Platform games are one of gaming's most enduring staples, and you can't really mention them without talking about Mario. Except I am. Put simply, there's no point in me trying to list the best platform games of all time because, like it or not, Mario titles would take up at least 50% of the entries. The best platform game ever made is probably Super Mario Galaxy 2 (so says our list). But let's not argue about that. Let's look at the challengers.

There's more to the competition than just Sonic the Hedgehog. In fact, you're about to read about 25 amazing platform games that don't have Mario in them. And they're in order too, so let's start with 25 and work our way up to the top. Let's-a go! *Gunshot*.

Ah, a familiar face. Crash is surely one of PSone's most enduring icons and his first adventure is arguably his best. The tight, corridor-like nature of the levels mean Naughty Dog (yes, of Uncharted fame) was able to cram loads of polygonal detail into every frame, making this still look surprisingly lush, especially on a PSP or Vita's screen.

The gameplay is much harder than most people remember, and finding all of the wumpa fruit (there's a blast from the past) requires some pretty serious skills and searching on later levels. It's true that non-homing jumping in 3D space doesn't work very well a lot of the time, but Crash's shadow at least allows you to see where you're landing. It's still fun, charming and easy to get hold of via PSN.

It's rare for a platform game to out-concept the infamous Glover in the 'most ridiculous premise for a platform game' contest. But Vince is the third-best voodoo doll belonging to the owner of a magic shop in New Orleans, who comes to life when zombie dust is spilled during a robbery/kidnapping.

Vince himself is a wisecracking platform hero (no, wait - come back!) who can defeat his enemies by inflicting pain on himself. Chuck yourself in a fire if it helps (and it probably will). From the world design to the N'orleans Jazz-influenced soundtrack, Voodoo Vince has a ton of personality to go alongside the tight 3D platforming design. Still surprisingly good-looking, too. That original Xbox has still got some clout, I'm tellin' ya...

Shantae is one of those games that hardly anyone talks about, but deserves much more acclaim. Shantae herself is a Middle-Eastern belly dancer and in this, her third game, she must team up with her former enemy, Risky Boots (great name – love it) and save her town from a typically pantomime-evil threat.

What follows is classic platform action, where new abilities unlock secrets in previously-visited areas. It's very similar to an old (unrelated) game called Monster World IV – in fact, it could feasibly pass as a sequel to that game. But this is better. Some might be put off by the ridiculous moments of cartoon fan-service (those costume changes are gratuitous to say the least), but it's all tame and feels good-natured. Look out for the new-gen sequel currently in development.

It's remarkable how well the oldest game on this list has stood the test of time. While you could boil this first Dizzy sequel down to an overly-punishing 'fetch and carry' quest, you'd be doing it a massive disservice. The design of this static-screened world is still a treat for the imagination. A desert island with pirate gold lying beneath the surface of the water, complete with a treehouse village, a sub-aquatic world (with a shipwreck) and cursed treasure to boot.

The one-hit-and-you-have-to-restart 'feature' is cruel, but it actually gives the game an immense feeling of peril. Every jump near a hazard – be it a jellyfish or burning torch – must be judged perfectly, or you have to start again. And each moment of discovery when you work out where an item goes is a moment of air-punching glee. Even though the whole game fits into 48k of RAM, it's still brilliant.

Channeling the likes of Rocket Knight Adventures, Giana Sisters is a fast-paced, flowing and beautiful platformer. It's dripping with classic platform iconography, too. Coloured jewels floating the air, begging to be collected. Lush forest backgrounds… glistening water… it's exactly like the platformers of the 1990s, only rendered in spectacular modern detail.

It is, however, extremely difficult. It is certainly possible to master its versatile moveset, but doing so will take a lot of time and patience. Fortunately, it's totally worth the effort, so it won't feel like a chore. And when you're dashing, spinning and leaping around like you own the place, you'll feel amazing.

Disney platformers in the early 1990s were pretty much universally brilliant, whether on 16-bit or 8-bit machines. The Lucky Dime Caper may be an 8-bit title, but it's got everything you could want. Donald himself is beautifully drawn, full of personality and charm. The movement is solid and smooth and the mallet attack feels suitably meaty.

The levels are now the stuff of cliché, what with a water area, a forest, an ice zone and desert, but you can tackle the first three in any order, then the next three in any order, too. The soundtrack is superb and the sense of drama it creates by the time you reach the final level is palpable, followed by some of the most celebratory music ever committed to cartridge. Such a pity the game isn't more readily-available today.

It's very rare to have something from your childhood remade in a way that's sympathetic to what you remember, but Castle of Illusion's HD redux is exactly that. Some moments, like the leaves in the spiders' webs, look and sound exactly how you remember them… although if you go back and play the original now, you'll be amazed at quite how old it feels.

From the over-sized library to the confectionary-filled sweet level, everything is lovingly-rendered and delivered in an organic-looking, non-regimented way. Mickey looks superb in 3D and the scattering of collectible items is challenging enough to be rewarding, but certainly not impossible. Whether you play on PSN or iOS, the experience is the same. This is quality, retro-styled gaming, only modern enough to feel fresh and relevant today. Just a shame the 'bottom bounce' has been replaced with a standard jump attack. Ah well, can't have everything.

Obviously there are many Mega Man games that have a special place in a lot of hearts, but Mega Man 2 is the most iconic. It's also one of the most hardcore platforming experiences around, with ultra-precise and solid controls, fearsome enemy patterns, and carefully rationed upgrades that come to you as you swear your way through screen after screen of chunky scenery.

It also sounds magnificent, with a classic soundtrack made up of bleeps, bloops and fizzes. Forget its actual age, there is a timelessness to Mega Man 2. It's a distillation of the joy of pressing a button to interact with a little sprite on your TV screen. The game design is spectacularly great, with an understanding of timing and challenge far beyond many games, even today.

After Mario and Sonic made platformers THE genre to play, everyone wanted in on the action. By 1993, there was an element of platformer fatigue. But even the biggest critics of the fad would have to concede that Aladdin is a very special video game. With sprites designed by Disney animators themselves, this was as close as you could get to actually playing an animated movie on your home console.

It's the Genesis/Mega Drive version, of course, that we're championing here. The SNES version, while still good, simply doesn't have that authentic feel of the Mega Drive version. With MIDI-fied versions of the feature film's classic songs, technically astonishing collision detection (knives split apples mid-air) and a tonne of gameplay variation, this is how you do a movie tie-in.

A lot of indie platformers play around with various gimmicky mechanics, but rarely make them feel as cohesive as Sound Shapes. At its heart is a simple (but not simplistic) 'stick to grey surfaces and avoid red ones' idea, which gets difficult very quickly. But this is coupled with a superb musical element.

As you play a level, you add notes to the music, building the soundtrack and avoiding various threats that all bounce along with the beat. It's mesmerising and utterly, utterly brilliant. The fact that it works with actual music tracks too – imported via DLC – makes this even more delightful. This is so much more than the sum of its parts. Like music, really.

There is an argument for one of the original SNES versions of Donkey Kong Country, but those games' controls lack the precision of the Returns series, which were given Retro Studios' usual classy treatment. This Wii U game has quality written all over it (erm… in invisible ink). And no, it doesn't count as a Mario game.

Not only is the platforming gameplay as enjoyable as ever, it all sounds absolutely phenomenal, thanks to another sensational score by David Wise, who worked on the original Donkey Kong Country. I actually know someone who listens to music from the game on a loop, it's that good. Not me, I hasten to add. But maybe you will.

The 32-bit scene was comparatively light on side-scrolling platformers, most likely because they were seen as a 'last-gen' genre now that 3D worlds had arrived. Klonoa blended the best of both sides, offering precise, smooth, colourful gameplay with 3D visuals.

It's still a 2D platformer, of course. And one that moves absolutely beautifully, despite the now prehistoric tech specs of the humble PSone. Flowing, precise and smooth, Klonoa is sheer class. It's a relatively rare game to get hold of in disc form these days, but you can buy it on the PSN to play on PS3, PSP or Vita. So do that.

There are several entries in the Ratchet Clank series that could easily fit on this list, including the PS2 original (and the new RC remake on PS4 will probably be best of all). But this PS3 game is everything the series stands for, and at its most imaginative, too.

There's the 3D platforming and melee combat we've come to know and love, plus a load of customisable and upgradeable weapons, and some time-warping puzzle-solving to boot. All of this is wrapped up in super-slick production values and topped off with a funny and entertaining script. Can't get much better than that, really. This is exemplary platforming by one of the master development teams of the genre, Insomniac.

Bionic Commando already had a legion of fans hanging onto the glory days of the '80s arcade scene. But this XBLA remake is a revelation for anyone who loved the game the first time around. Everything's better. From the graphics to the controls and the freedom of movement, Bionic Commando: Rearmed is the perfect example of an HD upgrade done right.

The game is mostly the same as it always was, only with a better ending and a few new features thrown in for good measure. And the arm itself makes for a rather unique-feeling platformer, as you swing around, blowing up walls to find secrets and generally feeling like a bionic version of Spider-Man. With a gun. What's not to like?

It's amazing to think that Cave Story is actually already over a decade old. But this 3D remake of the original platformer/shooter hybrid is undoubtedly the best way to play it. This is the definitive version of the game.

But why is it so good? It's the amalgamation of screen after screen full of smoothly-moving (and exploding) sprites, tight controls, a clever upgrade system and good old fun. Yes, it's one of those increasingly rare things – a game that is fun just to control. Add in one of the most subtle, yet brilliant, branching route systems ever seen and you've got a classic on your hands. Well… more like 'in them'.

3D platformers were everywhere in the late-1990s, but even with the mighty Super Mario 64 already owning the platform (sorry, I mentioned Mario), Rare managed to create something truly special on N64 in the shape of Banjo-Kazooie. The two-character set-up works beautifully, with Banjo and Kazooie complementing each others' movesets and playable both as a team and individually.

The textures may look primitive today, but there's still a lot of charm to the game's colourful world, and the Xbox 360 HD re-release is perfectly acceptable, if a little simplistic in terms of geometry. That still can't dull the game's humour, open design and depth of exploration. Oh, and it turns out that Kazooie is a girl. Amazing how few people realise that.

Dave Perry must have learned a lot from developing Cool Spot, because by the time Earthworm Jim came around, everything was working. Jim works as a character because his shape can morph into anything. He can use himself as a skipping rope. Mario can't do that. The 8-direction shooting lends a Gunstar Heroes vibe to proceedings as you monkey-swing and bounce around the levels, giving this entry genre-straddling elements, while remaining most certainly a platform game at heart.

But for all the technical accomplishment and game design (excluding that water level – but even that was fixed in the HD remake, so get that), it's the game's humour that makes it stick in most people's minds. You could call it low-brow, but that just resonated with bogey-hungry '90s kids everywhere. While it does feel very… ''90s' today, it's still brilliantly playable and you should get it.

It was the game to get for Christmas in 1992. Taking the super-smooth movement of the original game and ramping up the level variety, scale, speed and spectacle, Sonic Team created a timeless platform adventure. And, unlike the original game, the second level is just as good as the first. As is the third, for that matter. Emerald Hill, Chemical Plant and Aquatic Ruin form a holy trinity of gaming playgrounds.

While both the drop-in/drop-out co-op and split-screen 2-player mode have clear flaws, that doesn't mean you can't have fun with a friend. Competing for rings in the pseudo-3D special stage is still loads of fun, but it's the game's longevity that's kept it on this list. People still speedrun it. The new iOS conversion is technically more advanced than the original, while remaining outwardly authentic. However you play Sonic 2, on whatever platform you choose, you will have fun. Fact.

The Castlevania template had already been established long before the 32-bit era arrived. And before Konami turned the series into a 3D adventure, there was time to release the pinnacle of the series' 2D evolution. Symphony of the Night combines pixel-perfect 2D platform combat with 3D background elements to incredible effect. The fact that the 3D is now pretty shaky and roughly-textured somehow makes it all the more wonderful. This has become an icon of retro gaming.

It's aged beautifully in terms of gameplay, too, serving up a huge, lavish adventure, rich with stat-boosting items and new weapons to uncover – not to mention one of the best hidden endings ever. After the PlayStation version, the game also appeared on Sega Saturn, offering extra content including a new playable character. But other elements were weaker, so it's a tough call to say which is best. Both, basically.

Sackboy may be available on PS4 (with some amazingly cute friends), but it's his second PS3 adventure that remains the definitive LBP experience. The built-in levels are more imaginative than those of the original, and the joyous presentation – not to mention Stephen Fry's lovable narration – make just moving around this craft-themed world a pleasurable experience.

But it's the creation suite that really makes this indispensible. You can create regular levels, as you could in the first game, sure, but now you can actually make different genres of games. Yes, making games in a game. What a time to be alive.

Some games are built to reward skill. But few have such a sadistic slant, encouraging you to die a hundred times in preparation of nailing a level with a perfect run. In fact, it even celebrates your catalogue of failures, with an incredible, climactic cascade of replay Meat Boys all dying around that one, lone survivor.

All of this would be for nought if the game played badly, but Super Meat Boy's controls offer incredible precision. When you die, it is simply because you didn't perform well enough. Granted, the graphics are basic by today's standards, but that's because there needs to be no margin for error. A platform is a platform, a wall is a wall. This is ultra-purified platforming action – and it's the meat in the sandwich that matters, not how prettily the bread is cut.

Proof (as if proof were needed) that it's the way a game plays and not how it looks that makes it either a great experience or an also-ran. N+ is all about momentum. It takes some getting used to, certainly, but the potential for perfect runs makes this a mouthwatering prospect for anyone with an eye on getting the best score.

It's mega-hardcore, too. A single wrong move and you're dead, forced to watch a chain reaction of explosion around the screens as pieces of debris (and you) fly around, detonating more explosives. It's this knife-edge of tension juxtaposed against the beauty of a clean run that makes N+ such a delight.

Metroid was pushing all the boundaries when it first released on NES back in 1986, but it was rougher than tree bark with a sore throat and a hangover. Yes, that is rough, you're right. But Super Metroid cemented that formulative… er... formula so perfectly a few years later, it spawned two decades of imitators. The level design and control set are perfectly married, ensuring every area has something new to offer every time you learn a new ability.

The 16-bit visuals may look, shall we say, 'functional' by today's standards, but the music remains some of gaming's best – and actual tunes are used brilliantly sparingly. Super Metroid is designed to give you a sense of melancholic isolation and it gets under your skin. The series translated into 3D perfectly with Metroid Prime, but while Prime is the , Super Metroid remains one of the best platformers ever made.

Is PoP a platformer? Yes. Environmental traversal makes up so much of the game, and requires dexterity and quick-thinking to keep your character from a fall, just like Sonic or he-who-must-not-be-named. But if you do fall… well there's PoP's best stuff.

Being able to rewind time is a brilliant concept and even though it was relatively new when Sands of Time came out, it was done in exemplary fashion. Indeed, play the game too much and you start reaching for the undo button in other games. And even real life. Hit by a bus? That's OK, just rewind time and… oh yeah. Damn.

Rayman Legends is simply the best platform game ever made that doesn’t have Mario in its name. With sublime, intuitive controls that see you sprinting, sliding, wall-jumping, swimming and thwacking enemies into next week, this a joy to play – and easy to pick up if you're a newbie. It works best on Wii U, which is no surprise considering it was designed to be exclusive to that console, before going multi-platform late in development. The HD art is beautiful, the minigames an absolute riot (Kung Foot is worth the asking price alone) and the level layouts are a masterclass in game design, with secrets everywhere and constant rewards for skilful play.

As if that wasn't enough, the multiplayer co-op is exceptional, combining the best of helpfulness and bastardry as you race each other to gather lums, cut a rope to send your mate down a hole to their death or, y'know, actually work together to 100% each level. It's massive too, even going so far as to include levels from Rayman Origins. It's impossible to be disappointed with this game. If you have any interest in platformers at all, you need to play this. Just as soon as you've played Super Ma...(snip!).

It’s really big, very cold and mostly empty, but that hasn’t stopped us populating an entire genre with exciting sims dedicated to exploring and fighting in it over the last forty-or-so years. Human instinct is drawn to discovery, and the vastness of the void creates unlimited opportunities for scope and scale that you just can’t find here on Earth.

The genre has evolved and refined itself over the last four decades, and, despite falling out of mainstream favour over recent years, is now on a major, and very exciting, resurgence. Here are the most important steps in its lengthy history.

Space games existed in some form before A Journey into Space; 1974’s Star Trader was an extremely basic text-based space game, but it wasn’t until a decade later that the genre started to see a real shift forward. A Journey into Space was originally released on the Atari 2600 by Activison and it was one of the first space sims to establish flight mechanics like landing, takeoff, ship stabilisation and more. It was also one of the first games to encompass actual pretty graphics.

Space Shuttle was so deep that it revolutionised the genre and gave it a sense of scope that hadn’t been seen before. It was so popular, in fact, that it was re-released on several machines after the Atari, with Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum versions released in 1984, and two final versions released on the Amstrad and the MSX in 1986. See kids, HD remasters aren’t such a new fad after all!

Ah, Elite. Created back in the 1980s by the revered space-nut-cum-games-developer David Braben, with his good pal Ian Bell, Elite is considered by most to be the seminal space trading simulator. I’m firmly in love with Elite Dangerous thirty years on, but Elite’s rich history is ingrained in the halls of science fiction. It was truly massive back in 1984, with eight whole galaxies each containing 256 planets to explore. All of this was done from the cockpit of the ship, and a lot of the now-iconic features of Elite were established here, including the recognisable scanner that sits in the center of the cockpit’s design.

Elite also experimented with procedural generation, and despite having to downsize the universe at the request of the publisher - mostly to make it less obvious to the player that the computer is generating systems using algorithms - the game was still awe-inspiring to those who played it. Braben and Bell even removed an entire galaxy when they found a planet had been named ‘Arse’ by the game’s random generation technology. It’s difficult to imagine how impressive it must have been considering the progress of games over the last few decades, but Elite is a remarkably important step in the evolution of space games.

Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts called his game “World War 2 in space” and if that’s not a selling point then I’m not sure what is. It’s a game that focuses heavily on combat scenarios, and uses Star Wars as a main influence in bringing the fraught tension of dogfighting to life. It not only made space combat exciting, but it also implemented fresh mechanics to level objectives, adding bonus tasks that net larger rewards when going above and beyond while on a mission.

Released on floppy disc at the start of the 1990s, Wing Commander also spawned a couple of sequels and several add-ons to the main game. These expansions’ fully realised plots kept the game supported for months after release. Wing Commander was a major critical success, too, even earning 6/5 stars in Dragon - the official Dungeons and Dragons magazine - and is regularly considered one of the all-time PC greats. Competition ramped up considerably after its release, leading to contemporaries like LucasArts’ X-Wing.

Shuttle was published by none other than later commercial space flight pioneer Virgin back in the early 1990s. When you look at it now it looks like a very basic version of Kerbal Space Program, but it still packs a considerable amount of depth. From takeoff all the way to re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, Shuttle recreated a lot of the complexity of real cockpits, displaying almost all of the major functions with an array of knobs, buttons and little levers. It was truly incredible. Especially for a game taking up a miniscule amount of space on a floppy disc.

The game was praised for condensing of tons of information into a system that players could learn to understand. Similar to Kerbal, Shuttle also incorporates real life space shuttle missions and other flight tests into its mission structures. The Enterprise flight is a particular highlight, and you even get to run through the launch of the Hubble space telescope, building a space station like the ISS (International Space Station) and more. Shuttle may not have the dogfighting bravado of Wing Commander, but it refined the core simulation mechanics that lie at the heart of the genre.

Despite sounding like a cheesy television show that your parents might have watched in the mid ‘70s, Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space is a two-player strategy game built on the idea of the space race. Playing as either the USA or USSR, each player’s end goal is to make a successful landing on the moon, but the game incorporates many mid-tier objectives on the way to the lunar surface. You control a base station that acts as your hub for missions and other developments, and the game itself takes place across twenty in-game years, from 1957 to 1977.

The game takes great advantage of humanity’s achievements during the Space Race, allowing players to carry out real historic missions on their path towards reaching the moon. It was billed as a game suitable for young children, but drew a fair amount of criticism for being overly complex and difficult to play. Still, that didn’t stop it getting 90/100 from PC Gamer UK, and more recently it received an open source translation from the original creators back in 2005.

At the end of 1993, David Braben’s first Elite sequel hit the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS. It carried over a lot of the ideas that its predecessor established ten years earlier, while expanding the size and taking advantage of the graphical power of new hardware. Frontier continued the Elite staple of allowing players to do whatever they want, focusing mainly on trading to earn money and reputation. There’s almost no plot whatsoever, save for some titbits around the game’s political factions.

Frontier also adheres to Newtonian physics and thus the ship controls are vastly -depth. There’s even an time acceleration feature which allows players to travel between planets and stations within the same system, as well as the classic hyperspace jump. A really cool feature of Frontier is, weirdly enough, its copyright protection - every now and then the game’s security forces will ask you for a certain string of letters from your game manual. If you enter them incorrectly three times in a row, your game ends and that’s that, you can’t play anymore. Tough!

You might not know it but EVE Online is now over a decade old. This super dense, in-depth MMO has had numerous major updates since its release, but it continues to be one of the most complex and engaging space simulators ever made. With its rich player driven economy and some of the largest multiplayer battles ever seen, EVE definitely isn’t for everyone, but invest time into learning some of its incredibly intricate game systems and you’ll become engrossed in arguably the best space MMO ever made.

The game is famous for a lot of really cool events, including one player who offered $500 in real money to anyone who could assassinate a particularly high profile target. A few key, obliging players then spent a year of real-time playing the game, working their way up the ranks of the target’s corporation in order to earn trust and get close. One assassin even managed to reach second in command of the entire organisation. Then, when the moment was right, the assassins struck by killing their target (twice, no less, which means you’re really dead in EVE’s world), stealing valuables and destroying the rest - over $16,500 worth of in-game items were destroyed. They even bagged the $500 bounty.

The first half of this decade has seen a resurgence in the space simulator genre, and Kerbal Space Program has led the charge. Still technically in beta, KSP packs charm and depth using its Kerbals - cute little green humanoids - to provide the character to make your ventures into space feel human and perilous. With so many options for creativity in Kerbal’s tools, any accidents, deaths or abandonments-on-nearby-moons are your fault, but the game constantly pushes you to trial and error until you get it right.

Developer Squad has gone so far in its depiction of authentic space as to involve NASA in its development process, implementing real missions and ships into the game so that you can experiment with real life science. Other space organisations have taken real interest, too, including the Copenhagen Suborbitals, Space X, and the ESA. It’s these kinds of partnerships that really prove the educational and scientific power of video games nowadays, and how space simulators have become important and respected by those outside of the hardcore gaming community.

FTL is the top-down, fast-paced real-time strategy game that turned space simulation into permadeath roguelike, brought it to mobile, and made it endlessly replayable - not to mention furiously addictive. While a lot space games focus on the overall scope of space battles, lasers and explosions, FTL concerns itself with the stressful minutiae of crisis management on a single ship. There’s no maneuvering or aiming going on - FTL just takes the randomness of certain scenarios and forces you to cope against difficult and often insurmountable odds.

The permanent nature of every demise makes it all the more stressful. Permadeath is a risky mechanic to put in a game, often dividing players on whether it’s well executed, but FTL puts it to excellent use. Even when the game feels like it’s beating you up unnecessarily, the unpredictable nature of its mechanics make it easy to pick up and play again, and you rarely see the same scenarios play out again in exactly the same way.

First announced a few years back as David Braben’s next ambitious project, Elite: Dangerous took full advantage of the crowdsourced funding model, using Kickstarter to raise over £1.5m of development budget. Since then it’s raised a lot more cash, and the scope of Dangerous’ vision has expanded as its wallet has bulked out. It’s been a long, lengthy road to release, running through several alpha and beta stages, but developer Frontier has been vigilant in the refinement of its latest game.

Dangerous takes tons of the key elements that made the original Elite games so iconic and frame-shifts them to 21st century standards. The game’s high definition sheen makes its impressive scope even more beautiful - there’s nothing like travelling from a hot white star all the way to a distant gas giant, descending into its icy rings until you’re there in between the trillions of bits of space debris. There’s still a long path of development and expansion ahead of it (with its console debut having just occurred by way of Microsoft’s early access Xbox Game Preview programme), but Elite: Dangerous is arguably the most important space simulator of the last ten years.

No Man’s Sky has had gamers everywhere wetting themselves since it was announced back in 2013. It’s huge - indie developer Hello Games has claimed it’s technically infinite - and is heavily focused on venturing out into the nothing to find weird and wonderful things. Very few details exist about what else you actually do in No Man Sky’s procedurally generated universe, and the studio’s own Sean Murray has been very explicit in not wanting to describe the game’s main objectives because he believes that goes against what the game is about.

Whatever you end up in doing out in the stars, No Man’s Sky is colourful and bold, full of alien spaces and unusual celestial landscapes. It feels like the space simulator’s arcade cousin, and the fact you can travel seamlessly from land before climbing your ship and flying up into space is something especially magical - something even Elite: Dangerous hasn’t managed to implement yet.

With a ludicrous amount of crowd-sourced money in the bank - just under $70 million at last count - Star Citizen is probably the most well-funded space simulator game of all time. It’s definitely the biggest game to ever get funding from Kickstarter. There are a lot of grand promises for Star Citizen being bounded around by its developers, and while they’ve definitely got the money to keep the game in development for a life-time if they need to, all eyes are intently scrutinising whether those promises have substance.

Aside from anticipation for the game, Star Citizen represents something perhaps more important. It raked in tens of millions of fan-donated dollars, and that’s pretty impressive for a game sat within a fairly niche genre which many discounted as near-dead a few years ago. Over the last four decades, space simulators have evolved and refined themselves, coming out in all different shapes and sizes with unique takes on what the genre means and can achieve. The fact we’re at a stage where a single space sim can amass the budget of a blockbuster triple-A title just by asking for it is, frankly, just really bloody cool.