The most popular flight simulation games

Armour-Geddon is what you get when someone combines Wargames with a midlife crisis. Set in a post-nuke world where you pilot tanks, helicopters, and laser cannons to stop a doomsday device, it’s a strange cocktail of strateg...

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat is a combat flight simulation video game released in 1991 by Electronic Arts. The game is named after and endorsed by the real-life aviation legend, Chuck Yeager, who was the first pilot to break the soun...

Ah, Apache Strike (1989), the game where you're the lone helicopter pilot flying through blocky cities that look like they were made of leftover Lego bricks. Your mission? Blow up bad guys in a first-person view that resembles a s...

Released in 1987, this is less of a simulator and more of a fever dream where you pilot a flying box over a grid pretending to be terrain. 3-D Helicopter Simulator was ambitious for its time, with wireframe graphics that suggest a...

Released in 1990, Air Strike USA is what you'd get if Top Gun had a baby with a Saturday morning cartoon. You pilot a heavily armed jet through side-scrolling skies, shooting down everything that moves and quite a few things that ...

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe is a combat flight simulation game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games (later known as LucasArts) in 1991. It was designed for MS-DOS systems and later released for Amiga computers. The game ...

Strap into your Spitfire, because Aces Over Europe (1993, DOS) is here to show you that flying over 1940s Europe was as dangerous as it was polygonal. As a follow-up to Aces of the Pacific, this one tightens the mechanics, adds gr...

Explosions? Check. Missiles? Check. Graphics that look like someone spilled gray soup on your monitor? Double check. A-10 Tank Killer lets you pilot a flying war machine and rain chaos upon tiny pixel tanks that may or may not be ...

Step into the cockpit of the Apache Longbow, a 1995 combat flight simulator where you’ll experience the thrilling sensation of trying to figure out keyboard controls before getting shot down by invisible enemies. It's a seri...

Ace of Aces (1987, DOS) is a game where you pilot a WWII plane via a series of still-image panels that suggest action more than deliver it. It’s like a flipbook with ambitions. You’ll toggle views, dodge bullets (sort ...

In ACE 2 (1987, DOS), you and a buddy can engage in split-screen dogfights so slow they make real air combat look like fast-forwarded ballet. The graphics are simple, but the charm is in the rivalry — few things bond friends...

B-17 Flying Fortress (1992) is the kind of game where you don't just fly the plane—you are the plane. One moment you're the pilot, the next you're the nose gunner swatting Luftwaffe pests like you're at the world’s ang...

F-15 Strike Eagle III is a combat flight simulation video game released in 1992. It was developed by MicroProse and is the third installment in the F-15 Strike Eagle series. The game was designed for various computer platform...

Ever wondered what it’s like to fly inches from another jet’s tail while defying both gravity and common sense? Blue Angels: Formation Flight Simulation (1989, DOS) tries to capture the precision of elite aerobatics wi...

Ah yes, Air Trax from 1983 - a game where “flight” is more of a philosophical concept. It’s clunky, it's slow, and it looks like it was coded in someone’s garage (because it probably was). But there’s...

Not many people know that the first games created by Sid Meier were flight simulations. Solo Flight was published by MicroProse in 1983 for Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari, and a year later, in 1984, for PC. The game takes place in ...

Strap in and squint at the horizon—Advanced Tactical Fighter 2 wants you to dogfight like it’s the Cold War and your joystick is a weapon of mass confusion. Released in the golden era of chunky graphics and keyboard gy...