Whether you’re creating a government, mining for resources, or building a Dyson sphere, the granular micromanagement in Stellaris can feel overwhelming at times, but everything fits together wonderfully. While it’s more accessible than other Paradox titles, it’s still a complicated beast that consists of running an empire, exploring the galaxy, and claiming new worlds and systems as your own while tackling RNG random encounters that could indefinitely change the course of your game. Stellaris brings together two of my favourite genres: sci-fi and grand strategy.

Any games that didn’t make it into the top 50 were brutally sliced off the bottom and lost to the annals of history. Add them together and you get something approaching a consensus. Each person’s top choice got 25 points and each underneath it got one point less. To achieve this, we used science: everyone on staff picked their top 25 games of the last ten years and placed them in order. Since we don’t get many chances to look at a decade as a whole, we thought it’d be nice to look back on the past ten years in video games and select what we consider the best of the best, ranking them all to boil some piss. The same goes for video games - the gaming landscape has changed in those ten years, with many developers now focusing on building games that will last a decade, rather than be consumed and forgotten, in the form of service games. Maybe you weren’t longing for an asteroid. Perhaps you had another job, lived in a different house, or you have a different circle of friends. Just think back to where you were in 2010 and there’s a good chance your life was different. You don’t realise how long ten years is until you sit back and take stock of what’s happened in the space of a decade.

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