Granted, Xbox One players can get their hands on the joystick of Elite: Dangerous, but it’s at the expense of a greater level of manual control.

Players searching for depth in terms of nuanced control over spaceships should definitely warp over to the Star Citizen galaxy, or the Elite: Dangerous universe on PC. PC players can get lost in the sim-lite game on the birth place of simulators, while PS4 owners can also have a taste of space-simming, too. For starters, it’s multiplatform and, at least as far as Sony is concerned, it’s something of a flagship indie product for the PlayStation 4 (sorry Xbox owners: no No Man’s Sky for you).

Star Citizen is tonally darker and more serious than No Man's Sky.Step over into the No Man’s Sky universe, and you can have a similar experience, albeit in an infinitely more accessible way. Add first-person shooting, trading, a persistent world, and the ability to seamlessly enter and leave the surfaces of planets, and Star Citizen ups the ante in terms of what it has to offer in terms of an as-realistic-as-it-can-be sci-fi experience. Unlike Black Shark, Star Citizen doesn’t require you to memorise 30-odd command inputs to get your ship off the ground, but it’s still hardcore in terms of the manual control a player can exert over a spaceship. To this day, I still can’t look at a tree without feeling guilty. YES NOTo give you an idea of how hardcore simulators can be, I recall being a stupid kid and testing my printer’s half-life in a single job by churning out a 534-page manual for attack-chopper simulator DCS: Black Shark.

Popular space simulator games pc