The 8 Best Space Video Games in Cloud Gaming (Stadia, GeForce Now)

And people think going to the cloud for gaming is bold, ha. There’s a growing list of reasons why cloud gamers should want to go beyond the cloud, deep into the final frontier. That’s because the number of quality space shooters, looters and sims continue to expand on cloud gaming platforms like Google Stadia and NVidia GeForce Now. Here’s a look at eight of the best space video games cloud gamers can play via the cloud, right now.

1. Elite Dangerous

It’s becoming everything the original Elite series set out to be in the late 80s and early 90s. Just as the original Elite franchise upgraded its flight model, scale and economy over each subsequent entry, Elite Dangerous continues to evolve far beyond the kickstarted reboot released in late 2014. 

The space-trading simulator that was released in 2014 has leveled up with several seasons of content that have built the game out, and have even rebuilt some of the core gameplay. For example, the Horizons season of content eventually became free, bringing with it desirable fundamental changes to the gameplay loop: planetary landing, planetside vehicles, character creation, bases, first-person shooter action and much more.

With the release of the Odyssey expansion imminent, now’s as good a time as any for cloud gamers to explore Elite Dangerous on GeForce Now. The Odyssey DLC will expand on the planetary landings and base building with first-person shooter action.

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic 77%, Opencritic 79%

2. X4: Foundations

The deeper you go into this game, the higher you climb – so high, that eventually X4: Foundations evolves into a grand strategy game. X4: Foundations’ tagline, “trade, fight, build, think,” is pretty succinct at describing the point of all the dogfighting, asteroid mining, resource trading, economy tilting, empire-building you’ll do in this game.

Newly updated with its latest expansion, Cradle of Humanity, and polished up with a free update (4.0), X4, like X3 before it, continues to near the game we’d all hoped it would be when it launched in 2018. Be warned: this is a complex space trading sim with a fairly steep learning curve. While you won’t need to be some sort of savant to get the most of out this game, you will need a bit of patience and may want a third-party tutorial to help you live the imperial dream: prosperity, success and space superiority.

If the learning curve is a bit offputting, the graphics, atmosphere and gameplay are soothing in a way that sort of dilates time. Time moves differently here, and you’re likely to enjoy every minute of it. 

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic 59%, Opencritic 68%

3. Deliver Us the Moon

A vast as space is, it’s often quite claustrophobic of those of us humans who get to experience it. Deliver Us the Moon offers a mix of first- and third-person action to deliver us the astronaut experience. But this isn’t a pure simulator or survival game. It’s enriched with drama and thrills that make what would already be an unforgettable experience, even more memorable. The game tasks you with exploring a near-future, abandoned colony on the moon. Adding to the stakes of your adventure: all of humanity, ravaged by the impact of climate change, is relying on to succeed.

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic 68%, Opencritic 71%

4. No Man’s Sky

Like the other sandbox space sims on this list, No Man’s Sky has turned its struggles into redemption. These days, the game looks a lot like what gamers had envisioned ahead of its August 2016 launch. Developer Hello Games has spent the last four years polishing the graphics with new textures, lighting, assets. It also adds more assets, deeper base building, more environmental details and more to flesh out the heavenly bodies stuffed in this massive sandbox. The game has even expanded its multiplayer over the years, the latest being its cooperative Expeditions expansion. Expeditions delivers events that place the community at shared starting points, encouraging players to link up and explore the universe together.

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic 61%, Opencritic 70%

5. Emperion – Galactic Survival

It’s easy to compare Emperion – Galactic Survival to No Man’s Sky, but much easier to contrast the two. That’s because Emperion is certainly its own game, with its own gameplay loop and vibe. While both games leverage procedurally generated planets and assess, Emperion Galactic Survival puts much more emphasis on the sandbox aspect than exploration. Think Minecraft…. In, spaaace! The crafting and logic engine lets you build elaborate structures that can fortify a position planetside, ships that serve as capitals for other ships and even massive orbital stations.

Emperion Galactic Survival is still in Early Access. And while it offers partial controller support, you’ll probably want to bring a keyboard and mouse with you if you intend to play this space video game via the cloud in your living room – or wherever your primary cloud gaming headquarters is located.

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Early Access

6. Everspace 2

You can make an argument for which of the space video games available to cloud gamers offer the most realistic combat or the most breathtaking skirmishes. It’s arguably the best space video game packed with the purest, gun-on-gun, pulse canon on canon combat. Yep, it’s Everspace 2. There’s crafting, there’s exploration and there’s even light mining. But all of the crafting, mining and exploration are but means to the ends – looting, shooting and saluting.

Everspace 2 build’s on the successful formula employed by the original game, which is on both GeForce Now and Stadia, bump adds deep customization and much prettier looking asteroid, station, ships and more.

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic n/a, Opencritic 83%

7. Stellaris

There will be plenty of blood and explosions and stress, but many more soothing moments, backed up by a good orchestral score, in between each turn in this space-based, 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) strategy game. While the story may not feel like the most intriguing sci-fi story around, Stellaris is a beautiful game. It offers deep, satisfying gameplay mechanics with an engrossing diplomacy system – all speckled across a wide-open universe that hosts about a thousand systems teeming alien races made unique with the help of procedural generation.

Also, if you’re a cloud gamer who likes to game with a controller, Stellaris, like most “deep-end” strategy games will require a keyboard and mouse.

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic 78%, Opencritic 81%

8. Endless Space 2

If you want to go beyond the “exploration” element of a good space game, Endless Space 2, a turn-based 4X strategy game, gives you equal parts of the other three Xs: expansion, exploitation and extermination. Choose from any of the nine available alien races in the game to build your galactic empire and conquer those who refuse to assimilate. Some of the nine races include the Vaulter race that was finally forced onto its colony ship and off its unforgiving homeworld. There are the Horatio, a race of clones birthed by an eccentric trillionaire. And there are the insectoid Cravers, whose hunger drives them to consume more and more worlds. 

Of course, there’s plenty of politicking as you try to navigate the cultures of foreign races as well as your own. Each of the alien races is unique and asymmetrical, meaning this space-based strategy game offers plenty of replayability. 

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic 80%, Opencritic 82%

Honorable Mentions

If you haven’t jumped into a game listed here, then you’re late to the party. Yeah, you could dive right in and find yourself bankrupt of free time, and enjoy every minute of it, or you find yourself lost in the lore of a game brimming with veterans who’ve done multiple tours of the game while you were still nursing on milk – okay not exactly true, but some veteran players might give you that impression.

Eve Online – Choose who you want to be, where you want to go and who you want to go within the massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in outer space.

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic 69%, Opencritic n/a

Warframe – If you’ve heard of this space game, then you’ve probably heard how it grew from a game about space ninjas, essentially, to a much more fleshed out version of developer Digital Extremes’ initial vision of the game.

Platform: GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic 69%, Opencritic 75%

Destiny 2 – Derided as Destiny 1.5 early on, Destiny continued its predecessor’s cadence of content. And with each content drop, the user reviews became more favorable. It’ll more than scratch your itch if you’re a cloud gamer who’s looking for some first-person shooter action in your space video game.

Platform: Stadia, GeForce Now | Review Scores: Metacritic 83%, Opencritic 88%

Wanna get ideas for the next set of cloud games to play on GeForce Now and Stadia? Check out our list of the 8 Best Sports Games in Cloud Gaming or take a look at the Top 10 Role Playing Games on Google Stadia and NVidia Geforce.