Best games for laptops and low-end PCs

The best laptop games on the market today

range from tiny indie games you maybe haven’t heard of, like Thimbleweed Park, to wildly popular triple-A games along the lines of The Sims 4. Whatever your play style, schedule and hardware, we’re willing to bet you’ll find something on this list that you’ll enjoy.

Civilization 5

As long as you have an Intel Core i3 or better CPU, you’ll have enough grunt in your low-end laptop to run Civilization 5. And if you’re looking for a game that you can carry on your hard drive until the day it dies, it’s hard to ignore Civ 5.

There’s plenty of depth with the expansions and the mods available in the Steam Workshop, although chances are the Complete Edition will have enough content to keep you going through those lonely nights in hotels. It also plays just fine with the touchpad, which can be a lifesaver sometimes if you don’t have a spare mouse around.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

But sometimes you just want to open up your laptop for a bit of virtual catharsis. So for that moment, I give you the best Ork Slaying Simulator around: Relic’s Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine.

It gets repetitive at points, but Space Marine is basically an unhinged, non-stop slaughter of Orks from start to finish. It’s also quite an old game by today’s standards, and should have no trouble maintaining a perfectly playable framerate on laptops with the 6th or 7th generation Intel CPUs. (Here’s how the game runs on an Intel HD Graphics 4600 if you want a reference.)

Sleeping Dogs

Sometimes you just want to lose yourself in an open world. And what better world to explore than the brutal streets of Hong Kong. Sleeping Dogs was already incredibly well optimised on PC, but it runs just fine on laptops as well. I’d recommend packing a controller in your travel case for this, and it’s not the kind of game you want to download on airport Wi-Fi.

But any integrated graphics from the HD 2500 series and up can run Sleeping Dogs, albeit at reduced settings. And besides, sometimes when you’re miles away from home it’s just good to grab a bike and punch a few blokes in the face. (The story is also uncannily good, if you like the undercover cop shtick.)

Euro Truck Simulator 2

You might miss having your full trucking rig from home, but any laptop with an Intel HD 4000 or better GPU will be able to run SLS’s cathartic trucking simulation. Euro Truck Simulator 2's relaxing nature already makes it a strong candidate for being on your laptop, but the added benefit is that the game has a full suite of keyboard controls. You’ll still have to use the trackpad to turn the game’s camera around, but since left and right is mapped to A/D you can manage that on a laptop pretty easily.

Borderlands

Borderlands is a classic loot-driven open-world shooter that you can play with up to three friends. While some of the humor has aged poorly, it’s still a rush to tear down a boss and see what goodies it has left behind.