What’s special about the XCOM series is how it finds such nerve-wrecking meaning in a large-scale conflict by shrinking it down to a really small, personal level. ADVENT has invaded the Earth and enslaved most of humanity, sure, but that’s too big an event to really hold in your head while you play. What you really care about are the team of soldiers – inevitably named after you and your buddies – embarking on missions to take them down.

The formula has flim-flammed between real-time and turn-based tactics over the years since UFO: Enemy Unknown first landed in 1994, but XCOM 2 chooses turn-based wisely. Not only is your macro-strategy itch already scratched by the base management and R&D layers before you get to a fight, there’s also something peerlessly tense about plotting out your move and then having to relinquish control entirely, wait, and then watch it play out. Whether your buddies save the day or miss a crucial shot comes down to RNG really, but those random events turn them into heroes and villain in your mind, and those character arcs get you hooked on XCOM 2 like a bad (good) soap opera. 

For a while, it seemed making a quality game with the Alien cinematic license was like convincing people climate change is real, or recording a genuinely good ska album: plenty of people gave it a go throughout the ‘90s and early ‘00s, to little avail. 

And then, only a year after Gearbox’s well-documented disaster Aliens: Colonial Marines, which seemed to be jutting out its chin and daring you to still respect the xenomorphs after watching them tiptoe around like cartoons, Alien: Isolation arrived. It was, and remains, everything you could ever hope a licensed game from this universe could be. 

Its fastidiously designed environments feel like setting foot back in Shepperton Studios in 1978, such is the care which which Creative Assembly breaks down the visual language of Ridley Scott’s movie and applies its shapes and colors to the Sevastopol space station. Every sound is head-noddingly correct in its retro-futuristic analog quality.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the mesmerizing sights and sounds are attached to an incredible horror game. It’s just Amanda Ripley (daughter of one Lt. Ellen Ripley) and a xenomorph, locked in a battle of wits, hour after unbearable hour. There’s no S.M.A.R.T. gun to blow it away with, only home-made weapons and tools that buy you more time – and an escape route. 

Dishonored 3 would have been the logical next step for Arkane. Everybody loved the studio’s first two steampunk immersive sims, so much so that the name ‘Dishonored’ was the most popular boy’s and girls’ name on birth certificates in 2016. No need to alt-tab and look that up, you can trust us on that. Instead, the studio took a long-delayed reboot of an all-but forgotten shooter, rebooted that reboot, and 2017’s Prey was born.

Apparently dissatisfied by that level of conceptual strangeness alone, Arkane made a game about aliens who disguise themselves as office chairs and trash bins, and in which your best line of defense against them is often a glue gun – sorry, G.L.O.O. gun. Packed with fascinating lore about an alt-history Cold War space race that rocketed ahead faster than our own timeline, bristling with atmosphere aboard its lonely space station, and just as alive with mechanical invention and player empowerment as its Dishonored series, Prey is the kind of wilfully uncommercial rarity we get once every blue moon in games. 

David Cronenburg himself would be proud of Visceral Games’ legendary space horror. In between dry heaves, anyway. The aliens here don’t look like little gray men. They don’t even look like men. They’re grotesque body shock tangles of viscera, whose primal repulsion comes as much from their movement as their appearance. Spider-like arrangements of splintered bone and inside-out sinew scuttle towards you from behind the shadows, and you’re supposed to beat them using a futuristic welder’s equipment. 

But more unsettling than that, the Necromorphs themselves aren’t even the aliens, really. The aliens are the infection that turned all these human cadavers into ‘80s claymation horrors. Your enemy is unknowable and without clear form, and that’s all the more effective. 

There’s been a lot of shooting and running away from aliens on this list so far. But there is another way: interplanetary diplomacy. This is the brave new way of conquering space that Paradox lays out in its 4x Stellaris. 

And it’s not just that you’re trading commodities with them instead of shells. Somehow the species inhabiting the many planets in your vicinity feel distinct from other sci-fi, and seem to tell a self-contained story of planetary evolution each time, just by their appearances, strengths and proclivities. It’s a slow-burn, certainly, but one that’s liable to burn through an entire weekend when you get your head around its Civ-like mechanics. 

Of course Half-Life. It’s the LeBron James of alien games, even though it’s also at times a platform game, a military shooter, a slapstick comedy and a train sim. Even by 1998, alien invasions were starting to feel old hat as we experienced them in first-person shooters, but Valve managed to make the Xen portal’s opening and subsequent invasion of the Black Mesa research facility feel breathtaking and – well, real. 

Which sounds mad, when we’re talking about headless dogs that howl you to death and enormous tentacle beasts. But by telling its story defiantly in real-time and never pulling you away from control, Half-Life feels like the most extraordinary day at work that a Level 3 research associate scientist has ever had. Grab it inside The Orange Box for one of the best PC games of all time. 

Creative Assembly isn’t the only studio to put together a triumph of a game using the Aliens license. British-based studio Rebellion managed it in 1999, and it even nailed the Predator license while it did so. 

Aliens vs Predator Classic 2000 holds up today for two reasons. The first is its unflinching difficulty – aliens are absolutely terrifying things in this game not simply because of their appearance, but because even one of them can tear you to shreds in a couple of seconds. As a marine, you never get too powerful not to worry about one xenomorph. A facehugger is instant death if it reaches you, and a Predator? Forget about it. Run. 

But then playing as the Predator, or the xenomorph, you’re treated to a bang-on visual interpretation of the species, like the alien’s massive fish-eye field-of-view and the Predator’s indecipherable HUD digits, and guided to acting just like that species, crawling around on the walls and air ducts, stalking your prey, leaking green goo when you’re shot. It’s been remade and sequeled over the years, but none of its successors got close to the naked fear and cinematic faithfulness of this one. 

An alien game full of humanity and one of the best RPGs ever made. Commander Shepard has a universe’s worth of intelligent life to save from the Reapers, but it’s the personal stories that really form this revered BioWare RPG. Combat’s much-improved from the original but still nothing to write home about – it’s cover-shooting with some abilities. Movement and animations can feel stilted. It doesn’t matter a bit. 

Because through deep and careful characterization, both of crew members and entire alien races, Mass Effect 2 draws you into a seductively believable saga. And we do mean seductive – Shepard’s on the lookout for love even with the fate of the universe on his or her shoulders, and very few are resistant to the charms of authority and that sexy dance they pull out in the club. 

Protoss. Terran. Zerg. Three eternal adversaries, trying to RMB their way to galactic domination through three distinct approaches. For the pro gamers Starcraft II’s story and races are an abstraction – what matters are the numbers, build times and damage values. 

For human beings whose wrists won’t do 1000 APM they’re deeply engrossing. Because its campaign knows just how to throw you a curveball with every new mission, leaning into a particular race’s strength or weakness by introducing an environmental factor that hamstrings you and forces you to play around it. 

No, it wasn’t quite what people expected at launch. But it would be such a shame if No Man’s Sky were remembered only for that, and not for the years of hard work and intelligent responses to feedback that developer Hello Games put in afterward. Because now it’s a beautiful multiplayer deep space Minecraft with quests and things, not just a colorful arty low-gravity walking sim. 

And above all else, that same sense of excitement and wonder that made us all so interested in the game in the first place – that childlike feeling we all got when the spaceship takes off and leaves the planet’s atmosphere in the trailer – that’s still in there.

Samus has been fighting metroids for over 30 years now. It says a lot about how inventive that series has been, and how robust its world-building is, that a game released in 2021 is generally considered the best of them all. 

It’s hard to dislodge that squishy feeling we get when we see Super Metroid’s graphics, but 2021’s take on the classic formula is just irresistible. Those new Emmi robots, dogged and nearly invincible, raise the stakes of exploration, and make the dead ends that previously felt frustrating seem like welcome reprieves. And visually it’s the best of 2D side-on platforming and 3D space at once, every scene resplendent with production values poured all over them.

If aliens aren’t quite your thing, check out our list of the best space games (most of which also have aliens in them. Funny, that.)

Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.