Games like Pardus

Pardus has been flying since September 2004. It is a browser space MMO from the Austrian studio Bayer & Szell in which you are a single pilot in a persistent universe: you fly your ship from sector to sector, work out trade routes, take assignments, hunt bounties, smuggle contraband, and eventually swear into one of its factions, the Empire, the Federation or the Union. Every move spends action points, and those come back on their own clock (24 every six minutes, banking up to 5,000), so a pilot with a job and a family can compete with one who plays all day.

More than twenty years later the game is still online and still run by its makers, which is more than most of its generation can say. But the reviews that once praised it have largely rotted off the live web, and the crowd, while famously loyal, is smaller than it was. If Pardus taught you to love the slow, persistent browser universe and you want to know what else is alive in that lane, this is the list.

What are games like Pardus?#

Persistent browser worlds you inhabit rather than binge: nothing to download, sessions measured in minutes, and a universe that keeps moving between logins. Core Exiles is the nearest living single-pilot relative. Prosperous Universe rebuilds the trading half as a full economic sim. Torn is not set in space at all but runs on the same daily action budget. And Old Light, my own game, takes the same persistent-browser idea to empire scale. All of them belong to the wider family of free space strategy games and persistent universe games built around short sessions.

Is Pardus still worth playing?#

Yes, with caveats. The servers are up, the news page was still posting seasonal offers in December 2025, and the copyright line reads through 2026. It runs more than one persistent universe, the base game remains free, and premium accounts, sold since 2006, add extra features and universe access. It even collected a best free online RPG award back in 2005, in an era when browser games got that kind of coverage.

What you will notice is the age. The community that remains is loyal and long-tenured, with pilots who have held accounts since the mid-2000s, but it is a thinner crowd than the one that filled its universes at the peak, and the presentation has not chased modern fashions. If you have an old account there, going back is worth an evening. If you are looking for somewhere new to settle in for years, the games below are the strongest Pardus alternatives.

Core Exiles#

Core Exiles is the closest thing to Pardus still in active development: a free, persistent browser space MMO where you play one exiled captain making a living across six galaxies, starting in the Sphere Galaxy. You mine asteroids, salvage wrecks and derelicts, run missions, haul freight, and work a deep crafting and research system, and none of it ever resets. Its long-time developer is still shipping new content regularly, which is rare at this age.

The honest limitation is scale. The game's own front page counts recent player activity in the low hundreds, so this is a small, friendly universe rather than a busy one. If what you miss about Pardus is bumping into rivals, you will feel the quiet here too.

Prosperous Universe#

Prosperous Universe takes the trading half of Pardus and builds an entire game out of it. You run a spacefaring company rather than fly a ship: production chains, freight logistics, and a player-driven commodity exchange where every price is set by supply and demand, running around the clock. It is real time and deliberately slow, with most players checking in once or twice a day, which makes it the closest match on rhythm. A free tier lets you play indefinitely with limited features, and a subscription unlocks the rest.

That focus cuts the other way: there is no combat and no PvP beyond the market itself. If your Pardus years were spent hunting pirates or being one, this replaces only half the game.

Torn#

Torn is the odd one out, a persistent crime city with no spaceship anywhere in it, and like Pardus it dates back to 2004. It earns its place because the loop is the same one. Energy and nerve regenerate on a timer the way action points do, you spend them in short sessions, and progression compounds over years rather than evenings. It is also by far the most populated game on this list, with over 100,000 players logging in daily as of 2026, so nothing here feels abandoned.

The catch is the setting: if space is the point for you, a city of muggings and stock trades will not fill it, however well the mechanics rhyme.

Where Old Light fits#

Old Light is my own game, so read this section knowing who wrote it.

It moves the persistent browser universe from one pilot to a whole empire. You start with a single star system in one shared galaxy and grow it in real time, with builds finishing while the tab is closed. You project borders every player can see across the map, scout rivals with probes before committing to anything, and send fleets to defend or take ground. There are no action points; the pacing comes from build and travel timers instead, so it suits the same short daily checks Pardus does without a banked meter to manage. It is free, it runs in a browser with nothing to download, and no payment buys a bigger empire or better intel, so a fight comes down to numbers and position and there is no pay-for-power anywhere in it.

What it does not have yet is Pardus's social machinery. There is no player-to-player market, and while you can message other players, formal alliances are still on the roadmap. Old Light is also young, so the galaxy holds fewer neighbours than a world with two decades of history. The beginner's guide covers your first days if you want to see how it feels.

How they compare#

Which one to pick#

For the closest living single-pilot experience, make it Core Exiles and accept the small crowd. If trading was your whole game, Prosperous Universe does it deeper than Pardus ever did. Players who realise the daily action budget was the hook, and the setting negotiable, should look at Torn, the biggest and busiest version of that idea. And if you would rather command an empire than a ship, there is a separate rundown of games like Astro Empires, with Old Light as my entry in that lane: a shared galaxy on a slow clock, where nobody can buy power.

Pardus is still online and still free, run by the same team that launched it in 2004. Few browser games from that year survived at all. If it shaped how you like to play, it is worth a visit before you settle on a successor.