After seeing Planet Zoo 2 gameplay behind closed doors, I've often thought about its sag mechanics. It's a word that made the developers at Frontier laugh and wince at the same time, chuckling that they really couldn't call it that at launch. But, despite the connotations, it really does play a key part in one of the big new additions for Planet Zoo 2 - the aviaries.

These huge new habitats are built on the enclosure mechanics from the original game, but with a key difference being canopies that you can craft as roofs to keep your new feathered pals safely within. Made from essentially gigantic nets, you're given full free-reign to position poles wherever you want around the enclosure to hold the net aloft or adjust the way they're rotated or tilted. Which brings me to that all-important sag mechanic - aka, how the net drapes or sags between poles. You can swap out the canopies for glass or other materials, too. The effect is pretty cool, especially when you realize these new enclosures are completely explorable on foot by your guests.

For me, looking up is often what makes a great zoo or aquarium experience. There's something about having enclosures that you can walk inside with butterflies or birds flying overhead, or being inside one of those tunnels at an aquarium that lets sharks, stingrays, and other water friends swim overhead. Planet Zoo 2 really plays with that experience, adding so much more verticality to your zoo builds than the first game ever made possible.

It's particularly palpable when the developers whizz us round to one of the new aquarium habitats that are also coming with Planet Zoo 2. This aquarium they've built is easily four or five times the height of the guests, with turtles, shoals of fish, and other aquatic creatures floating around inside it - and even a scuba-clad staff member too, sponging the glass clean. There's a shipwreck, huge rock formations, plants and more, and I'm really glad they linger on the view as they really are stunning to watch. Plus, you can absolutely make aquarium tunnels, too.

"It was really clear that at the top of the wish list of things that the community wanted in the sequel were aquariums and aviaries," explains Gareth Hughes, game director on Planet Zoo 2. But in terms of actually getting them in the game, "it was really confidence that we could technically deliver them - feeling that we could do justice to the navigation and motion of the animals. And obviously, that we could portray the actual structures in a way that made sense for the game".

It's interesting the way Frontier Developments has approached the aquariums in particular, with residents essentially split into two categories. There are 'hero' fish of sorts, like the Hawksbill Turtle, or the brilliant but goofy-looking Sunfish, which will have all the usual animal welfare requirements of the Planet Zoo games. But then there are also shoals of fish, which are treated as a group rather than as individuals. It helps keep your aquariums feeling full and really alive, without you having to drown in animal care requirements.

A roaring success

Because you certainly will be busier in Planet Zoo 2, as the sequel is making major changes to animal behavior.

"Pretty much the most important thing in Planet Zoo is the animals," adds Hughes. "We've always wanted to represent them in a really authentic way, both in terms of how they look in the game, how they behave in the game, but also how you manage and look after them. A really important part of the game loop is animal welfare."

Along with advancements in fur, scale, and feather tech to make all your zoo residents look their best, Planet Zoo 2 is making major improvements to animal animations and behavior. The way your animals will interact with their enclosures, environments, and each other has been worked on a lot, with the chimpanzees moving on their climbing frames being the prime example of this in our preview. They can now hang off, sleep on, or interact in other ways with the beams on those frames too, which will no doubt make watching your animals even more enjoyable.

In terms of behavior, there are a lot of new improvements when it comes to welfare. In Planet Zoo 2, you'll be able to physically see the mood of your animals just by looking at them or listening to the sounds they're making.

"As we moved into development of Planet Zoo 2, one of the other new pieces of technology we had access to was a brand new animation system, and that allowed us to do all sorts of new tricks with the animals and get some really, really amazing results. One of those is basically layered animations that allow the animals to be much, much more expressive. In our demo, they've conveniently forgotten to give the tiger any water, and it's clearly subdued, sulky and inactive. It might sound like a comedy take on animal welfare, but it's such a realistic way of gauging your animals' moods.

"That's something that we could never have done in the original Planet Zoo. It's a massive sort of step forward in terms of the realism of the animals," says Hughes, explaining that these new animations allows the team to create "much more expressive" creatures than ever before.

It should also dial down what Hughes calls some of the "crazy volatility" that was present in some of the zoos in the original game. "It's all about things being readable. Something is happening, I understand what's happening, and I understand why it's happening, and I understand what I need to do to fix it. That kind of summarizes our philosophy toward the zoo management side. It's really just making it a more accessible experience without sort of dumbing it down in any way. We don't want to simplify it and make it easy, that's not where we're at."

Creative vision

The team is also hoping that the approachability changes they're making with Planet Zoo 2 also extend to building the zoos themselves. The scale and scope of these parks are now much, much bigger than in the original game, with the park we're shown being an Indonesian island-inspired zoo with different heights, weaving paths, entertainment areas, and expansive habitats.

Hughes says that they're "making sure everyone can create awesome-looking stuff in the game. We want to keep a high ceiling so our dedicated players can continue to create amazing things and really spend the time and effort to make those things. But we want to drop the floor a little bit to make things easier for most players to come in and build, whether it's structures, environments, or habitats."

I've not had a chance to go hands-on, but I really hope that's true. It's one of my key frustrations with the original game: creating things from scratch is really fiddly, awkward, and sometimes seriously frustrating - even on PC with keyboard and mouse. And that's certainly a sentiment shared by the community too.

To remedy that, the team has also integrated the community-powered Workshop, where you can go and grab not only dev-built blueprints for all sorts of building elements, from habitats to facilities, but also community-made creations too, all curated specially by the team at Frontier.

Beyond the park

But I think for me, the real allure of Planet Zoo 2 is how Frontier highlights its focus on conservation. Narratively, the campaign this time around is getting you to play as a member of an organization known as FEN - or the Fauna and Ecosystems network - with the goal being to set up a network of zoos to renew a load of wildlife reserves. Any animal you then release into the wild from your zoos will then join these playable nature reserves.

"You're not just visiting these places, you're actually rewilding them, you're repopulating them, so they're integrated into the wider game loop," says Hughes. "But [it's] also just an amazing experience to see the animals from your zoos moved into that new context, and seeing those animals in their natural environments with other animals around them that perhaps in a zoo setting you wouldn't necessarily put together. It has quite an emotional impact. We've certainly felt it on the dev team, seeing this come together. It looks and feels really authentic."

Watching the animals co-exist in a safari-style nature reserve even just for a few minutes was magical, and I can just imagine the emotional tug watching your animals go live their new lives somewhere else rather than just watching them disappear once you hit the 'release to the wild' button.

From everything I've seen so far, Planet Zoo 2 is going to be quite the sequel, as it's building on everything that made the original game great with more attention to making it a better game for more players. And making the animals even better too, of course. Thankfully, with the game launching on October 13 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, we don't have too long to wait.

Take a look at our new games calendar for what's coming up next!

Dinosaurs never really go out of fashion. There's something about these titanic animals that stirs the imagination in just about everyone. Despite everything that has happened over the course of the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World series, the desire to visit such a park is pervasive in people of my generation. It should come as no surprise, then, that creating your own dinosaur theme park in Jurassic World Evolution 3 is, at its best, an extremely engaging experience.

Over the course of the game's campaign, you'll create theme parks near Vegas, in the snowy Dolomites, on the verdant shores of the Azores, and in several other locations. Each comes with its own set of criteria to meet if you want to make a truly fantastic park. The park near Las Vegas, for example, is focused on flying dinosaurs, while in Indonesia, you'll need to cope with dino disease outbreaks that threaten to capsize your business. While there will be quite a bit of crossover between your parks, they never threaten to converge, carcinisation-like, into carbon copies of the same location.

The game gives you some freebie dinosaurs to get you started with your parks, but to get more, you need to research dig sites and send your scientists out to dig them up. Then, it's time to bring them back, extracting DNA from the fossils, synthesizing dinosaurs from a rogues gallery of crowd pleasers and more obscure species, and then creating the conditions for them to breed naturally. It's involved, but that's fine – bringing dinosaurs back from the dead should be. You're also able to create hybrid dinosaurs, or tweak the dinosaurs' genes in a somewhat eugenicist way to make them more sociable, fertile, and so on. In addition to this, your scientists will also need to research various techs that make your park better. These range from the understandable, like new gene modifications, to busywork, like researching wider paths. Now, I don't have a PhD, but I'm pretty sure widening a walkway doesn't require the combined knowledge of the cream of the scientific community.

What do we want? Extinction! When do we want it? Now!

Opposing your efforts to play God is a group called Extinction Now, who argue, not entirely unreasonably, that dinosaurs should stay extinct. Their methods include protests and sabotage, which can be annoying, but didn't represent too much of a stumbling block during my campaign, as I was able to tranquilise any escaped fauna and stop it from seeing the teeming guests as a kind of ambulatory buffet, with the help of some emergency shelters I'd plonked down earlier. They aren't the sole cause of problems, though – storms can periodically smash into your parks, which can also wreak havoc.

I wish that I could say that Jurassic World Evolution 3 is always a smooth experience. The core gameplay loop is built around keeping both your guests and your recently revived relics of the past thriving, and that's tough when pathfinding bugs prevent your staff from actually getting where they need to be (even, so far, after a day one patch).

This was particularly painful for me on the Maltese map, which is all scorched rocks and sandy expanses. I had built a monorail to serenely glide my guests around the park, but my staff refused to walk to their workstations to activate it – only able to access them if I personally drove them there. This will likely be fixed eventually, but it put me in the mindset of having to babysit my employees through the simplest tasks so they don't get caught out when I'm not watching.

Beyond bugs, the power system is incredibly finicky, requiring you to place substations that link back up to the main power station for the park. Each one has a coverage area that is just slightly too small, so you'll end up with unsightly substations all over your park. The UI is sometimes hard to parse, too, and it's not always immediately obvious how to solve problems that present themselves. I still don't know what 'building constraints' are, either; the phrase that the game used, with alarming regularity, to slap my hand while attempting to put down some new amenities in clearly open spaces. There also doesn't appear to be any way to lay bridges across water, so you'll need to dig into the terrain tools to build paths across even small ditches.

Isla New-Blar

Yet I kept playing it, and not just for the review, either. After a couple of rounds of Battlefield 6 in my off-hours, I found myself returning to Jurassic World Evolution 3 as a way to chill out. It's almost hypnotic, watching your dinosaurs gambol around, interacting with their environment and each other. Credit to the animators who worked on them – watching them never felt like it got dull, and I couldn't help but watch every dinosaur's first moments. I wish the guests had anything like as much charisma – an order as tall as a Brachiosaurus, I know – they're effectively just mannequins that make their way around your park and seemed (at least in my game) almost dangerously unperturbed by storms. More than once, they were sitting outside a souvenir shop in T-shirts while snow was hitting them with the force of a category 5 hurricane.

You can, thankfully, research techs to help you deal with storms and escaped dinosaurs alike, which goes some way towards keeping your park in good order. If anything, it's a little too easy to keep things ticking over nicely, and will likely make you wonder what the staff at Isla Nublar were doing the whole time.

Alongside the campaign, there is a challenge mode and a sandbox mode. I imagine that most of my time in this game will, eventually, be spent in the sandbox, just as I did with Zoo Tycoon back in the day. In the sandbox mode, you can play across the campaign maps, legacy maps, or generate a brand new island, which you can then tweak to add and remove trees, mountains, and other geographical features. Challenges take place on campaign maps and allow you to unlock props that you can place in your parks – nice, but totally inessential.

It's a strong game, and one that is, a lot of the time, a great deal of fun to play. Bugs, busywork and a shallow difficulty curve aside, it's a game that you'll likely keep coming back to, and one whose charm can overpower most of its issues, making it ideal for anyone with dino fever who wants to party like it's 99 million years BC.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 was reviewed on PC, with a code provided by the publisher.

Explore our best Jurassic Park games for more to play!

Jurassic World Evolution 3 developer Frontier has revealed a new gameplay feature coming to the dino management sim: hot air balloons, a series first that'll let tourists take to the sky for an aerial view of your prehistoric theme park.

Frontier revealed the new Balloon Tour feature exclusively here on GamesRadar+, showing off some gameplay snippets captured from an entirely new perspective. You can check it out for yourself below:

The way it works is simple: just plop down your Balloon Tour building directly into your park, set a series of waypoints to determine where the balloon travels, and watch guests flow in and then subsequently fly up and take in the views.

Although the views look great, I'm not sure there's a more theoretically dangerous place to be than a hot air balloon in the event of a containment breach in the world of Jurassic. You'd have very little control of where you land, you aren't safe from the flying lizards like pterosaurs, and you're in a poppable vessel hundreds of feet in the air. A kayak might give the hot air balloon a run for its money, but you'd have to be paddling in the Mosasaurus enclosure for that to be an issue. It's not exactly clear if hot air balloon tourists will be in any danger if and when dinos break loose in Jurassic World Evolution 3, but I know I'd rather be in a buggy with Jeff Goldblum by my side. (A Frontier representative has since confirmed that the balloon tours cannot be attacked nor popped, which is good to know but doesn't prevent me from finding the hypothetical scenario terrifying.)

Anyway, yes, Jurassic World Evolution 3 will have hot air balloons, featuring various Jurassic World and Jurassic Park skins, at launch on October 21.

For more check out the best simulator games you can play today.

Turns out, bullying works for productive purposes too. Jurassic World Evolution 3 developers have removed some AI-generated art from the game after a swift fan backlash. Its initial inclusion was an interesting move considering the Jurassic Park series is all about humanity's hubris in the face of new technology.

Following its reveal at Summer Game Fest 2025, eagle-eyed fans quickly spotted that in-game scientist portraits had been made using generative AI. Steam now requires developers to state if they're using the controversial technology on their game store pages, so that likely helped, too.

On the Steam forum for the upcoming dinosaur management sim, one fan wrote: "Seriously? Ya'll are pathetic and that desperate where you can't possibly design things yourself but willing to bend over/glaze for the AI washing machine like a prostitute? Nope I will not support this, the lack of self awareness and appallingly low IQ."

A developer response to those strong words reads: "Thanks for your feedback on this topic. We have opted to remove the use of generative AI for scientist portraits within Jurassic World Evolution 3."

Frontier has gone a step further and given a statement to GameWatcher, confirming: "We have removed the use of generative AI for scientists portraits in Jurassic World Evolution 3 following some initial feedback. The team are continuing their diligent work on the game and are very much looking forward to launching on 21 October."

It may seem like a small detail that we could all just ignore, but it does beg the question: where do we draw a line? Today it's portraits that no one cares about anyway, but who knows what gets replaced with AI tomorrow.

For now, check out the best simulator games you can play right now.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 is the newest entry in Frontier Development's prehistoric management series, and it's finally here. Yes, that's right, one of the most exciting new games for 2025 is out in the wild, and we may just have one of the new best Jurassic Park games on our hands, folks.

Announced earlier this year during Summer Game Fest Live 2025, our first glimpse at the fresh entry in the Evolution series (which has seen releases that are still considered to be some of the very best dinosaur games around today) came way of a reveal trailer featuring Jeff Goldblum, who's reprising his role as Ian Malcolm. Since then, anticipation has been high to dive back into the management dinosaur-filled world, only fueled further with the release of the latest Jurassic movie, which you can read more about in our Jurassic World Rebirth review. However, games aren't cheap, and even if you are a fan of the iconic franchise, you may be hesitant to grab your wallet.

Well, we're here to help you figure out if Jurassic World Evolution 3 is really the right game for you. In this guide, you'll find all the information that you need to know about the title, from its price, release times, gameplay, and more. So buckle up and avoid those giant dino teeth, here's everything you need to know about Jurassic World Evolution 3!

Jurassic World Evolution 3 release date

The Jurassic World Evolution 3 release date was on October 21, 2025, with release times of 3pm BST and 10am EDT.

In terms of price, there are two editions that players can pick from. The Deluxe Edition will cost you $74.99 / £64.99, and the Standard Edition is $59.99 / £49.99. The Deluxe version includes four additional family dinosaur units, including the herbivore Protoceratops, the Guanlong, which is a relative of the tyrannosaurs, the Thantatosdrakon that has feathery plumes, and the Concavenator breed that are known for being "aerodynamic hunters".

Additionally, paying that extra cash will also get you bonus scenery and skin items for your parks and dinosaurs. So, if you are a fan of the franchise, it may be worth picking the Deluxe Edition up if you ask us.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 platforms

Jurassic World Evolution 3 platforms have been confirmed for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5.

As one of the confirmed new PC games of 2025, Frontier confirmed that it's also available via Steam and the Epic Games store. So no matter your platform of choice, you'll be set here. The only thing still waiting for confirmation is Nintendo. The Switch 2 is capable of handling big games, so who knows, maybe it will be counted among our list of upcoming Switch 2 games in the future. We'll keep you posted.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 trailer

In the Jurassic World Evolution 3 trailer, life finds a way. Yes, we get to see plenty of dinosaurs roam as Jeff Goldblum once again reprises his role as Ian Malcolm to narrate our very first look at the new management sim. With the adventure set to introduce new dinosaur family dynamics, we even get to see some baby dinos with their parents. You can watch the full announcement trailer just above.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 gameplay

Jurassic World Evolution 3 gameplay adds some exciting new features and tools, along with a wealth of customization options that will make building parks and incubating dinosaurs more in-depth and intuitive than ever before.

With a look at some of the ways the third entry is stepping things up from the games that came before it in our Jurassic World Evolution 3 preview, male dinosaurs and dinosaur breeding bring a whole new layer of gameplay to the experience. Not only does the breeding feature give you greater control over the prehistoric friends you'll introduce to your parks, but it also brings a new family dynamic and young dinosaur behaviors to the management sim.

With an all-new 3D viewer in the hatchery - where you can incubate new dinosaurs - you have options to change up the patterns and coloring to create and customize the look of your dino-friends. Then, you're able to set down nests in your park.

Not unlike previous games, every dinosaur will have different needs, and catering to them will increase their comfort level. Provided they are comfortable enough in their environment and you have males and females roaming, they'll make use of the nests to create eggs that will then introduce "juvenile" dinosaurs that get up to their own unique antics in your park.

The juveniles also inherit the traits of their parents, so you can even strategize to try and retain and change certain traits for the dinos you breed.

The third installment also includes a suite of new creative tools, including the ability to easily manipulate and sculpt the terrain to add the likes of cliffsides, waterfalls, and landscape the environment to create tiers for your park. With the tools created for newcomers and more experienced players alike, new features have been added to the creation of buildings and structures.

So, if you're looking to get more creative, you can now customize and change each individual piece of a building - such as walls, ceilings, windows, and more - and change up its angle, scale, and coloring. But if you're looking to just get stuck into the management side of things in your park, or you don't particularly enjoy the creative aspect, you can also quickly set down pre-made buildings to get stuck in with ease.

Not unlike games past, you can also expect to put your management skills to the test as you try to build up your own park, ensure your dinosaurs are comfortable, fed, and well looked after, and most importantly, that the fences have a good power source so no aggressive dinos make a break for it and wreak havoc.

And with a more naturalistic approach, you can still place down fences, but this time around, you'll also be able to make your enclosures using the terrain manipulation tools to create surfaces that cut off areas for different dinosaur breeds.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 had a variety of different modes, including a sandbox mode, and a Chaos Theory mode that had various "what if" scenarios tied to the movies. For a refresher on the last entry in the series, check out our Jurassic World Evolution 2 review.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 story and setting

Jurassic World Evolution 3 features a core campaign set across the globe, meaning you're able to make parks in various locations in Asia, North America, and Europe. With the preview showing off two locations, including one in Japan and one in Malta, game director Andy Fletcher also revealed that the campaign will be non-linear, meaning that you can choose to go to a location and return to any parks you create around the world as you wish.

Frontier released a Feature Focus video, which gives us a closer look at the campaign and the role we'll have within it as a member of the Dinosaur Integration Network (DIN) - with Jeff Goldblum narrating as your adviser and guide. From building and rebuilding parks to unlocking new locations, dinosaurs, and more, we'll be working as park managers as we try to manage various aspects, from security to entertainment and conservation. The choices we make will shape the campaign, but we may not always please everyone as we strive to run our parks.

Along the way, we'll work with different characters. There was some concern surrounding the use of generative AI for scientists' portraits following the game's reveal, which Frontier Developments has since confirmed has been removed following feedback from the community.

There will also be a narrative that's set after the event of the Jurassic World Dominion movie, which saw people and dinosaurs striving to live in harmony - check out our Jurassic World Dominion review for more on that.

With juveniles and breeding now in the narrative and core experience, you'll be setting out to ethically conserve habitats and run sustainable breeding programs to maintain the dinosaur presence across the globe.

See which Jurassic movies made it in our ranking of the best sci-fi movies of all-time.

The Last of Us star Troy Baker and Apex Legends' Erika Ishii are teaming up to host this year's Future Games Show as part of the Gamescom 2023 schedule.

The pair will guide you through all the announcements from the show, which takes place on Wednesday, August 23, at 11:00 PT / 14:00 ET / 19:00 BST / 20:00 CEST. You can watch it on YouTube, Twitch, Steam, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and here on GamesRadar+.

Tune in to see over 50 games from publishers and developers, including Frontier Developments, Raw Fury, Thunderful Games, Nacon, and Crunching Koalas. Eight world premiers will be shown alongside exclusive trailers, a VR showcase, and a 'Ones to Play' segment featuring games with demos available to try right after the event.

Baker, who plays Joel in The Last of Us, Higgs in Death Stranding, and is set to appear in the upcoming musical RPG Stray Gods alongside sci-fi thriller Fort Solis says: "Super excited to be hosting the Future Games Show at gamescom on August 23 with Erika Ishii! We'll bring you all the latest gaming news, trailers and some super-hot world exclusives. So if you want to find out what's coming up next in the world of gaming make sure you join us!"

Ishii, best known for voicing Valkyrie in Apex Legends and who's also lent her vocal talents to the likes of Destiny 2 and Deathloop, says: "Thrilled to be hosting the Future Games Show at gamescom on August 23 with Troy Baker. We're unveiling some of the hot new games coming soon on PS, Xbox, Switch, PC and VR. Join us!"

To keep up to date on everything regarding the Future Game Show at Gamescom, you can follow the official FGS Twitter account, where you can expect more game announcements as we get closer to the big day. Also, be sure to check out the YouTube trailer for more and click the 'Notify Me' button to set a reminder so you don't miss a minute of the action. 

Looking for more info on GameRadar's flagship digital games showcase? Here's everything you need to know about the Future Games Show.

Frontier Developments has announced that it's ending major gameplay updates for F1 Manager 2022 less than two months after launch, but after a swiftly negative response from fans, the studio's messaging has softened.

On October 27, a Frontier representative made a post titled "News on Next Update and the Future of F1 Manager" on the game's official subreddit. According to the post, "this next update for F1 Manager 2022 will be the last significant update that addresses player-reported feedback, or suggested changes and additions. Any potential updates following this would be minor patches that do not noticeably affect gameplay."

The devs said that "to ensure upcoming F1 Manager projects realise their potential and meet the expectations of both our team and our community, the development team’s focus must move fully onto projects beyond F1 Manager 2022." The post also describes the last big patch as the game's "final update."

Response from fans was unenthusiastic, to say the least. Posts with titles like "never buy another Frontier game ever again," "this company is a laughing stock, and "a disgusting decision by Frontier" are filling the subreddit now, and the game's Steam page is quickly being flooded with negative reviews referencing the news.

Today, Frontier has made a new post that makes an attempt at "clarifying yesterday's news". As in the previous post, the developers say that major gameplay updates are ending while minor patches will continue. "To be crystal clear," the devs say, "we will continue to support F1 Manager 2022, with multiple updates currently in the pipeline, focused on addressing the most important topics raised by the community."

The devs are making some specific contradictions to previous statements, however. One of the big complaints players have had regards issues with cars not properly getting unlapped under the safety car. Yesterday, one member of the team said "we can now confirm that this will not be addressed further in F1 Manager 2022," because the fix "would require significant gameplay alterations that are just not within scope for this game."

Today, Frontier says the issue is "not considered a gameplay feature. It remains on our list of topics we're investigating for F1 Manager 2022. We'll continue to provide more specific details on what else we're working, as soon as it's confirmed."

Dig into our list of the best sim games, many of which are still getting updates both major and minor.

There are lots of fantastic games like The Sims 4 to try out if you're looking for something similar or if you simply want an alternative. After all, although we absolutely love The Sims, it's a pricey franchise once you add up all of the best Sims 4 expansion packs. Maxis' iconic life sim's future is also currently uncertain due to EA's recent billion-dollar acquisition and the fact that The Sims 5 is not going to be a traditional installment in the series as we originally believed. Well, no matter your reasons for looking beyond The Sims franchise, we've got you covered.

Whether you love designing homes, love the life sim options, or enjoy all the wacky (and sometimes supernatural) elements that expansion packs bring, there's no shortage of options in our selection that will likely speak to you. However, before you dive into our list of the best games like The Sims to play today, please note that we haven't put inZOI on our list yet due to its current state in Early Access. It, along with a slew of other new games on the way, will likely be added in the future. But for now, we are going with titles that have more content.

With that out of the way, buckle up and jump into our list of the 10 best games like The Sims 4 that you can play right now, across various platforms.

The best games like The Sims, starting with...

10. My Time at Sandrock

Developer: Pathea
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC

My Time at Sandrock is well-known among cozy game aficionados as "the life sim that will ruin other life sims for you." The game incorporates an array of classic concepts (farming, romance, town planning, dungeon crawling) into a genuinely fascinating post-apocalyptic setting where mysteries lie under every stone and in every dungeon. It's also a beautiful game with a diverse cast of characters for you to romance, antagonize, or become besties with.

To get you started, we've got a guide to finding Quartz in My Time at Sandrock. Crafting and harvesting resources is key in this game, as you'll be largely responsible for the economic prosperity of the town pretty much from day one. Sandrock presents a heartwarming challenge for life sim lovers, and it's a great time to be getting into the series, with the slightly more grown-up My Time at Evershine currently in the works. Check out our preview of My Time at Evershine if you're curious – the game raised more than 2.5 million dollars via Kickstarter last year and is finally bringing a multiplayer mode to these beloved sim games.

9. Stardew Valley

Developer: ConcernedApe
Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5, PC, Nintendo Switch

Ah, Stardew Valley. As another time stealer with oodles of heart, this charming farming sim is like The Sims 3 if you were a farmer in the pixelated countryside. Going at your own pace, you can build up your farm, decorate your house, and get engrossed in Stardew Valley's endlessly interesting community. Just like the Sims, you can form relationships with every character in each household of the Valley, and all the residents have their own unique stories. You can also put on your decorating hat and make the coziest farm in all the land.

There's so much more than meets the eye in this delightful RPG. Fishing, mining, cooking, farming, and raising farm animals are just a few ways to keep yourself occupied. From its relatable characters to its hidden secrets, playing one in-game day's worth won't be enough. Before you know it, you'll sink hours into making your farm just right without realizing how much time has passed you by.

8. Wylde Flowers

Developer: Studio Drydock
Platforms: PC, Switch

If you love the occult expansion packs in The Sims 4, you may well fall in love with Wylde Flowers from Studio Drydock. Taking on the role of Tara in the seaside town of Fairhaven, you get swept up in a witchy, mystery-laden story, with magic, werewolves, fairies, and other fantastical beings.

With life sim and farming elements to boot, you take over your grandmother's farm, where you can concoct potions and spells that have a myriad of uses, from helping your crops thrive, to caring for your animals, and even aiding you in quests. You also spend a lot of time getting to know the locals and even develop a romantic relationship and get married if you so wish. Plus, it features an inclusive cast and so much hidden depth that you surely won't regret stepping into Tara's shoes.

7. Cities: Skylines

Developer: Colossal Order
Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5, PC, Nintendo Switch

Who doesn't love being able to decide the fate of Sims? Whether you want to help them fulfill their dreams or be the cause of their untimely demise by trapping them in a pool or setting a stove on fire, having all the power is what makes it so much fun. If this is why you love to get stuck into the Sims world, Paradox's Cities: Skylines will feed your desire to be a virtual god even more. It's also one of the best city building games ever made, so it's a must-play!

Instead of just managing a household, you manage an entire city, with all manner of ways to help it thrive or cause chaos. And if building and designing is your bag, you'll be glad to know you can design and build up your city however you wish. All jokes aside, if you thought managing a big family household or town was a challenge, managing a city takes it to a whole other level. Contending with natural disasters, pollution, and traffic jams are just some of the problems a city can encounter, and you can deal with them however you want.

6. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Developer: Nintendo
Platforms: Nintendo Switch

We waited so long for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and it was worth every second. The game doesn't just let you build and decorate your own home but a whole island. All the best features are there - designing your own clothes, sending letters and gifts to friends, and collecting adorable home furnishings - but now you can also travel to other islands courtesy of Dodo Airlines, and even indulge in a spot of terraforming to create ponds, rivers, and cliffs wherever you want.

Its never-ending gameplay loop of fishing, catching bugs, improving your home, and making friends with an ever-increasing cast of quirky critters is incredibly comforting. If you're looking for thrills, there are always tarantulas to stalk and the turnip stock market to play. Check out our Animal Crossing: New Horizons review for more cozy details.

5. Coral Island

Developer: Stairway Games
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X, PC

It's a real shame that Coral Island never made it to the Switch, because with its seamless combo of Animal Crossing, The Sims, and Stardew Valley, it's ripe for Nintendo fans to sink their teeth into. Fortunately, you can grab a copy of the wholesome farming sim on other consoles and PC. It's a truly gorgeous-looking game with plenty of customization options and a vast community to explore.

You move to Coral Island from a busy city life, hoping to take things a little slower and learn to live off the land. Your new home, it turns out, is absolutely packed with complex characters, shops, farms, pets, resources, and fun things to do. It's like being on holiday all the time. Dig for gemstones, go diving to restore the reef, play a part in ecological projects, and eventually find the love of your life. Coral Island has a bit of everything – even mermaids!

4. The Sims Medieval

Developer: Maxis Redwood Shores
Platforms: PC

Okay, so this might be cheating, but The Sims Medieval offers such a unique twist to the mainline Sims franchise that it deserves to be mentioned. Incorporating elements of RPG into the life sim framework, The Sims Medieval is a spin-off that starts players off as a monarch of a burgeoning medieval kingdom and puts you to work setting the place up. You'll still have a castle to decorate and can start a family, but the addition of quests makes TSM's goal-oriented gameplay a true standout offering.

You'll have to build churches, graveyards, medical quarters, and more in order to keep the townsfolk happy. Will you send them to the stocks for being disobedient? Will you sneak away from the throne room to sail the seas and claim lands from adjacent kingdoms? Will you simply stay home and lap up the lavish life of a medieval noble, courting suitors and birthing heirs to the throne? This is no ordinary game like The Sims; this is The Sims, but better.

3. MySims: Cozy Bundle

Developer: Maxis
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC

If you want your Sims experience with a dose of nostalgia, EA's MySims: Cozy Bundle rerelease is just the ticket. A throwback to, for many of us, a simpler time, these cuboid creations were Millennials' original Roblox. Dress 'em up, design their houses, go on adventures, and solve fun puzzles – what was once "The Sims for kids" is now looking like a pretty good premise for adults, too.

The Cozy Bundle (released on Nintendo Switch in November 2024 and PC in March 2025) includes two classic MySims games, the original and MySims Kingdom. If you spend more of your time on The Sims 4 decorating houses and parks than actually letting your Sims live, you'll enjoy the focus on creativity, design, and customization. You'll not be able to drown your Sims or propose a Woo Hoo, but there's not a lot in this world you can't accessorize with wholesome charm.

2. Fields of Mistria

Developer: NPC Studio
Platforms: PC

Fields of Mistria may be "anime Stardew Valley" but I think most of us would struggle to find an issue with that. Although still in Steam Early Access, Fields of Mistria is the gourmet, Michelin Star, connoisseur's choice meal of farming sims. NPC Studio incorporates an array of inspirations from Harvest Moon to Slime Rancher, crafting a game that gives you more of what you want and none of the rest. It's got all your traditional farming sim accouterments – fishing, growing turnips, flirting – all gently brushed with a taste of magic and fantasy.

We got particularly excited about Fields of Mistria, for what it doesn't do as much as for what it does. Farming sims, even the best ones, can quickly turn into min-max capitalism simulators if we're not careful, but this game offers something very different. In our early access preview feature, we noticed that "the game doesn't expect you to build a turnip empire in a matter of weeks, and make use of all your land from the get-go. You can focus your efforts on a small, manageable vegetable plot that you can easily make a living off. There's no pressure to create excess. Fields of Mistria isn't concerned with efficiency."

1. House Flipper 2

Developer: Frozen District
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X, PC

House Flipper was an excellent game, but House Flipper 2 improves upon it in almost every way. Another one for the more creative players – this trash-slinging, sofa-hauling, paint-sploshing, window-clean-a-thon is one of the most satisfying games you'll ever play. In our four-star House Flipper 2 review, we asserted that the game "gives the same satisfaction as doing up an actual property," and we stand by it.

If you could clean and decorate your Sims' houses from a first-person perspective, you'd get an idea of what it's like to play House Flipper. The career mode sees you start off as a total rookie, slowly moving on to bigger and better projects as your skills and finances increase, while sandbox mode lets your creativity flow freely. Build a beautiful grand abode, a humble starter home, or a real pile of rubbish – the choice is yours.

Looking for more suggestions? Be sure to check out our list of games like Stardew Valley.

Frontier has confirmed it will no longer be developing Elite Dangerous for consoles.

In a brief statement, Frontier CEO David Braben acknowledged that the release of Elite Dangerous' exploration update, Odyssey, "was less than ideal" and confirmed that as a consequence of Odyssey's delayed console release and the team's focus on the PC version of the game, "with a heavy heart [Frontier has] decided to cancel all console development".

"Elite Dangerous is a game close to my heart," Braben said in a statement posted to the official site. "It’s no secret that Odyssey’s launch was less than ideal, including the need to split the PC/console player base to focus on a PC-only launch. Since Odyssey’s release in May 2021, we have worked tirelessly to improve the Odyssey experience on PC, and whilst we have made great progress there is still more to be done. We have been supporting the pre-Odyssey and post-Odyssey codebases since.

"Over the last several months, we have been wrestling with the best way to move forward, and it is with a heavy heart we have decided to cancel all console development," the statement continues. "We need to be able to move forward with the story of the game, and in order for us to do this, we need to focus on a single codebase. Elite Dangerous will continue on console as it is now together with critical updates, but we will focus on new content updates on PC on the post-Odyssey codebase."

In closing, Braben said the team "appreciate[s] this news is not what our console community were hoping for" but assured players "this was not an easy decision to make, but it was made with the long-term future of Elite Dangerous in mind".

Although it's a tad late to get involved with Elite Dangerous on console now, of course, there's still the PC version if its piqued your interest. In GamesRadar+'s Elite Dangerous review - in which we gave the game 4 out of 5 stars - we said: "The size can be overwhelming, and the often brutal lack of hand-holding won’t suit every kind of player. Be prepared for a much slower-paced game than you might be used to. 

"You’ll need to invest a lot of time in Elite: Dangerous to see the best of what it has to offer. But once you’ve conquered that steep learning curve, you can start shaping your own destiny among the stars."

While Elite Dangerous is no longer being updated for console, there are plenty of big titles on our upcoming PS5 games and upcoming Xbox Series X games lists that you can get stuck into.

Jurassic World Evolution studio Frontier Developments has officially revealed F1 Manager 2022.

Due out this summer, F1 Manager 2022 is a management sim where you'll act as team principal of an F1 team. That means you'll be top dog when it comes to directing drivers and the rest of a team competing in the FIA Formula 1 Drivers' World Championship.

In addition to all of the day-to-day necessities that come with managing an F1 team, Frontier notes that you'll need to hire drivers and engineers, upgrade cars and race facilities, balance budgets and driver demands, and more throughout your career. 

You'll also need to make decisions once the races begin, though Frontier hasn't divulged how involved you'll be with that process. It's possible you'll have to make snap decisions as the cars whiz around the track, but with this being a sim rather than a racing game, it'll likely be more granular stuff. 

In March 2020, Frontier announced it had an F1 management sim in the works. There have been no additional tidbits about what that sim might be or what it could include, however, until now. This is the first time the developer has managed an official sports license, so it should be interesting to see what it's capable of now that it's in the driver's seat.

There's no concrete release date for F1 Manager 2022 just yet, but you can pick it up for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Xbox One, PS4, and PC when it drops this summer.

If you want to spend more time on the track, be sure to check out our guide to the best racing games available now.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 is coming this year, developer Frontier Developments announced during today's Summer Game Fest kickoff.

The sequel to the prehistoric management sim will be available on PC (via Steam and the Epic Games Store), PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, and Xbox One. The reveal trailer confirms that the sequel picks up after the events of the 2018 film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and promises a new campaign, new dinosaurs, and a medley of new features and options for construction and customization. "The result is an even bigger, better and authentic Jurassic World game," Frontier Developments says. 

 "We ignored all the warnings," narrator Jeff Goldblum says in the reveal trailer. "Forgot lessons. We abused our power. We played with genetics like it was a toy. We weren't careful. And now here we are. This is a very different world."

The newly published website for Jurassic World Evolution 2 offers a few more details on the upcoming sequel. While set after Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the upcoming management sim tells "a compelling and original Jurassic World narrative" of its own across new locations. Beyond new options and dinos, Jurassic World Evolution 2 is also pushing Chaos Theory mode, which lets players experience "key moments" from the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films "with a twist." No word yet on the ability to place a small Jeff Goldblum in your custom park and watch him flee a T-Rex in a Jeep, but we're holding out hope. 

The original Jurassic World Evolution quickly became one of our favorite park-type sims back in 2018, so we're excited to see Frontier Developments expand on the formula and add in a whole bunch of new stuff. 

"Jurassic World Evolution is a smart, expertly crafted dinosaur theme park sim, balancing immense joy with a constant low key nausea for the inevitable perils that come with running a dinosaur theme park," our own Sam Loveridge said in her Jurassic World Evolution review. "It’s full of the kinds of intricacies you’d hope for in a Jurassic Park game, the fantastic management sim mechanics that Frontier is famed for, lovely little nods and references to the movie series and, honestly, why wouldn’t you want to play a game that lets you drive your own gyrosphere through the legs of a T-Rex?"

Summer Game Fest has begun, and there are plenty more shows in the E3 2021 schedule.   

The upcoming Elite Dangerous: Odyssey expansion has been delayed, developer Frontier Developments has announced. 

While the delay on PC has only been pushed back slightly and is expected to launch in late Spring 2021, the expansion for consoles will see a "larger development shift", with an autumn 2021 release date window. 

"2020 was a difficult year for many, but in spite of those challenges we are pleased with our progress towards what is a truly ambitious new era for the game. We’ve been delighted with the excitement and positive response to our development diaries, interviews, streams and trailers and want to thank all of you for your continued support," Frontier writes. 

"The ongoing impact of the pandemic however, including the renewed lockdowns in 2021, continues to put added pressure on our teams and ultimately our development timeline. We have therefore had to make the difficult decision to make some adjustments and changes to our existing development roadmap." 

As detailed in the new roadmap, an alpha of the expansion is set to release on PC in early Spring 2021, with no exact date revealed just yet. Taking a "phased approach" to the alpha, Frontier will be releasing new features and systems online throughout the test period to gain community feedback. More details about plans for the alpha is set to come closer to release. The full PC release will follow after the alpha and is expected to launch in late Spring 2021.  

Odyssey is currently set to arrive on PS4 and Xbox One in autumn 2021, with Frontier coming to the decision to push back the console launch further "after continued feedback, iterations, and balancing". 

"Please do know that these difficult decisions have been made with a focus on making Odyssey as incredible as it can possibly be for all our Commanders regardless of their platform," Frontier adds, "while also respecting realistic project deadlines for our teams during this difficult global situation."

The upcoming expansion is set to open up the world of Elite Dangerous like never before by adding on-foot planetary exploration and first-person combat.  

There's a moment in our demo of Planet Zoo, the follow-up to Frontier Developments' theme-park sim Planet Coaster, that captures perfectly the fantasy the studio is shooting for. The camera floats above the clouds, overseeing all creation, before plummeting with all the sudden gravity of a rollercoaster drop, into an enclosure filled with lions. Each member of this small pride roams around with convincing independence, one clambering down a slope to paddle around their player-constructed pool. The camera pushes in further still, until we can pick out every strand of fur in their manes. What makes it truly remarkable is the scale, and the contrast between the bird's- and worm's-eye views. The demo repeats the trick, zooming out and whizzing across the zoo, past large constructions and a closed-loop railway, to pick out a family of African elephants, where one calf is in the water using its trunk as a snorkel. Then it’s onto the zebras, the grizzly bears, the peacocks…

A single zoo can contain hundreds of animals, across dozens of species, and Frontier wants them all to be equally believable and engaging to watch. "We never wanted any animal to feel like a reskin of another one," lead animator Chris Marsh tells us. "One thing we found with Jurassic World Evolution is that everybody has their favourite dinosaur, their favourite animal – and if the player feels like their favourite hasn’t been given as much love as another species, that would be a shame."

Two by two

Planet Coaster isn't the only Frontier game that's feeding into the development of its latest project. "There’s a lot of DNA in Planet Zoo from our history," Marsh says, pointing back to the aforementioned Jurassic World Evolution, which applied the studio's management-sim template to a park full of dinosaurs. Beyond that, there's Zoo Tycoon and its Kinectimals games for Microsoft and, further back still, the PS2 game Dog's Life. This helped equip the animation and programming teams, many of whom worked on these earlier projects, with the skills needed to create realistic animals. But scaling that up to an entire ark's worth of species, able to react dynamically to user-generated geometry as players turn molehills into mountains underfoot, or paw or hoof? That would require a fresh approach.

The solution, principal programmer Ollie Powell explains, was "finding core sets of animations that could be shared and tweaked in a procedural way." The basic elements of a walk cycle for a lion, for example, can be applied to the rig for a zebra or any other quadruped. "The retargeting system actually takes some inspiration from Spore," says Powell. "They figured out this idea of how you generalise motion into this abstract motion essence, ready for any skeleton, and then reapply that to different morphologies."

This might sound like it would result in a zoo filled to bursting with lions, tigers and bears all marching in perfect step, but the key is the tweaking. Powell and Marsh show us how a zebra’s walking animation can be carried across to a camel, then slowed down to give it a more deliberate gait. With a couple of tweaks to the posing of the camel’s underlying skeleton – the neck raised a little, the head held just a tad higher – the two animals quickly feel distinctive, even walking alongside one another. "Layer on these little shakes, eye twitches and ear flickers," says Powell, "and if they're out of phase with each other, you get all of this variety emerging." Combined with procedural systems such as foot planting, headlook and ragdoll, the game can summon a menagerie of believable creatures relatively quickly, and "free up animators to do the bespoke lovely stuff."

He shows us a peacock spreading its tailfeathers, each one unsheathing from beneath its neighbour and fanning out beautifully. Then a loop of two lion cubs playfighting and tumbling over one another, as compelling to watch as it is adorable. These are moments handcrafted by the animation team, and are what Marsh refers to as “the little motions that make an animal unique". This combination of procedural and handcrafted animation enables Frontier to create animals that feel believable both with the camera pointed straight into their refractive irises, and with it pointed down from the skies, watching a herd move as one. But, you might notice, this is all concerned with the act of watching rather than interacting, and that’s partly because Frontier is currently keeping details about the game's management and construction aspects fairly close to its collective chest.

Survival of the fittest

The suggestion seems to be that Planet Zoo will stick fairly close to its theme-park predecessor, albeit with an extra layer of management in keeping animals happy and healthy. They’ll need to have their habitat and nutrition needs met, and be paired up carefully to avoid inbreeding. This side of the game is founded in reality: Frontier has commissioned research on each species’ needs and behaviour, and interviewed zookeepers about their processes. The space needed for each animal’s habitat is based on government guidelines.

While management sims can lead players to ruthlessly min-max in the pursuit of efficiency, the emphasis here is on creating a “modern zoo” – a phrase we hear multiple times during our visit to Frontier’s new HQ. Conservation and education will be as much a part of the management game as maximising profits, we’re told, although how players will be incentivised to be good zookeepers remains a little unclear. It shines through in the overall feel of the game, which is relatively gentle – certainly in comparison to Jurassic World Evolution. Forget to complete the wall around an enclosure and, while animals will escape, they won’t then starting chomping on visitors. The game will model alpha hierarchies inside a species, and fights can break out – we’re shown a remarkable dynamic scarring system – but these are unlikely to be fatal.

When we ask what happens if you were to put carnivores and their prey in the same enclosure, the team seem taken aback at our bloodthirstiness. The answer is that, yes, predators will eat their cohabitants – but it comes with an implied question of why anyone would even want to do that. This reaction is indicative, perhaps, of Frontier's dedication to making these feel like living, breathing animals. (Literally, in the latter case, with respiration being another procedural animation applied to each species.) The studio isn’t denying that nature is red in tooth and claw, but realises this isn't what people want to see on a nice family day out at the zoo.

This, ultimately, is what the development team is trying to achieve. While theme parks are all about interaction and thrills, zoos are by their nature more passive. It's the natural divide between the two halves of the park-sim sub-genre, but in both cases, a major part of the pleasure is just sitting back and enjoying the fruits of your labour. So it’s a good thing that Planet Zoo's virtual animals are about the most convincing we’ve ever seen.

For more features like the one you've just read, be sure to check out the Edge magazine channel page here on GamesRadar or visit MyFavouriteMagazines to check out the latest subscription offers. 

Founder and CEO of Frontier Developments, David Braben, had a busy GDC, picking up awards and announcing the release of massive space MMO Elite: Dangerous on Xbox One later this year. Initially revealed as an Xbox exclusive, Braben later admitted on Twitter that PlayStation owners will just have to be patient. Why? It's a timed deal, which means PS4 owners can hold onto their free time for a little longer.

GamesRadar+ catches up with Braben for his opinion on the difference between traditional, AAA blockbusters compared to the world of Elite: Dangerous: “The industry is branching... the five to ten hour experience is still a great thing, but you look at some of our players. We’ve had players playing for significantly more than 1000 hours.”

“It’s interesting - how can they see new things after 1000 hours? But the great thing is we’ve been continuing to update the game,” he explains. “We brought out community challenges about three or four weeks ago which went down well. I remember being impressed when people were saying Skyrim was 100 hours... The beauty is that even though people have been playing for more than 1000 hours, we’ll have new content. This is the pace that we expect to keep up.”

The world of Elite: Dangerous on PC is overwhelmingly expansive and constant updates across the galaxy such as Wings (out now) and Powerplay (an expected update for later this year) will make the world even bigger. Expansions bleed into the main game, making the universe endless and that’s what Braben feels is key to its success.

“I don’t quite see it as core game vs expansions because that’s a mindset of the past. The way I see it is that the world is continuing to get better,” he explains. "Because we’ve also been doing daily updates in the story. News items come out, they affect the world. Also there is the great evolving storyline created by players. We’ve had players overthrowing governments - those sort of things are dynamic and happen moment to moment.”

Braben ties this freedom for players to do what they want into the freedom given to Frontier as developers. The result of an ultra-successful Kickstarter project in 2012 with over a quarter of a million pounds over their target £1.25 million, Elite: Dangerous has always been fiercely independent.

“The great thing about having that independence - that’s been created by all those people who backed us - has enabled us to almost go back to gaming where there is much more freedom in terms of what you do but also in terms of it not being dumbed down in anyway. And that’s great,” enthuses Braben.

“Whether it applies to how the game plays or how it controls, that sort of thing. And that’s not to say everyone has to play like that. That’s the beauty of it. I’m very very excited about where we are with gaming. It feels in the past year or so, gaming has started to get its own identity in the way it’s getting to tell stories and we have that opportunity.”

It’s when asked about his ideal game, Braben reveals his thoughts on the future of Elite: Dangerous and it’s tantalisingly exciting; “I’d like to think that we’re working towards it. My ambition is that the game doesn’t get in the way, that you genuinely can do whatever you want to do. I’ve said that in the future, via paid updates, that there will be lots of things coming.”

“The scope for that is very nearly endless. Whether it’s big game hunting on alien worlds, cities on planets, that sort of thing. It could be truly amazing, but also each one of those is a major game in its own right, so the scope of all of those things beautifully integrated together for me is The Ideal Game.”

“The thing that matters to me with Elite - because we have a real galaxy with real distances - you can look up and see the whole night’s sky and you can say ‘I can see that, I’ve been there’. That means a lot to me. I’ve always been a great science fiction fan so the more games that fulfil that feel. I love open worlds. I love science fiction. It’s that inception that’s particularly a sweet spot.”

It sounds like the kind of sweet spot that could make life exceptionally more, err, dangerously unproductive when Elite reaches Xbox One later this year.

If you're much of a (virtual) space jockey, you've probably been watching the development of Elite: Dangerous with great interest. The crowdfunded space sim from the creator of the seminal Elite promises to take players back to space with a vast simulation of galactic trade, politics, and eye-searing ship-to-ship combat. Now that the game is just a month away from its full release, it seems primed to deliver on all of those big-picture promises. The only problem is one little-picture detail: contrary to the assurances of its Kickstarter campaign, you have to be online to play.

A totally offline version of the game would be 'unacceptably limited and static' compared to the connected game, Frontier Developments said in its latest newsletter. Even those who plan to stick exclusively to single-player mode will still affect and experience galaxy-wide developments informed by the community's efforts in exploration and diplomacy. The only way to make that happen, Frontier said, is to do all the galactic number crunching on central servers.

All this talk of server-side calculations may remind you of the new SimCity last year, when Maxis insisted that an offline mode was implausible before quietly implementing one in March 2014. But I'm willing to give Frontier the benefit of the doubt here; a galaxy that's reactive to thousands of players has always been a major part of its vision for Elite: Dangerous. That vision has only grown over nearly two years of development. Cutting all of that out for an offline experience, and making sure said offline experience is still compelling, sounds like it would be quite a bit of work.

So yeah, it's easy to see where Frontier is coming from. Only problem is that its hugely successful Kickstarter was partially built on the promise of an offline mode - there's even an FAQ answer specifically confirming it. No matter how well Frontier justifies the decision today, loyal customers were still misled. And it only takes a peek at the campaign's comments to see how they feel about it. This is one of the dangers of crowdfunding games - it's a bit like putting a full deposit down on a pre-order based on a video and essay of what the developers think their project may one day be. Wait, no, that's exactly what it's like.

Unfortunately, there's no happy solution here. Either Frontier diverts resources toward creating an offline mode (which sounds more like a spin-off at this point) and compromises its work on the main project, or backers who plunked down cash for an offline experience are left waiting for a refund. Either way, what looks like a very cool game has already disgruntled much of its fanbase just a month before release. It could have, at the very least, let them down easy.

UK developer Frontier Developments has released several new shots of its action-adventure game The Outsider, which is currently being developed for PS3 and Xbox 360.

The Outsider is described by Frontier as a "high-tech thriller" and is set in Washington DC. The story follows a CIA operative framed for a crime he didn’t commit as he attempts to clear his name while avoiding being captured. Armed with an array of cutting-edge technology and weaponry, the CIA operative must try to turn the tables on the shady organizations that have set him up.

Frontier's idea behind The Outsider is to offer the gamer a similar sort of freedom to that which was experienced in the classic space adventure Elite. Therefore gamers can choose their own route through the game and decide whether they want to proceed on a path of bloody revenge or attempt a more subtle retribution.

The new screenshots are from the demo that Frontier will have on show behind closed doors at next week's E3, and show off the lighting effects. The Outsider's game engine is capable of generating. However, Frontier is keen to point out that it understands that attractive visuals are only the start of a good game and intends The Outsider to be a next-generation game also in terms of the amount of freedom it affords the gamer.

We'll be exploring The Outsider next week at E3, so stay tuned for more details.

May 5, 2006