10 Best Military Simulators: No Toy Soldiers

Best Military Simulators

The next-gen platforms—the PS4 and Xbox One—are set to receive a new simulation/action game in the form or Rainbow Six Siege, a game in which you take on the roles of SWAT team members, or hostage-taking bad guys. It harkens back to the old SWAT series of games and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six series, both of which were visceral simulations of military and police tactics. We look forward to playing it. In the meantime, check out what games you can pick up at the present in the genre.

In the genre of military shooters, these gamers are being serviced by features that give a game a sense of heightened realism that regular shooters just can’t (or simply choose not to) deliver. A type of game where running and gunning won’t work, where advancing through unknown terrain has to be taken slowly, where a single shot can kill.

These games are relatively young in comparison. While there have always been shooting games with what I like to call “military flavor”, very few tried to get close to “what it’s really like”, with most of the earlier shooters going for a “what it looks like in the movies” type deal.

That all changed when Operation Flashpoint came along in 2001. While not being the biggest financial success in gaming history, Operation Flashpoint showed that there was indeed an audience for military games that were a lot more heavily grounded in realism. Let’s take a look at some more of those titles.