It has a particular focus on emergent storytelling, as your colonists go about their unique lives, working, farming, romancing each other and reproducing. If you’ve played Prison Architect, RimWorld feels like a more open iteration of that, set on a distant space colony. Incredibly deep and ridiculously satisfying, RimWorld is the latest twist on the Dwarf Fortress formula, where you create a habitat for people, each of whom has a complex hierarchy of needs, desires, and ambitions that you need to carefully manage. You’ll be forced into making some tough expedient decisions in Frostpunk, such as whether it’s okay to eat the bodies of dead citizens as a food source (sounds practical enough), and just how many people you can afford to sacrifice for the greater good of your society.įrostPunk receives regular updates, too, and has recently been bolstered with a much-wanted Endless mode. You build up a city around a solitary heat source in the middle of an ice field, trying to manage food supplies, laws, and morale as the world all around gets colder and colder. FrostPunkįrom the makers of This War of Mine comes a desperately bleak game that focuses on trying to keep people alive on an Earth that has entered into an unprecedented Ice Age. It’s a uniquely stark exercise in human cooperation and conflict – a vast lab where anything goes, making it both fascinating and compelling. It’s the self-organization that makes it really interesting, though, as players can establish settlements, forts, townships, and band together against the more murder-minded folk out there. It’s definitely an acquired taste because it’s demoralising when you spend hours to get to the point of building your first wooden shack, then get shot in the head by a far more experienced player just as you’re about to call it a night on your freshly crafted mattress. The full Mac version only came out in 2018, however, so in the interest of including a shooter in this list, Rust makes the cut.

Rust feels like it’s been in early access pretty much since the stone age, which is appropriate for a grueling online shooter in which you start off naked with a rock for company and need to scavenge and survive to find your place in the world. The following is our ranked list of the best Mac games of 2018.

Best strategy games mac 2018