The real world sucks, and we basement-dwelling gamers do everything in our power to avoid interacting with it on a daily basis. However, maybe you dream of living another life. Maybe you want to run away and start an idyllic farm life, or make a living driving all over the world. They’re nice ideas, but since most of us aren’t willing to leave our bedrooms most days of the week, we’ll have to settle for the virtual version with simulator games.

Simulator games have got a bit of a bad rep over the past decades. Sloppily-made simulators led to funny parody games which led to the awful copycats that have plagued Steam for years, but we’re not here to talk about Goat Simulator. This list is about the truly great simulators that provide you with a realistic and fun experience in whatever field they’re simulating.

Cooking Simulator walks a fine line. It has a bit of a janky physics engine and plates that smash if you even gently scrape them against something, but once you get the hang of it, there’s an intricate cooking game in there. You can create some very intricate dishes, and the game is quite the perfectionist, marking your performance down for even the most minor of mistakes, forcing you to become a great chef.

If you’ve ever wondered how difficult it is to drive even ten feet on a frozen road, SnowRunner will set you right. This game and its predecessor, Spintires, simulate driving through extremely hostile terrain. You and your friends will need to pick a variety of vehicles to help drag each other through roads covered in 6 feet of snow and muddy ground that won’t give you any grip. The game’s maps are fairly small, but the terrain means it’ll take you about an hour to get from one side to the other.

Lots of people get a great thrill out of assembling a top-of-the-line gaming PC. However, without an extensive amount of funding, it’s not something we get to do very often. This game lets you run a business repairing PCs and building new ones from scratch, which will hopefully take care of that PC building itch until you can next afford to upgrade your machine.

There’s something undeniably satisfying about seeing something go from utterly filthy to completely spotless. It’s a bit of a wonder that this game took off as it did, but these kinds of games are great to mindlessly while away the time as you listen to a podcast or relax to some music.

In a hilarious turn of fate, the Farming Simulator games from around 2011-2013 were the games that gave simulators their awful reputation. However, because they became such a high-profile joke in gaming, they made a lot of money, and over the years all that money has turned the series into extremely competent simulators. There’s even an eSports scene around the game now with prize pools upwards of $100k.

One type of daytime TV show that never seems to die out is the property show. There’s something beautiful about a complete dump being transformed into someone’s dream home, and now you can have complete control over what that house turns into. It’s not just fancy suburban homes either, you get the opportunity to renovate weird and wonderful properties like the house from Home Alone or a Mars base.

Simulators don’t have to all be monotonous jobs, ARMA is an example of military simulation at its best. There’s plenty of opportunity for unrealistic mischief in there, but if you want to find a community out there that strictly simulates military options, then few games can serve you better. It gets even better if you instal some of the realism mods that overhaul features like the soundscape.

KSP may seem silly on the outside, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better astrophysics simulator. You may pick it up to mess about with rockets, but you’ll very quickly learn that the game takes itself very seriously, and it’s great at teaching you how to make rockets that can get into space. It’s not easy – it’s quite literally rocket science, after all – but building something that works is so very satisfying.

There have been many iterations of this game over the years, but the most recent version is utterly mindblowing. Not just because of how thoroughly realistic of a simulation it is, but because of how overwhelmingly pretty it looks. Flying over the world’s greatest landmarks has never looked so incredible.

What makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 one of the greats is that it dared to be an excellent simulator back in the era when they were still a joke. Everyone was still laughing at the Firefighter Simulators of the world when something as competent as this appeared to make everyone sit up and listen. Over the years, between this and American Truck Simulator, the game has evolved into one of the best driving games ever made, letting you go almost anywhere in Europe, and a slowly growing section of the USA.

Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.

Sign up for the For The Win newsletter to get our top stories in your inbox every morning

This is the greatest Family Feud Fast Money round you'll ever see.

Apex Legends Season 14: Hunted is coming very soon, and we have a list of times it launches in your time zone right here.

The latest entry in the Tekken series has been announced. Kind of. A 3D model of Kazuya has been shown off, at least.

© Copyright For The Win 2022

Powered by WordPress.com VIP

Please enter an email address.

Please check your email for a confirmation.