8 Great Retro-Futuristic Sci-Fi Games

The Outer Worlds

Sci-fi western RPG full of colorThe people who made the Fallout series got ideas for The Outer Worlds from movies and TV shows like True Grit, Firefly, Futurama, and, of course, Fallout. The result is a game that feels like the American frontier but is set on different worlds. There is also a good amount of humor and satire in the game.

In The Outer Worlds, the player is on a journey that takes them through the colonies and badlands, where big corporations are colonizing and taking over new planets for their own profit. Similar to Fallout and Borderlands, this will involve shooting raiders, monsters, and other enemies in the head or otherwise hurting them. However, The Outer Worlds will add its own twist, such as a limited slow-mo feature that gives players an edge without making things too easy.

Bioshock: The Collection

The player is immersed in the city of Rapture in the first two BioShock games. A kind of neo-noir city that was lit up like Gotham in the 1960s but was submerged in water and covered in mystery. Sometimes, the background noise of an old “Beyond the Sea” recording will take the player back in time while the city of the future falls down around them. The main character finds Rapture in bad shape and full of crazy people, like the Big Daddies who wander the dank ruins in their deep-sea diving suits and watch over their creepy Little Sisters.

In Bioshock Infinite, the story moves to a new place: a 1912 steampunk city that floats in the sky. This gives the game a new look, a new feel, and a new way to play. With Bioshock: The Collection, all three games were updated in 2016 to make them look and play better for today.

Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation is a unique addition to the retrofuturistic genre, but it is also one of the best. It takes place in the future, but it is based on the first Alien movies. So, the “futuristic” technology is what “futuristic” meant in the 1970s and 1980s. This means big mobile motion sensors, computers with lime green fonts and loading bars, and cartridges that you put into landline phones to save the game.

The fact that space technology is pretty old makes facing a xenomorph all the more scary. Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley, goes to the dangerous and empty Sevastopol Station to find out about her mother, but she isn’t alone. Half the time, she has nothing but her wits to help her get through tight maintenance tubes and scares that make the player jump out of their skin. It’s a great movie-like experience with personalities that are just like those in the famous Ridley Scott movie.

Fallout (series)

After a nuclear war in 2077, the Fallout games take place in different times. In the world of Fallout, the art, technology, and buildings that have survived remind me of a post-war, 1950s-ish America. But advances in technology and atomic energy have led to things like robots and laser guns.

The irradiated wastelands of North America are risky places where players can go and explore. In later Eggy Car games, they can do these things while listening to the sound of old jazz records on their radio. When mixed with the sound of their Geiger counter, it makes them feel like they’ve gone back in time. As players kill supermutants in the toxic badlands, the music has a very ethereal feel to it.

Wolfenstein New Order & New Colossus

In the famous first-person shooter games in the Wolfenstein series, players kill waves and waves of Nazis for different reasons in each game. These Nazis aren’t your average Nazis, though. In New Order and New Colossus, the Third Reich gets ahead and wins World War II because it has better technology.

William “B.J.” Blazkowicz doesn’t just get the blood (and it will be bloody) of the opposing Nazi forces on his hands. It is also the same as that of their strange, armored monsters. If you like crazy, powerful shooters with a twist on history, you don’t need to look any further. These games don’t take themselves too seriously, but the gameplay is great and the personalities are great. They are violent, funny, and full of blood.

Borderlands (series)

People often say that the Borderlands series is a “shoot-n-loot” first-person shooter and RPG. It looks like a comic book, has some gory violence, and is very funny. Most of the games take place on or near the planet Pandora. An ancient race’s wealth and technology are found in bunkers on a planet that had been abandoned and was dangerous. This brings the planet back to life. The player takes on the part of different vault hunters who have to kill a lot of alien monsters and raiders who were left behind on a planet that isn’t very friendly.

Because of this, there are a lot of crazy and violent figures to play with. The Borderlands series has games with tight FPS gameplay in styles like fantasy, the Wild West, and pop culture. Not to mention the treasure hunting, which is very fun and can lead to finding more and more strange weapons of death.

Destroy All Humans!

The book Destroy All Humans! The player controls Crypto, an alien who wants to save or kill his clone brother, who was killed by a rocket in 1950s America. He is also sent to collect Furon DNA from people, but the real point of the game is obvious. Since humans won’t obey Crypto, they must be killed.

It’s fun to kill helpless suburbanites with a death ray from a flying saucer and destroy harmless civilian buildings with all hellfire. Or on the ground, scaring people with Crypto’s look before throwing them into the sky with psychokinesis, watching them fall back to Earth, and collecting their brain stems. Even though it’s fun at first, the humans will eventually attack Crypto with more powerful (but made-up) 1950s technology. This keeps the game from being too one-sided.

Atomic Heart

In the alternate history of Atomic Heart, the Soviets won World War II because of advances in science and technology. In comparison to the old, the style of the day is communist-red propaganda with a sci-fi twist. Everyone calls each other “comrade” with a strong post-war spirit, even the many robots who are part of society and proudly wear the red star. The setting is very engaging, and the graphics and game design really bring it to life.

Of course, not everything goes well in this communist ideal where people love robots. Like always, the robots turn on their masters. Agent P-3 is going to fix the problem by going up against all kinds of machines that used to be friendly but are now scary. From the creepy ones with no faces that move like cruel crash test dummies to the robo-ballerinas with no faces at all. No sir, these bots are no longer P-3’s friends. Even though Atomic Heart has been criticized for having gameplay and conversations that aren’t as smooth as they could be, it’s still a memorable experience.