The list of Mac Games keeps growing and all these games are available to play on your Mac, from blockbuster RPGs to racing, shooting games to puzzles. These are the best games for Mac.
Unfortunately in recent years, the number of great games for Mac has declined because many are no longer supported. Every new version of macOS tends to break a few games, but macOS Catalina in 2019 meant that lot of games that used 32-bit code were no longer Mac compatible.
At the same time that Apple went 64-bit only it also introduced Metal for 3D graphics, which left a lot of games developers with a decision: make new Mac versions of their games or stop making them. Unfortunately many chose the latter.
This will hopefully change now that macOS Sonoma is here. With Sonoma, Apple provides two things: a new Game Porting Toolkit to make it easier for game developers to bring their games to the Mac, and a new Game Mode to ensure a game gets the highest priority on GPU and CPU, for better playability. Read: How to use Game Mode to boost performance.
Even before the changes that Sonoma brought, and contrary to popular belief, Mac gamers already have plenty of top games titles to choose from – indeed, the most difficult part is narrowing down the options, and then finding the money to buy and time to play them. We can’t help with the latter, but the first problem is right up our alley. In this article, we’ve collected the best Mac games for your delectation – including some of the best new games.
Below you will find what we believe are the greatest Mac games out there, together with links to the Mac App Store, Steam and other reputable vendors, so you can buy them right away. These are the very best games for Mac. They are in alphabetical order, not in order of preference (because everyone likes different things).
Updated June 2024 to add The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road.
You may also like to take a look at our Best Mac for gaming guide. Plus we have an in-depth look at using an M1 MacBook Pro as a gaming laptop. And if you want some free games to try out on your Mac take a look at our round-up of the Best free Mac games. Best Mac Games 2024
Before we run through our list of the best games we’ve played on the Mac, here are games that we strongly recommend you play on the Mac in 2024.
1. Death Stranding: Directors Cut (Mac)
Apple is currently attempting to make up for around 40 years of neglecting the Mac games scene – probably because it thinks that a few good games might help to boost sales of the new Vision Pro headset (cynical, moi? You betcha!). It hasn’t exactly catapulted the Mac games scene into the stratosphere, but there are a few high-profile games now starting to arrive on the Mac, and 2024 gets off to a good start with the arrival of Death Stranding, the idiosyncratic and sometimes downright bizarre game from Hideo Kojima, the renowned developer behind the long-running Metal Gear series.
The game is set in a near-future version of the United States, in the aftermath of a mysterious apocalyptic event known as the Death Stranding, which has caused the collapse of society. All that’s left are a few scattered communities, which rely on ‘porters’ to deliver supplies and help set up a communications system called the Chiral network. That’s where you come in, playing Sam ‘Porter’ Bridges – who is voiced by, and modeled on the actor Norman Reedus of Walking Dead fame – as he trudges across the country delivering his supplies. Along the way, you’ll encounter terrorists and creepy invisible monsters called BTs (‘beached things’), but your real foe for much of the game is simply the environment around you.
There is some combat in Death Stranding, but your main task as a porter is to struggle across the rocky, ruinous countryside as you embark on a series of missions to deliver your cargo of medicines and other supplies. The game is sometimes described as a ‘walking simulator ’ as you spend much of your time clambering over rocks, up hills, or wading across rushing rivers and streams. That may not sound terribly exciting, but there’s a lot of satisfaction as you struggle to slowly inch your way towards the peak of a craggy hill with your cargo intact.
The game also has a dramatic cinematic flair – possibly a little too cinematic, as the first 45 minutes or so is really just a series of very long cut-scenes, interspersed only by a few brief sequences where you learn how to control Sam as he walks, jumps and wades across the rocky terrain. The long cut-scenes can try your patience in the early stages of the game, but they do look terrific – the landscapes have a cinematic scope, and the 3D graphics are tremendously detailed and realistic. And the feeling that this is the gaming equivalent of a blockbuster Hollywood production is further emphasized by cameos from a number of other Hollywood big names, including Mads Mikkelsen, Guillermo Del Toro, and Lindsay Wagner.
The graphics do require a bit of horsepower though. The game will only run on Macs and iPads that have an Apple Silicon processor (M1 or later), and running macOS 13.3 or iPadOS 17.0. We were pleased to find that the game ran well even on an iMac with an M1 processor, although we did have to lower the resolution to 1920×1080. You might need an M2 or M3 to really enjoy the game’s sweeping vistas and eerie special effects, but seeing a game like Death Stranding running on an M1 iMac gives us some hope for the future of games on the Mac.
2. Resident Evil 4 (Mac)
It can be a little tricky following the sequence of the Resident Evil games – especially as most of them have never been released on the Mac. Last year’s Resident Evil: Village was the eighth game in the long-running series, although it was the first ever to arrive on the Mac, and also one of the first games written specifically to run on Macs with Apple Silicon. However, Resident Evil 4 is actually a newer game (sort of) as it’s a remake of the original Resident Evil 4, which was first released back in 2005.
Being a newer game means that it’s considerably more expensive, though, weighing in at a rather hefty $59.99/£57.99. However, it works hard to earn its keep with “juiced-up visuals and a reimagined story” as well as improved controls for combat and other character actions. And, thankfully, you can actually download the game for free and play through the opening section, before deciding if you want to go ahead and buy the full version of the game as an in-app purchase (along with some rather pricey DLC packs too).
This installment follows the adventures of special agent Leon S. Kennedy – a floppy-haired special agent from an earlier game in the series – who has now been recruited to rescue the kidnapped daughter of the US President. Tracking her down to a village in Spain, Leon encounters a spooky cult called Los Iluminados, who have turned the villagers into crazed killers. You have to fight your way past the villagers and confront various bosses as you track down the President’s daughter and attempt to uncover the cult’s true plans. Resident Evil 4 has some good jump scares along the way, but it’s more action-oriented than Village and doesn’t have quite the same creepy and tense atmospherics. It certainly keeps you busy, though, as you shoot and slice your way through the villagers, and encounter the mysterious figures who control the cult. And, of course, it’s pretty gorey too, with a 17+ age rating.
Like Resident Evil: Village, this game runs on Macs with Apple Silicon, and it ran pretty well even on a 24-inch iMac with a basic M1 processor. It felt a little sluggish initially, but seemed to run quite smoothly once we turned the resolution down to 1,920 x 1,080, and experimented with some of the graphics settings (the game will also run on iPads with Apple Silicon, and even on the iPhone 15 Pro as well).
3. Total War: Pharaoh – New for Mac users
After a fairly epic detour into the fantasy worlds of Warhammer, the Total War series is back on its home turf once more, returning to the more traditional historical settings that the games have explored in the past. This time it’s ancient Egypt for Total War: Pharaoh, set in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age, and covering the lands of Egypt itself, as well as neighboring Canaan and the Hittite Empire.
There are eight factions spread across these three lands, all competing to take the throne of Egypt and become the next Pharoah (with additional factions available to purchase as DLC on Steam). Each faction has its own leader, with their own individual strengths and abilities, such as the reckless young warrior Ramesses (who has a tendency to “put the chariot before the horses”), and the cunning Tausret, who uses diplomacy and finance to pull the levers of power. If you’re new to the game then there are several tutorials available that introduce the basics of battle, as well as more advanced tactics, such as siege warfare, and learning how to use the land and weather to your advantage.
Pharoah might not have the otherworldly spectacle of the Warhammer games, but it still looks great, with spectacular vistas as the rival armies charge across the desert dunes. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t run on older Macs that have Intel processors, but it ran quite smoothly on an iMac with a basic M1 processor when set to 1920×1080 resolution (and using the new gaming mode in macOS Sonoma).
The main single-player campaign should keep you busy for quite a while, and as well as creating custom battles to hone your skills you can also customize the main campaign, adjusting the troops, resources and money that are available to make the game more challenging. It’s a shame, though, that the game’s multiplayer mode only allows you to play with other Mac users, as this means that – without being able to play against PC users – you’ll have a fairly limited choice of online opponents.
4. Baldur’s Gate 3 – Best single-player RPG
The original Baldur’s Gate games were classics of the RPG genre when the series was launched almost 25 years ago, but their 2D graphics haven’t aged well, despite an HD update in 2012. However, the forthcoming Baldur’s Gate 3 brings the series well and truly up to date with slick 3D graphics and a vast adventure that looks set to match the epic scale of its predecessors.
It’s actually been available in ‘early access’ on Steam since 2020, but the game finally has a firm release date for August 2023 so you can now dive in and test drive the early chapters of the game to prepare yourself for the arrival of the full game in just a few months time. It’s not a true sequel as the story and the main characters are all new – set more than 100 years after BG2 – although it is still set in the famous Baldur’s Gate region from the popular Dungeons & Dragons table-top games (and – spoiler alert – some familiar faces do make a welcome reappearance).
Rather than the powerful, god-like being that you became in Baldur’s Gate II, the new game lets you start from scratch with an entirely new character, chosen from the traditional D&D selection of races and classes – humans, elves, dwarves, wizards, warriors and rogues – and you then awake to find yourself prisoner on a flying ship controlled by Mindflayers (a familiar villain from D&D lore). The ship is attacked by dragons, but you’re able to escape – only to find that a Mindflayer larva has been implanted inside your brain. So, along with other survivors from the crashed ship, you set out to try to find a cure and then quickly find yourself embroiled in a mysterious war between the Mindflayers and an assortment of enemy races – who won’t be fully revealed until the game’s launch in the summer.
The 3D graphics really bring the game to life as you and your companions wade into combat, but the spectacular visuals do need a fairly fast Mac in order to run properly. The developers says that the game will run on an Intel Mac with a quad-core CPU and an AMD graphics card, or on most Macs with M1 or M2 processors. However, we had to drop the resolution to just 1600×900 on our M1 iMac in order to get a playable 25fps, so an M1 Pro or higher might be better. Fortunately, the game’s turn-based combat doesn’t require lightning reflexes and high-speed action, so you can still get by with an M1 Mac if you need to.
The decision to opt for turn-based combat might worry old-timers – like yours truly – who remember the terrific real-time-with-pause system of the original games. But turn-based is the trend these days, and if my time in the early access game is anything to go by then you’ll find that the old Baldur’s Gate magic will soon tempt you in as you “gather your party before venturing forth” – just like the good old days!
5. Elder Scrolls Online (Gold Road Update) – Best non-subscription MMO
Elder Scrolls Online is one of the few MMO games that is available on the Mac, and it celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2024 with the launch of a major update called Gold Road. The game has seen a lot of changes along the way – both to the game itself, and also to the Mac platform, following the transition to Apple Silicon.
The bad news is that developer Zenimax now states that Apple Silicon “is not officially supported”. In fact, the game does run on Macs with Apple Silicon – thanks to Rosetta – although some users have reported poor performance even on high-end Mac models. However, I was able to get a perfectly playable 40fps when running the game at 2,560 x 1,440 resolution with high graphics settings on my MacBook Pro with M2 Pro, and 55fps on medium graphics. There’s no free trial available for Elder Scrolls Online, but the game does run free play events every few months that allow you to play free of charge for a couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for these events if you’d like to check the game out before buying.
One of the good things about Elder Scrolls Online is that – unlike MMO rivals such as World Of Warcraft – it doesn’t require a subscription to play. You do need to pay $19.99/£15.99 for the base game (until end of June 2024 this is $5.99 at Epic), or $49.99/£42.99 for the complete Gold Road Collection – which includes a whole decade’s worth of expansion packs – but after that you can play for as long as you want without having to pay a monthly subscription (although a subscription is available as an optional extra).
Even the base game is huge, with a vast continent full of snowy mountains, windswept deserts and murky marshes for you to explore. There are epic quests, a wide range of skills and abilities to master and, of course, there are the inevitable dungeons and quite a few dragons that you can face on your adventures as well. As always, the Gold Road expansion adds a new region for you to explore, and a major new storyline called The Return Of Ithelia. It also introduces a major new magic system to the game, called Scribing, which provides new skills and spells that can be customized so that you can create a unique set of skills that really allow you to play just the way that you want.
6. The Elder Scrolls Online (High Isle Collection) Best non-subscription MMO
Along with World Of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls Online – or ESO to its thousands of fans – is one of the few A-List MMO titles that still supports the Mac (sadly, we lost Guild Wars 2 a couple of years ago…). But, unlike WoW, you don’t need to pay a monthly subscription to play the game, which makes it great value for players who want to immerse themselves in hundreds of hours of quests and adventures in the game’s online world of Tamriel. Some people – i.e. me – also prefer its grittier graphical style to the Disney-esque cartoon graphics of WoW.
ESO keeps its fans coming back year after year by releasing regular expansions – which it refers to as Chapters, as each new chapter brings a new story and a new series of quests to the game, as well as opening up new zones for you to explore. The latest chapter is High Isle, which takes you to the homeland of the game’s Breton race, and throws you into a story of political intrigue involving High Isle’s rival factions and a mysterious organization known as the Ascendent Order. Other new features include a new deck-building card game that you can play to while away a few hours, and two new computer-controlled companions for players who prefer to go questing on their own. And, of course, there are plenty of new quests to complete and dungeons waiting to be plundered.
You can buy the base version of the game for $19.99/£15.99 (until end of June 2024 this is $5.99 at Epic), or buy the High Isle Collection, which includes High Isle and all the previous chapters for $49.99/£42.99. Or, if you already own the game, you can just upgrade with High Isle on its own for $29.99/£24.99. Once you’ve bought the game you can play for as long as you want without paying a monthly subscription, and there are enough dungeons and quests already available to keep you busy for years. However, you can pay for an optional subscription if you want ($14.99/£8.99), which provides bonuses such as a larger inventory for storing all your gear and some extra gold coins to spend in the game’s online store.
The Mac version of ESO did have a wobbly patch, around the time of Catalina, but it now runs well on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and we were able to get a playable 30fps from the game at 1920×1080 resolution even on a basic M1 processor on our 24-inch iMac.
7. Resident Evil: Village – Best horror game
The Resident Evil games are the sort of A-List titles that rarely come to the Mac, so the announcement at 2022’s WWDC that Resident Evil: Village would be released on the Mac at the end of the year was big news for Mac gamers. The game doesn’t disappoint either, providing a series of creepy locations for you to explore, and a variety of supernatural menaces to fight against.
Mac users, of course, will be new to the games, but Village starts off with a brief recap of the previous game to bring us up to date. Three years ago – in Resident Evil 7 – Ethan Winters and his wife, Mia, were trapped by the Baker family in Louisiana, who had been infected – and mutated – by a mysterious black mold. They managed to escape, assisted by para-military operative Chris Redfield, and then three years pass by before things start to get weird all over again. Ethan and Mia are now living peacefully, along with their young daughter, Rose, until Redfield suddenly reappears, gunning Mia down in cold blood and kidnapping Rose. So, playing as Ethan, you now have to pick up the trail and try to figure out what is going on.
It’s a frustrating game to get into at first, as the early stages of the game simply involve stumbling around a dark forest, liberally scattered with dead animals. Eventually, though, you discover the Village of the title, which is under siege by wolf-like Lycans, and find clues that suggest your daughter is being held in the conveniently creepy nearby castle. The pace barely lets up after that, with the game combining atmospheric horror and manic combat in equal measure (not to mention enough gore and bad language to merit a 17 age rating).
Apple used the game at WWDC to demonstrate the graphical performance of its new M2 chips – but the good news is that we found the game runs pretty well even on a 24-inch iMac with the older M1 chip. The bad news is that (a) it doesn’t run on Intel Macs at all, and (b) you’re paying extra for the Mac version, which costs $39.99/£34.99 on the Mac App Store, while the Windows version – released in 2021 – is half that price on Steam. It’s still a great game, though, and hopefully it’s just the first of many A-List titles that we can look forward to on the Mac in the new couple of years.
8. World Of Warcraft: Dragonflight – Best subscription MMO
World Of Warcraft has dominated the MMO genre for almost two decades now, and is one of the few A-list games to have staunchly supported the Mac throughout its history – in fact, it even provided an update that allowed the game to run on Apple Silicon Macs as early as November 2020. It’s had a few ups and downs in recent years – both in the real-world and in the game’s virtual world of Azeroth – but the release of the Dragonflight expansion at the end of 2022 was a welcome return to form, providing some important new features and also updating some of the more dated aspects of the game.
Dragonflight costs $49.99/£39.99, and is required in order to enjoy new features such as raising your characters to the new maximum of Level 70. It also gives you access to the Dragon Isles, which contain four major new zones for you to explore and go adventuring. The Dragon Isles are also home to a new playable race of ‘draconic humanoids’ called Dracthyrs, who can play as the new Evoker class, which has the ability to choose between either healing or combat abilities.
And, on entering the Dragon Isles, you can also obtain your own ‘drake’ – a flying dragon that allows you to learn a new set of ‘dragonriding’ skills that let you fly further, faster and higher as you explore the new zones. Throw in a more streamlined skill tree and a number of improvements to WoW’s aging interface, and the entire game feels more sprightly than it has done for several years. You don’t have to buy Dragonflight straight away though, as WoW still provides a free trial that takes you up to Level 20 for free, while owners of previous versions of the game can still continue to play – without the new Dragonflight features – by paying for a monthly subscription ($12.99/£9.99 per month, with discounts for three-month or six-month subscriptions).
9. Classic Marathon – Best Retro Action Game
Apple is trying very hard to encourage games developers to come back to the Mac, but – around 30 years ago – there was a time when big-names such as Bungie actually developed their games on the Mac first (until Bungie was taken over by Microsoft).
