30 PC Games to Play Before You Die

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2

Developer: Westwood Pacific
Year: 2000

Yes, we love StarCraft, but in our eyes it’s just not as good as Red Alert 2 somehow (Blasphemy! - Ed.). The gameplay is as balanced, the fiction as imaginative and the multiplayer as solid...but compared to RA2 StarCraft seems to be missing something. Maybe it’s the campness of the cutscenes.

Regardless, it’s Red Alert 2 which gets our final vote on this list, knocking StarCraft off like a feeble infantryman swarmed by bear cavalry. Despite what some may think, we even like the recent sequel too, even if that is mostly down to the casting of Gemma Atkinson and Holly Valance. Rawr.

Like Freespace 2, Red Alert 2 isn’t all that remarkable when compared to other games in the genre – build queues, tank rushes, psychic amplifiers, blah blah blah, but it excels not on innovation, but cohesion. Everything in the game unites so perfectly it feels like it wasn’t developed so much as it was grown and emerged as it is now, a fully formed and perfectly crafted slice of strategy-gaming history.

Sid Meier’s Civilization IV

Developer: Firaxis Games
Year: 2005

Most people probably don’t want to be as famous as the man who invented the most scarily in-depth and obscenely detailed strategy game ever made, but then most people aren’t Sid Meier. Good thing too - there's only so much micro-management that we can stand, frankly and Civ IV will probably keep us satisfied for a good few years yet.

The Civilization has been through plenty of changes over the years, getting more and more difficult with each iteration, with the exception of Civilization Revolution. Civ IV is undoubtedly the high point for the series, with plenty of gameplay tweaks to help make it feel different from earlier titles. As always, there's the genuine shock that someone has managed to make something like Civ IV as fun and tense as it is too.

There’s no story to Civ IV, naturally. Your job in the game is simply to survive and thrive, leading your country to dominance through whatever means you want to try; diplomatic, technological or simply by outlasting everyone else. To say that Civ IV is strategy on a grand scale would be an understatement; this is truly an epic strategy game.

Rome: Total War

Developer: Creative Assembly
Year: 2004

Rome may not be the latest game in the Total War series anymore, but we still think it’s by far the best – even if only because it isn’t as crippled by bugs as Empire: Total War is.

Rome maybe a smaller game than either of the later titles, Empire and Medieval, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that it’s any shorter or easier though. Quite the contrary actually; confining the area of conflict actually makes the game that much better and more focused. Ships and armies don’t always need multiple turns to reach a destination and players aren’t constantly skipping backwards and forwards between different maps, so the strategy feels more directed and distilled.

It has flaws, sure, but Rome: Total War compensates for this on two fronts. First, it’s one of the most easily modded games ever made and there’s a huge selection of total conversions out there for those who’ve finished the standard game. Secondly, you can create armies of flaming pigs.

Flaming pigs! Really, what else do you need other than a huge elephant vs. flaming pigs multiplayer match?