Gaming and Mac computers haven’t always been on the best of terms. Many believe the optimal PC gaming experience comes via a Windows-based machine and won’t waste their time shelling out the dough for a Mac. The argument usually begins and ends with most Macs’ lack of a powerful GPU and restrictive hardware designs. While the options for playing games on a Mac are limited compared to Windows PCs, the Mac gaming library has come a long way.
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Recently, more A-list games have become available for play via Mac, pleasing hoards of Apple-loyal gamers. You can play plenty of big-name games like Stardew Valley and World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth without a dedicated gaming PC.
We’ve narrowed down a list of the best Mac games — in no particular order — for all you Apple loyalists. ‘Stardew Valley’ Following years of disappointment with the Harvest Moon series he had once loved so much, first-time developer Eric Barone, also known as “ConcernedApe”, took it upon himself to create his own version of the farming simulation game.
It arrived complete with gorgeous retro-inspired sprites, charming characters, marriage, combat, and plenty of post-launch support. ConcernedApe promised online multiplayer when the game was initially pitched to fans. Earlier this year, the and will soon be coming to the Nintendo Switch.
Co-op allows up to three additional players to join you as farmhands to help operate your farm. They can also play through the story and get married in your game. Stardew Valley is more than just a farming simulator. It’s also a role-playing game, with characters leveling up in areas such as fishing and mining, customizing their professions, unlocking new areas, and exploring a dangerous cave filled with monsters and artifacts – as in the Animal Crossing games, you can then donate these to the local museum, but should you instead want to focus your attention on your own personal property, you can fully customize your home and surrounding farm to create a rural paradise. Buy it now from: ‘Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty’ Starcraft became a global phenomenon upon its release in 1998 and the sequel Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty carried on the tradition in 2010.
It’s played so much in South Korea many have self-proclaimed it the national sport of the country. That’s high praise for Blizzard’s real-time strategy epic, though they deserve every bit of it. In the game, you are able to take control of three separate factions: Terran, Zerg, and Protoss. Though Wings of Liberty’s main storyline has you assume command of the Terran, you’re able to play as any of the three factions when in multi-player. You’ll want to play Starcraft II if you thrive when micromanaging and juggling many different responsibilities. Keeping a keen eye on your resources, your available units, and your enemies’ whereabouts are all key to having a fighting chance in any match. If you just blink at the wrong time, thousands of Zerglings will bring your budding home base crashing to the ground.
For those who’ve already zerg-rushed their way through Wings, two critically acclaimed expansions — and — have been released since. Read our full Buy it now from: ‘Portal 2’ Portal 2 returns players to Aperture Science in this addictive first-person puzzle game. You play as protagonist Chell as she attempts to break out of the giant Aperture research facility and claim her freedom. Tasked with working through various rooms outfitted with unique puzzles, you’re armed with nothing more than the iconic portal gun. You’ll use various environments and objects alongside time and space to advance through the facility.
Portal 2 expanded on its predecessor’s successful formula and added a deep storyline to boot. Actors Stephen Merchant and J.K. Simmons voice recurring characters and their work in the game is spot-on.
Though the plot deals with a serious conflict the game is rife with well-timed comedy at every turn. Portal 2 is one of the most unique experiences in gaming and also one of the most comedic. Read our full Buy it now from: ‘Sid Meier’s Civilization VI’ After a somewhat lukewarm fan reception to the previous game in the series – Civilization: Beyond Earth – developer Firaxis returned in full force. Civilization VI builds on what made 2010’s Civilization V great, but it adds more robust culture and science trees, more dynamic choices, and more insight into why world leaders are acting in a particular way. It’s the culmination of years of development and experience creating previous Civilization games, and it shows. Since launch, Civilization VI has received a substantial amount of civilizations to control, including the Aztecs, Persians, Nubians, and Australians.
They’re each led by a famous historical figure, such as Montezuma for the Aztecs, and with new content releasing every few months, former to return and start a new game. Read our full Buy it now from: ‘Hearthstone’ Blizzard’s multiplayer card game Hearthstone blew up on mobile devices, but it’s also a perfect fit for the. With simple, easy-to-learn gameplay mechanics and a fast playtime, you can easily get through several battles in one sitting. The game’s excellent matchmaking system helps to pair you with similarly-skilled players, so every match will be close and intense. It helps that Hearthstone draws from Blizzard’s best-known property, Warcraft, with many of its most famous characters and abilities becoming playable cards.
If you’ve ever wanted to send a Murloc army at your opponent, wearing them down turn after turn with weak attacks before eventually claiming victory, there is no better game than Hearthstone. Buy it now from: ‘Gone Home’ Gone Home is one of those rare games that thrusts the player into an environment and just lets them explore. You’ll play as a college student returning home from a year abroad and upon arriving at your family’s estate, no one is home. It’s up to you to scavenge the house for any and all clues about where their family has gone and what they’ve done.
Gone Home has a slow but incredible story build up accentuated by its intense atmosphere. It begs players to explore and reveal the mysteries of a big empty home with a dark and sad story to tell. With its unique style of gameplay, Gone Home will have you glued to your computer from beginning to end. Read our full Buy it now from: ‘Minecraft’ There’s no denying Minecraft’s immense popularity ever since even the basic version became available in 2009. Armed with nothing more than a pair of hands when starting the game, you’re given absolute freedom over an enormous, randomized map. You start by foraging for dirt and before you know it, you’re deep underneath the ground level mining for diamond and gold. Watch your back because several enemies such as zombies or creepers are out to wreak havoc on your character and will even blow up your landscapes.
So addictive yet so simple, Minecraft will have you building towering skyscrapers and labyrinth-style mine shafts in minutes. Its pixelated, 8-bit graphics may turn some people away, though the gameplay is enough to please any and all gamers.
Buy it now from: ‘Kerbal Space Program’ Kerbal Space Program presents an odd combination of elements. Despite the cartoonish graphics and goofy, minion-esque creatures that populate the game, KSP is no joke. Flight simulation has never been so deep, so engaging, or so addicting, and Kerbal provides a playground for both the casual gamer and the serious physicist by balancing serious rocket-building considerations — how many Kerbals must die before you finally reach the moon? — with forgiving gameplay that allows for endless experimentation. The title also runs smoothly on almost any computer given its simplistic looks and benefits from a gratifying sense of progress.
You can spend countless hours learning how to build a rocket capable of reaching the moon, however, only to realize the lunar frontier is hardly the final one. With incredible replay value, KSP is one of the few games that prove both educational and fun. Buy it now from: ‘Firewatch’ Video game settings, as a whole, are remarkably similar to each other, tending to focus on battlefields and areas of conflict that pit people against each other.
Developer Campo Santo wasn’t content with exploring the same old environments and created a game set in the dense Wyoming wilderness of the late ‘80s. As a new fire lookout, protagonist Henry thinks that his job will be boring and mundane, but things aren’t as they appear. From watching the world burn from his tower to unearthing chilling discoveries in the wilderness, Henry’s new job is anything but dull. What helps separate Firewatch from other “walk and talk” games is its gorgeous art style, which blends realistic character proportions with slightly chunky features and bright colors.
It’s instantly recognizable, and even if Campo Santo chooses to do a drastically different project in the future, we hope the visuals are here to stay. Read our full Buy it now from.
If there’s one good thing about the relative scarcity of games on the Mac, it’s that we often get the best games when we do get them. Sure, you’ll find a few stinkers, but the fact remains that many developers don’t even consider porting their creations—and they’re almost always ports—over to Apple’s desktop system unless they think they have a chance of surviving between brushed aluminum and a Retina display. In fact, there are enough quality games on Mac that I could easily rattle out a list with 30 more, but ain’t nobody got time for that. For our money (and yours), these are the best.
Sounds like a cynical European’s attempt to get Americans interested in Europe’s favorite pastime. “It’s soccerwith muscle cars in a caged arena!” And yes, that’s essentially Rocket League in a nutshell. But, oh, it’s so worth it. It’s hard to pinpoint what makes the game so irresistible: Is it the speedy matches, awarding thrills to the victors and quick chances for redemption for the losers?
Is it the colorful cars themselves, which range from Mario-themed roadsters to the Batmobile? Or is it the gameplay itself, which sends your car careening through the air and up walls to better bump a ball into a distant goal? I’m still not sure. Join me as I play a few dozen more rounds to figure it out.
There’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard of. It’s about as popular as air in younger circles, and there’s an addictive quality about it that ensnares even older players. The basic concept of the acclaimed (and free) Battle Royale mode? You’re tossed out of a floating bus along with 99 other players, and then you land on an island and scrounge for weapons and supplies for defenses so you can kill everyone else until you’re the last person standing.
Yeah, it’s kind of brutal, but it delivers an undeniable thrill of victory, and its Pixar-like aesthetic does a lot to soften the edge. For that matter, its matches last only a handful of minutes and actually playing it costs nothing.
Developer Epic Games won’t complain if you drop some cash on cosmetic items, though. We may not have The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim on Mac—one of the most popular (and ported) RPGs of all time—but by gosh, we have. It’s a sprawling MMORPG that’s set in Skyrim’s same universe and features many of the same locations—yes, including Skyrim—and it’s remarkable among modern MMORPGs for its freedom. Unlike, say, World of Warcraft (which is still a fine alternative after all these years), you’re not forced to quest through zones in a particular orde. Instead, ESO adjusts itself to your level.
If you have the proper expansion, you can hop into brand-new content with everyone else right from the start. It’s respectful of your time, too, as far as MMOs go, as it lets you drop in and out at will. ESO also requires no subscription past the initial purchase (although there's a cash shop with loot boxes), and you can simply enjoy the entertaining quests and never group with another player if you so wish. Don’t like puzzles? Stay far away from.
At its core, it’s about nothing so much as walking around an island with 11 widely varying regions and solving mazes that pop up on screens powered by cords that snake mysteriously through ruins and forests. And yet, much as in Myst that inspired it, there are greater mysteries to unravel lurking in the shadows beyond, countered both through intellectual dexterity and revisiting previous areas. It’s probably the quietest game on this list, but it’s also one of the best. Few developers commit to porting games to Mac quite as enthusiastically as Blizzard Entertainment, which makes the absence of its smash hit Overwatch on the platform all the more disappointing. But that’s all right, because we have. Hearthstone is basically Magic: The Gathering for folks in a hurry, as it scraps Magic’s labyrinthine rules in favorite of relatively intuitive cards and decks styled after heroes from Blizzard’s popular Warcraft universe. Nor is it just a Mac game.
Part of the beauty of Hearthstone is that it plays just as well with the same account from your iPhone or iPad as on a Mac, thus freeing you to take your card battles from your desk at home to the city bus. You’ll probably have to spend some cash on some card packs in order to get the most out of it—which has always been the trap of collectible card games, be they real or virtual—but as its enduring popularity and expansion packs show, millions of people think it’s more than worth it.
May be the perfect game. It’s a puzzler at heart, but it injects those puzzles—which involve the best placement of the titular portals, which you create with a gun—into a masterful concoction of science fiction, memorable characters, and even a catchy song. It’s both memorable and challenging, and those challenges are designed in such a way that you feel triumphant when you finish. It’s also darkly relevant these days, centered as it is on a struggle with a malevolent A.I. Whose passion for her work goes to inhuman extremes. Also a standout: the voice acting of J.K.
Simmons as the facility’s founder. Many games are full of action and fury, but takes a different tack by riffing off of Harvest Moon from the late ‘90s. It’s a game about farming (if you want it to be), but it’s also a game about chatting and possibly dating some of the locals in the sleepy little town you’ve chosen to call home. It’s a game about rival factions and small-town politics. It can also be a game about exploring a mysterious cave if you wish, but first and foremost it’s a relaxing and emotionally rewarding game about the ups and downs of life. Stardew Valley may look like a cousin of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but in practice few games veer so far from fantasy as to capture the quiet delights or tragedies of reality.
“One more turn,” as the Civilization diehards like to say, and now we have one more game in this beloved strategy series that stretches back for decades. Some of those diehards will tell you that Civ V is the better game, but stands out for providing a smoother path to entry for newcomers and a host of experimental new concepts. Some work better than others, no doubt, it’s fun to try out each in the shoes of some of the most celebrated nations and figured of history. You’ll design cities, smartly placing key district next to each other on a gridded play area resembling a board game. You’ll raise armies. You’ll spread religions and dominate with science. And if you do well, you’ll bend other civilizations (and your friends, in multiplayer) to your will.
You see the word “assassin” thrown around a lot in games, but few games do a good job of capturing the tension of a flawless assassination. Stealth is barely a thing anymore in the popular Assassin’s Creed series, and these days it feels more like a hack ’n’ slash. But the episodic drips with tension. It also gives you multiple means of going about your dirty business, each with different probabilities of success. It’s also beautiful, frankly, both in the costumes Agent 47 dons to get closer to his targets and the settings that range from Parisian streets to sweaty Moroccan markets. As an extra bonus, the first episode is free.
Lara Croft isn’t as recognizable as Mario in the pantheon of gaming greats, but she comes pretty darn close. In the past, though, she had little in the way of personality. Remedied that by presenting us with a harrowing origin story where Lara starts out both vulnerable and human, and over the course of several bloody hours we see how she morphs from a humble scholar and into the strong-willed fighter we know today.
Filled with beautiful locations and elements of survival games (though without the drudgery), it’s one of the more successful reboots in gaming memory. And while the newly ported has better gameplay and better tombs to explore, it never reaches the emotional highs and clear character development of the first game. Is a strange beast. It insists on that lowercase “e” in the title, and yet it plays so fast and loose with the lore of J.R.R. Tolkien’s universe that the man himself must be getting uncomfortable from all that spinning in his grave. And yet for all that, it’s glorious fun.
It’s a tale about an elf and a human ranger in the same body. Together, they fight crime!
Or more specifically, they parkour over the spiky towers of Mordor, kicking orcish butt and forcefully recruiting orcs to their cause. (I told you it plays fast and loose, didn’t I?) But it’s most remarkable for how it goes about it. Shadow of Mordor boasts a “Nemesis” system in which the orcs you fail to beat grow stronger with each fight.
Even more impressively, they remember you, and they refer to your prior encounters with shocking specificity the next time you see them in the field. It all goes a long way to making Shadow of Mordor feel more “real” than other games before it. It gets a little repetitive at times, but the sheer force of its personality makes it hard to forget. Even if you think you “get” how difficult space travel is, there’s a good chance you’ve never been hammered by its complexities so forcefully as you’ll be in. Miraculously, this quirky simulation manages to be fun, rewarding, and occasionally hilarious. Your mission?
To get the little green kernels to the moon and beyond using real-world physics (more or less), and these concepts are presented in such a way that you’ll likely learn the basic ideas behind space flight here far more clearly than you will from a book. Beyond that, you can capture asteroids and monitor them using a mission pack from NASA itself. Some players have been inspired into careers in astrophysics and aerodynamics through KSP, but it’s still plenty of plenty of fun if you’d prefer to keep your space-traveling ambitions limited to a Mac screen. It’s a rare example of educational games being done right. Takes place in space as well, but it takes a — shall we say — slightly less authentic approach to space travel and exploration.
(For now, anyway.) It’s still one of the best real-time strategy games on any system, and the South Koreans loved it so much that it practically defined a generation at its height. Part of its appeal lies in its memorable cast of characters, no doubt, but the bulk of its reputation rests on the satisfying differences between the Terran, Protoss, and Zerg factions, as well as the satisfying juggle of multiple priorities. If all of that doesn’t convince you to try it out, then consider this: It’s now totally free. You can buy the fantastic expansions if you wish, but the low price of nothing gets you both StarCraft II’s campaign as well as the addicting multiplayer component that still thrives today. The Baldur’s Gate Dungeons & Dragons RPGs of the early 2000s laid the foundation for much of what we associate with story-driven games today, and in 2015 Pillars of Eternity revived that text-heavy, isometric style in order to remind us it still has power in this age of movie-quality production values. Problem is, the first Pillars of Eternity clung a little too closely to that formula. Charts a slightly new course by introducing ship battles across an archipelago that breaks with predictable fantasy.
Most of these merely involve picking choices as in choose-your-own adventure storybook style, but the need to keep track of your crew’s mood and cheer them up with fruit and rum allows for a more engaging experience. And fortunately, someone clearly told the team of Obsidian to lighten up. Pillars of Eternity was a little too glum for its own good, but Deadfire wisely remembers to sprinkle in some wisecracks among the wizardry. (It’s new, so watch out for some remaining bugs.). If you haven’t heard, is essentially Lego for the digital generation. At its best, it’s about little more than digging for resources throughout a fully interactive landscape and building massive projects with them, whether those be simple houses or skyscraper-sized recreations of the original iMac.
In the most common mode, creatures come out at night and attack you for a bit of extra excitement, but you can do away with that and simply focus on the building you wish. It’s an appealing concept that’s made Minecraft a winner among adults and children alike. In concept, it’s one of the simplest games on this list, but it’s also one of the most timeless.
In this quiet indie game, you’re a ranger in a remote forest, keeping an eye out for potential wildfires. Knowing games, you’re probably expecting me to tell you that zombies come out at night and it’s your job to use your trusty shotgun to—nah, there’s none of that. Instead, it’s real forest ranger work.
You spend a lot of time looking for kids who left their junk littered around a scenic swimming hole, and all the while chitchatting (and sort of flirting) with another ranger in a distant tower. Creepy shenanigans are indeed afoot, but is more remarkable for its sense of place and characterization, to say nothing about its gorgeous settings and artwork that straddle the line between realism and impressionism. As much as it’s a store about finding answers to a local mystery, it’s a tale about finding oneself at the height of middle age.
Life is certainly strange even in the most mundane situations, but that statement especially rings true when you’re a teenager with superpowers, as you are here. If Firewatch was art because of how accurately it caught the uncertainties of middle age, is remarkable for capturing the ups and downs of adolescence. It’s also a sharp lesson in the Butterfly Effect. The key power in play here is the ability to rewind time, and Life is Strange proves that having the ability to go back and right past wrongs doesn’t always result in a happy ending. In fact, it sometimes makes things worse.
But not to worry, O ye of ample faith in humanity: It’s possible for things to work out for the best as well. Do you dare risk everything for a second chance?
That’s the question Life is Strange constantly asks, if you’re anything like me, you might be surprised at the answer you choose.