Fun Packed Open Source Action Games

An Eclectic Selection

The action game is a video game genre that focuses on physical challenges, including hand–eye coordination, anticipation, and reaction time. It is one of the hardest gaming genres to define. Given the popularity and longevity of the action game genre, developers have tinkered with the formula extensively. The genre is therefore fairly wide as it encompasses platform games, fighting games and shooter games. Sometimes real-time strategy games are also included in the genre. Many action games share similar design mechanics.

There’s a wide range of open source games in this field. Action games lend themselves remarkably to open source development. We’ll leave aside real-time strategy games, as they were covered in this earlier article.

The games featured here are actively maintained, and cross-compatible on all 3 major platforms (and some even go beyond that). The source code is available for every game here. So you can have fun playing and modding these games to your heart’s desires. If your favorite action game is not in the list below, it’s either not open source, or because we’ve limited our selection to only 7 titles.

The following games represent our pick of the best action games. We only advocate open source games here. And we give preference to games that run on multiple operating systems.

Games are not listed by any sort of ranking. They are all worth downloading and free in every sense.

We’ve written these open source game compilations highlighting fun arcade style games, turn-based strategy games, real-time strategy games, first person shooter games, simulation games, card games, board games, and more.