The best free strategy games for PC

Strategy games and the PC are made for each other — the genre takes up quite a few slots on our list of the best PC games. With the precision of a mouse and the power of a good graphics card, the depth and complexity inherent to their design can be fully fleshed out into massive, expansive worlds that offer dozens, even hundreds of hours of entertainment. Best of all, many of our favorite titles are free-to-play games, letting you choose if you want to pay for expansions or content beyond the base game. You can try out any one of our top picks for yourself, without worrying our differing tastes will fool you into spending money on a game that just isn’t for you. These are a few of our favorite strategy games that you can play for free on the PC today. We’re including promising Early Access titles, strategy titles beyond the usual war strategy games, and more.
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Gaming has always been an expensive hobby, but it is only getting worse in 2025 and beyond. If you take a look at the list of upcoming video games, you will see more and more games all charging $80 for the base version. That’s a lot of money to spend on a single game, so a lot of us will need to be more discerning about which games we choose to buy at that price. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to play fewer games if you know where to look. There are dozens of free games to pick from, but those almost always come with the pressure to buy various microtransactions to get the best experience. These games are all complete packages you can buy for less than the price of lunch and have a fantastic time.
Undertale
The art of the video game trailer is a delicate one. A trailer needs to get people excited to play an upcoming video game, while ideally being representative of what that game will actually be. However, it has become clear that plenty of trailers — at least the ones without gameplay — are more interested in generating hype than being especially faithful. These are our first glimpses at the world, characters, and maybe even bosses of a game, but presented like a short film. Because trailers can be so different from what the final game becomes, we wanted to find the best video game trailers judged only on their effectiveness as trailers and not take into consideration how accurate or good the game they are advertising was. It is just as likely that a terrible game and one of the best games of all time will have an amazing trailer. After digging through the archives of hundreds of video game trailers from every console generation, we’ve come up with a list of the best video game trailers ever made.
There can be a bit of confusion when it comes to determining what qualifies as a video game remake and what is a remaster. Typically, any game that is ported to a new console with some visual improvements and quality of life features added without any major changes to the core systems or mechanics is considered a remaster. Remakes, on the other hand, rebuild the entire game from the ground up with new assets, models, and even content in some cases. Things have gotten a bit more confusing as of late, with plenty of remasters looking like remakes, and some remakes calling themselves remasters. Remasters remain the best way to relive classic games from older video game consoles on modern hardware. We cut through all that confusion to craft a definitive list of the best video game remasters of all time.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD
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