Avorion
If you enjoy building games where you're not just making pretty stuff but also considering the physics of your designs, you cannot go wrong here. Avorion gives you a huge amount of freedom in an easy to learn editor, to build your own ships and space stations. There's a huge amount of satisfaction in designing, then building a ship that you can fly around in. There's also a huge galaxy full of factions, economy and trading. I got absorbed in the game just chilling out, designing spaceships for weeks. The devs have recently overhauled the game with 2.0 & made it really intuitive for new players too. I hope they continue making many more games with as much love and care as this one!
Pros
- Incredibly detailed building system that's easy to learn
- Good performance
- Ability to set up an automated empire of ships, miners and factories
- Can design your own ships and space stations
- Great controls
- Intelligent autopilot
- Ultra widescreen support with super sampling
- You can pilot any ship you own
- You can hire captains and get them to pilot your ships for you and go on expeditions
- Decent in-game encyclopaedia
- Tiered building materials, all with different attributes
Cons
- If there's a lot of stuff in a sector, loading times get quite long. There are a lot of loading screens in general - every time you jump
- I'd love to be able to interact with the planets more; they're literally just background images now
- Trying to equip multiple ships with similar gear is a real chore. There's no window for equipment overview of a fleet, so you have to just take everything off them and try to distribute equally, manually