Games like Critical Mass: turn-based dogfights with simultaneous turns

Critical Mass sits in a small, stubborn genre: turn-based dogfighting with simultaneous resolution. You give orders while time is stopped, everyone's orders execute together, and the skill is guessing where the other side will be, not how fast you can twitch. Here is everything we know of that scratches the same itch — the game itself first, because it is still there, then the rest, roughly by how close they come. Where a game is only cousin-close we say so.

Critical Mass (1996, still maintained)

Start with the original. Sean O'Connor still sells and updates it — Windows via the Microsoft Store, iPhone and iPad, Android, Kindle — and a free Windows version is on his site as it has been since the shareware days. Squadron of ships, drag an arrow from each nose, six homing missiles, forty mission types. Its story is on its own page. windowsgames.co.uk →

Prisma Duel (2026, browser, free)

An homage to Critical Mass and the reason this page exists. Same overhead view, same secret orders, same drag-a-course-out-of-the-nose control with momentum you have to plan around; then everything resolves together over four seconds. Different in what it fires: one fighter each with a nose-mounted laser that is a real spectral ray tracer, an arena of dichroic crystals that refract it into a rainbow, mirrored walls that close in, and up to four people in a browser tab with no download. Play it →

Steambirds (2010) and Steambirds: Survival (2011)

The closest thing in feel. Top-down, turn-based, you draw a curved path for each of your planes, hit end turn, and every plane on both sides flies it at once, guns firing automatically at anything in the arc. Alternate-history WWI-ish aircraft rather than spaceships, and no momentum to speak of — but if you loved dragging that arrow, Steambirds is the modern game that understood why. Originally Flash; Survival went to iOS and Android.

Scramble: Battle of Britain (2021, early access)

Simultaneous turn-based WWII dogfighting in full 3D. In the planning phase time is paused and you set each aircraft's flight path by adjusting pitch, roll, yaw and throttle rather than picking from a menu; then a simulation phase plays everybody's decisions out and a review phase lets you rewind it with a free camera. Serious about the flying, but the shape of a turn is exactly Critical Mass's.

Sid Meier's Ace Patrol (2013) and Pacific Skies

Turn-based dogfights on a hex map, WWI biplanes then WWII carrier aircraft. Turns alternate rather than resolve simultaneously and manoeuvres are chosen from a menu, so it is a step away in feel — but it is the most polished turn-based dogfighting game most people have actually played, and it is quick.

Flight Commander 2 (1994), Over the Reich (1996), Achtung Spitfire! (1997)

Big Time Software's trilogy for Avalon Hill, and the other 90s Windows games people confuse with Critical Mass. Overhead map, an order phase and an execution phase, jets in the first and WWII prop fighters in the other two. In Flight Commander 2 you literally drag the arrow at the tip of a flight path, capped at ninety degrees of turn. Proper wargames with a rulebook, so heavier than Critical Mass, but the same order-then-watch loop, and Flight Commander 2 is playable in a browser at the Internet Archive.

Frozen Synapse (2011)

Not aircraft, not space — squads in corridors — but the purest expression of the we-go idea: you plot, you can preview any hypothetical enemy plan, you commit, both sides' orders play out at once for five seconds. If the thing you miss is the commit-and-watch dread rather than the spaceships specifically, this is the game.

Laser Squad Nemesis (2002)

Julian Gollop's simultaneous-turn squad game, built for play by e-mail: both players issue orders, both submit, a ten-second replay resolves them with pause, slow motion and rewind. Same lineage as Frozen Synapse, and older.

Renegade Legion: Interceptor (1990)

SSI's conversion of FASA's board game: you command a squadron of space fighters, plot each one's thrust and facing on a hex map, and the AI is unforgiving. Space, squadrons, fighters, plotted movement — the ingredients are Critical Mass's; the hexes and the die rolls are the board game's. Also on the Internet Archive.

Fleet: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator (1996)

A shareware contemporary of Critical Mass, and the other one that turns up in the same "what was that game" threads. Hex-based, larger starships rather than fighters, and its central mechanic is splitting the ship's power between engines, weapons and shields each turn — which is exactly the trade Prisma Duel makes you make between thrust and the laser.

FighterCommand (in development)

A small indie on itch.io: turn-based squadrons, drag to set each plane's move, both sides plan secretly and simultaneously, then it plays out. Early, but its one-line pitch is the genre's.

The thread that connects them

Every game here shares one design decision: your orders and your opponent's orders execute in the same breath. It is rarer than it should be, because it is hard to make feel good — too little control and the result is a dice roll, too much and it is a puzzle. Critical Mass hit the balance in 1996 with a drag limit per ship. Prisma Duel's answer is that speed and the laser draw from the same power, so every turn is a small argument with yourself before it is one with anybody else. How that plays, and the game.