of creating graphics to support text, games evolved as well.

For instance, early graphic adventure games used simple images to support the still text-based adventure. Extremely popular in Japan, most visual novels require players to build up character traits or statistics to advance the gameplay. The games often have multiple endings which are determined by how the player responds to specific points in the plot. Dating and legal simulations Ace Attorney for the Nintendo DS, for example are popular themes for many visual novels. Interactive movies contain pre-filmed live-action or animation sequences.

It was animated by former Disney animator Don Bluth. The latest evolution of adventure games is real-time 3D. Instead of pre-rendered scenes, players interact in a real-time 3D video game world. Shenmue and Heavy Rain are good examples of these types of games.

Probably the second-most popular game genre, role-playing games, or RPGs, mostly feature medieval or fantasy settings. Finally, gamers are often given choices in this genre that influence the final outcome of the game, which means many RPGs have alternate endings. Action role-playing games take game elements of both action games and action-adventure games. Fun Fact : You can still play Diablo online. Massive multiplayer online role-playing games or MMORPGs evolved as graphical variations of text-based multi-user dungeons MUDs , which were developed in the late s.

MMORPGs involve hundreds of players actively interacting with each other in the same world, and typically, all players share the same or a similar objective. The only other game genre based on the name of the game that inspired it, Rogue was a 2D computer game and dungeon crawler from The game featured a text interface and random level generation.

Players overcame enemies and obstacles to increase their player stats. Considering their origins in tabletop gaming, tactical role-playing games play more like traditional board games, wherein the turn-based game action plays out over an isometric grid.

Players use almost chess-like strategy and a finite numbers of resources armies, weapons, etc. Sandbox, or open-world, role-playing games allow players to freely roam their game environments in search of adventure. These are some of the most immersive and engaging video game experiences available, because the massive amount of game characters and situations required to populate side quests and supporting storylines enable game developers to create almost lifelike virtual worlds.

Games in the simulation genre have one thing in common—they're all designed to emulate real or fictional reality, to simulate a real situation or event. SimCity is the most popular construction and management simulation of all time. The game simulates the building and management of a city, including street planning, zoning, and taxing city residents.

The Sims is the most popular life simulation game and one of the best-selling video games of all time. Like SimCity which was also created by Will Wright , in The Sims , players control the individual aspects of artificial life. Virtual pet games like Nintendogs and Tamagotchi are considered part of the subgenre of this category as pet-raising simulations.

Thus, The Sims is considered a social simulation. Both types of subgenres fall into the life simulation category. Vehicle simulations aim to recreate the experience of flying an airplane, driving a race car, and in some cases, driving a tractor on a farm. Vehicular simulations can incorporate combat, in the case of flight sims.

This category includes space flight simulators and train simulators. With gameplay is based on traditional strategy board games, strategy games give players a godlike access to the world and its resources.