The best free Steam games are pretty easy to find. All you have to do is open up Steam, find the Categories menu, and click on Free to Play. This will give you a full list of Steam’s free titles — and even if you just take the most popular games into account, there are still more than 400 options. Luckily, if you need help narrowing down your list, Tom’s Guide is here to help.
We’ve researched the best free Steam games based on their popularity, the depth of their gameplay and our own personal experiences with them. The games listed below are perfectly playable, even if you never spend a cent, with rich experiences for paying and non-paying players alike. Furthermore, we’ve tried to explore a variety of genres. (Free-to-play shooters may be a dime-a-dozen, but they’re not necessarily to everyone’s tastes.)
Read on to find the best free Steam games — and remember that if you’d like to try any yourself, you already know where to find them.
Apex Legends
Apex Legends skillfully threads the line between being a battle royale game and a form of hero shooter. Based in the same setting as the excellent Titanfall games, Apex Legends pits you and up to two others in a game that’s sees a mix of teams fight to the death in on a large map that slowly condenses with a deadly forcefield closing in.
This might sound like another version of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds. But the suite of skills each character has, from tracking abilities to teleports and shields, and a great selection of semi-sci-fi weapons, combined with fantastic movement, elevates Apex Legends above other battle royale games. And with added classes and content as the game matures, it’s a great choice for a top free game that you can lose hours upon hours in with that ‘just-one-more-game’ approach.
Brawlhalla
Brawllhalla is a 2D fighting game that has the same chaotic energy as Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Much like the latter game, Brawlhalla is easy to pick up and blends a mix of original characters with licensed ones; characters from Rayman, to Tomb Raider, to The Walking Dead and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are featured.
And up to eight of these characters can battle it out on arenas with multiple platforms. Do be aware that the free-to-play element here means the characters available rotate on a weekly basis. But thankfully, there’s no option to spend money to get a character that’ll give you an advantage over other players, meaning the brawling is even. If you do decide to splash the cash, it’ll be on cosmetic items only.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is what you get after a mod for the original Half-Life gathers such a following that it becomes not only its own game but a form of its own genre. Counter-Strike offers team-based first person shooter action with objectives that see terrorists and counter-terrorists face off against each other. Victory can come in the form of completing an objective, like successfully planting or disarming a bomb, or simply wiping out the other team. And with fast-paced action and a wide selection of weapons this can be both very challenging and a lot of competitive fun.
Crusader Kings II
“Grand strategy” and “free-to-play” don’t often go together, but Crusader Kings II from Paradox Interactive demonstrates that the pairing might have some legs. Crusader Kings II started life as a regular paid game, in which you take control of a Christian king in medieval Europe. The goal isn’t just to wage war on neighboring countries; it’s also to establish diplomatic ties, secure your family’s legacy and see how you can reshape the history of the continent. If you want the game’s DLC and expansions, you’ll have to pay up, but you can play for quite a while without plunking down any money.
Doki Doki Literature Club
Here’s an unusual one. Doki Doki Literature Club starts out as a Japanese-style visual novel about a high school student who courts a variety of pretty girls. As you play through this short game, however, you might get the sense that something is amiss — and as you begin your second playthrough, events become even stranger. To say more would spoil what makes Doki Doki Literature Club such a trip, but if you’re in the mood for a story that gets turned completely on its head, this is a good one. Just be aware that it’s not for the faint of heart.
Dota 2
Dota 2 is one of Valve’s most popular games. One of the big players in the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) space, Dota 2 started life as a Warcraft III mod, and eventually took on a life of its own. If you’ve played League of Legends or similar games, you know the drill: Choose a hero, team up with a few other players and lead an army of AI-controlled soldiers to conquer an enemy base. Dota 2 is a colorful, fast-paced game that tests both your tactical and strategic thinking. Communicating with your teammates is key. But if you get good, you can earn quite a few in-game rewards — or you can buy them with real-world money.
Gwent
You can’t play The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for free — but you can arguably play the best part of it without paying money. Gwent is a collectible card game that served as a side activity in The Witcher 3. It was such a hit with fans that developer CD Projekt Red expanded Gwent into its own free-to-play game. Naturally, you can spend real-world money on booster packs to augment your deck, or you can earn in-game currency as you refine your skills and defeat your foes. Gwent offers a lot of tactical depth, in both deck construction and how you play.
Path of Exile
Imagine if Blizzard’s Diablo series were free-to-play, and had an extremely long story campaign, and that’s Path of Exile in a nutshell. In this isometric hack-and-slash RPG, you’ll take control of an adventurer, then carve a bloody swath of destruction through thousands of monsters in your quest for revenge. If you’ve played a game like this before, you know the drill. Each class has a variety of skills to master, and you can collect tons of weapons and armor, each with different benefits, as you go. Paid transactions can get you extra storage space or cosmetics, but nothing that radically changes gameplay.
Star Wars: The Old Republic
While many people may have wanted Knights of the Old Republic 3, Bioware came up with MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic in 2011. It got fairly positive reviews at the time but a rocky launch and entering into a post-World of Warcraft world saw Star Wars: The Old Republic get a little overlooked in some ways.
But to Bioware’s credit, the developer kept adding content to it, including in 2022 with the Legacy of the Sith expansion. What we now have is a huge online multiplayer RPG with a rich story and a fantastic vein of Star Wars pseudo lore to tap into.
The relatively cartoon-like graphics keep it feeling less dated that one might think, and it still plays well in that classic party-based format. If you have the time and inclination, then this is definitely a Star Wars game worth checking out. Just bear in mind, only the base game is free, as you’ll need to pay for high-level story packs.