The PC has made great strides in the past year, but we don't want to ignore its entire history either. This Top 25 PC Games list is a delicate balancing act between the latest and greatest and a slew of dominating classics. Could you choose just 25 PC games to play for the rest of your life out of the hundreds of thousands of titles. With indie developers, digital libraries, sales, bundles, and more, the PC deserves the recognition it's gotten in 2013.
Here are GameRevolution's Top 25 PC games for 2013:
25. Peggle Deluxe
First released in 2007, Peggle has steadily grown into the perfect pallet cleanser. PopCap’s silver ball ricochets around the board and racks up points with every cleared red, blue, and green peg.
Special powers let you score even more points, but finishing a level in Extreme Fever and hearing the Ode to Joy beat drop satisfies like nothing else. It’s the perfect in-between for hardcore shooters and strategies. Break up your next Battlefield and Total War campaigns with a little Peggle to keep things light.
24. Thief II: The Metal Age
The team that brought us System Shock also delivered Thief and Thief II: The Metal Age. Thief II landed in 2000, one of the best years for PC gaming, and followed Garrett as he discovers a massive conspiracy in the age of Mechanists. With new technology complicating Garrett’s good-old-fashioned thieving abilities, Thief II expanded the story, world, and gameplay without sacrificing the tense shadows that players cling to in-game. Here’s hoping the latest entry can only further our fondness for the series in 2014.
23. Kerbal Space Program
A fully realized ship-building toy box, realistic physics, endearing Kerbals you might kill in a fiery near-space explosion, a totally unique and one-of-a-kind indie game. Kerbal Space Program is all of these things and more. You might never reach the Mun. You might never land a rover on a martian surface, but every ship is a story and sharing that story with fellow gamers doubles the fun. Try the game and see if you can do better, see if you can land your Kerbals on the moon, or just screw around and build something that was never meant to launch. Just stick around for the spectacular crash.
22. EVE Online
If you’re looking for a diehard online community in a deep galaxy simulation that brings economy, politics, and massive laser battles to the mix, look no further than EVE Online. CCP’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game earns a spot on our list for the way it mimics and mocks our own society. If you want big gambles to result in thousands of dollars lost to the virtual vacuum of space or to interact with players who have as much control over the game’s world and workings as even the developers, your ship should be parked somewhere in the vast space in EVE Online.
21. Minesweeper
Never mind the high-fidelity action your SLI graphics cards inject directly into your eyeballs. Never mind the liquid-cooled architecture of your hand-built beast. Never mind online multiplayer, or anything resembling a detailed menu. The only options you need are Easy, Medium, and Fuck-This-Game. When it comes to the edge of white-knuckled excitement that only a high-stakes drug deal can give you, you only need Minesweeper, the original free-to-play.
20. Diablo II
With the real-money auction house getting patched out of Diablo III, we’ll continue our recognition of Diablo II for getting the formula right the first time. Released way back in 2000, Blizzard’s second hack at the action role-playing genre gave fans a dark fantasy slant on their favorite classes, bringing magic and steel to an explosive juncture where a wild-west online world waited for players to plunder and loot. Here’s hoping they never pull the Battle.net plug on this classic.
19. Unreal Tournament
To this day, Call of Duty’s twitchy fan base needs to give thanks for Unreal Tournament, the originators of fast and furious arena-style shooting. Call of Duty’s layered mechanics in perks and attachments have been built on a base of frenetic shooting not seen since Unreal’s heyday. Sure, you can’t rocket-jump across your favorite map in Call of Duty, but there’s still a small community around Unreal Tournament, so dig in and blast a few hours away.
18. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Big butt mods, big breast mods, big sword mods, and we’re not talking about the one you swing around to fight Skyrim’s beasts. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim struck the gamer zeitgeist when it launched, but now that the DLC is complete and you can get the entire package for a song, it’s never been a better time to be Dragonborn.
17. Doom 3
Another PC franchise that continues to draw fans in with stark, horrific graphics and tight, responsive shooter controls, Doom continues to exist in whispers and shrieks. While a new Doom game has been in the works for sometime, we continue to wait for it with the reboot from 2004. Mods and graphical face-lifts mean Doom 3 continues to be the most horrifying first-person shooter on PCs, even if Doom 4 fails to ever appear behind us for a dastardly scare.
16. Minecraft
Notch’s boxy world has taken the world by storm and brought gaming to a new generation of tablet users, iPhone toting tweens, and everyone in-between. Even the Xbox 360 version of the game for console peasants has clung dedicatedly to the Xbox Live activity charts. World after world, Minecraft has grown in popularity and reach. Independent developers can look to Mojang for more, but Minecraft takes a place on this chart for the way it renewed interest in the Indie scene.
15. Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings rejoins our list of the 25 best PC games thanks to its long-standing influence on the strategy genre. At the turn of the millennia, Age of Empires II gave players a long, interactive look back at a past filled with countless bloody campaigns. By the end, you should have all you need to know about the art of war.
14. The Sims 3
Like The Sims 2, EA’s latest Sims game has extended its reach with countless expansion packs and new gameplay to ultimately become the ultimate living dollhouse. Barbies and action figures have nothing on the kind of melodramatic, cartoon-y, hair-brained, and totally-endearing dramas that can play out in Sims 3. Non-threatening and fun for everyone, The Sims 3 is the sleepy computer gaming cousin to Battlefield 3 and StarCraft 2. It’s the game you have installed for those quiet Sundays where you’ve done all your chores and so has your Sim.
13. Portal 2
Ignoring the game’s ties to the Half-Life series for a second, the most interesting thing about Portal 2 was pretty much the entire experience. From the teasing, tongue-in-cheek and laugh-out-loud narrative, to the puzzle action, the reactive soundtrack, to the mind-bending cooperative puzzles, to the sensation of flying through the air in a mad abuse of gravity… All of it. There’s really nothing else like Portal 2, and maybe there never will be.
12. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
KOTOR wasn’t just one of the best Star Wars games ever made, it’s also one of the best action-RPG hybrids ever made, representing BioWare’s first experiments with what would mechanically evolve into Mass Effect. With a narrative scribed by Drew Karpyshyn, a killer soundtrack, and tons of lovable characters and events, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic holds tight to GameRevolution’s list of best PC games because it continues to ring loudly in our heads as a meaningful extension of the brand and a meaningful experience for gamers from all walks of life.
11. SimCity 4
Despite EA’s horrifying, bungled launch of what could have been an engrossing new entry in the franchise, we can’t throw out SimCity just for its modern-day mistakes. With computer hardware growing in strength and shrinking in cost, SimCity 4 runs better than ever and with the right mods and gameplay adjustments, might even be the modern city builder you hoped for in 2013. The fine control you want over roads and construction still waits in that old SimCity 4 save you’ve kept from hard disc to flash drive to solid-state.
10. Total War: Rome II
Total War continues to impress us after all these years. Perhaps no other series caters to the diehard PC fan like Total War, and Rome II is emblematic of that dedication. One of the most hardware-intense games on the market, Rome II allows you to capture the bloody action from the perspective of a lowly foot soldier or the airborne commander surveying the columns of soldiers and barbarians as they crash into each other with shield and blade. Enter into a multiplayer skirmish or campaign and watch the hours fly by.
9. Counter-Strike: Source
Counter-Strike’s global appeal and diehard community make any entry in the franchise a worthy new notch in your Steam library, but Counter-Strike: Source has aged like a fine wine. Its server-side mods have grown more wild and free. Its best players have possibly moved on allowing newcomers to get addicted and get to knifing. Finding a stable CS_Office community or a wild meat grind deathmatch is just as easy now as it was a launch, thanks to the long-haul servers hosted by fans.
8. Battlefield 3
It may be too early for Battlefield 4, but with DICE’s Premium Subscription offering dozens of maps, plenty of varied game modes, and a wide reaching community in Battlefield 3, it’s easy to give the franchise a spot on our list. With the overall package coming down in price and PC hardware continuing to march into the blind future of technology, Battlefield 3 is more playable, more entertaining, and more accessible than ever before.
7. System Shock 2
This action role-playing survival horror game where players have to destroy an AI supercomputer named SHODAN still scares us. Whether you’re modifying your character for a completely different play style or experiencing the game for the first time, System Shock 2’s complex gameplay systems and narrative are only bettered through its sound design and now decidedly old-school graphics. With the title popping up on numerous download services, nows as good a time as any to let SHODAN in your head.
6. StarCraft 2
A worldwide phenomenon, a professional sport that regularly fills stadiums, and one of the hardest games to truly master all rolled into one package. StarCraft 2’s worldwide reach and balanced approach to the real-timed strategy genre make it one of the biggest games in the world, played by countless gamers every day.
5. Deus Ex
Sorry, now you’ve gotta go install this classic gem one more time. Deus Ex laid the ground work for many different avenues in modern gaming, but that the experience’s haunting vision of the future still holds up today speaks to its longevity. That we’re actually stepping into Deus Ex’s future, where an NSA runs rampant and biomechanics can rebuild men, makes the experience even more surreal today. We can’t wait to see what the future of Deus Ex has in store.
4. Dota 2
With Steam breaking several records for concurrent users this year, a lot of credit goes to Team Fortress 2, but Dota 2 is perhaps more deserving for serving up a viciously addicted community to the Valve overlords. When Valve didn’t anticipate the fan base’s hunger for a Halloween themed event, the fan base exploded and even harassed corporations outside of video gaming for their slightly different content. Look for Dota 2 to continue growing with every major eSport event.
3. Team Fortress 2
Valve’s class-based warfare has gone off the rails in recent years, but it has continued to define the online multiplayer space with community-focus, allowing the players themselves to shape the experience and make a difference throughout the community. When a game looks like a Pixar movie, features characters as colorful as a bloody rainbow, and maintains a thriving community like TF2, we have to stop and recognize.
2. World of Warcraft
New expansions continue to maintain World of Warcraft’s dominance in the MMO space. While forces like Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls Online hope to bring down Blizzard’s reigning market champion in 2014, it’ll be a long, dusty road to anything resembling the polished, feature-complete experience you can find in World of Warcraft today.
1. Half-Life 2 w/ Episodes 1 & 2
There’s a reason all of PC gaming continues to hope, yearn, and hold out for a sequel to Valve’s first-person shooter series and that’s because no other franchise has captured the hearts and minds of gamers. From an unexpected hero in Gordon, to an endearing partner in Alyx, to a giant robot named Dog, Half-Life 2 Episode 2’s cliff-hanger ending has us screaming for more. How long will PC gamers have to wait to finish the fight with the Combine and bump into the G-man once more?
