Unvanquished
Overview
Unvanquished is a free, open-source first-person strategy shooter — a real-time strategy game played from a first-person perspective, in which evolving aliens and heavily armed human soldiers fight for their survival. It is a fork of Tremulous powered by the Dæmon engine (descended from Quake 3 with work from ET:XreaL), in active development since 2011 and one of the most technically ambitious free games around.
Key Features
- Two asymmetrical factions — humans rely on long-range firepower, armour and buildable defences; aliens rely on speed, stealth and wall-crawling, evolving from the humble granger up to the tyrant.
- RTS/FPS hybrid — earn upgrades through individual performance and map control, then spend build points on spawns, turrets, armouries and egg clusters to expand your team’s reach.
- Base-destruction objective — a match is won by destroying the enemy base so the opposing team can no longer spawn, not by kill count alone.
- Dæmon engine — a modern renderer targeting OpenGL 4.6 with automatic fallback to 3.2 and 2.1, plus bloom, rim lighting, motion blur, heat haze and colour grading.
- Advanced rendering — multi-textured terrain blending, normal and relief mapping, glow, gloss, specular and physical material maps, and GPU-optimised DDS/CRN textures.
- RmlUi interface — an HTML/CSS-based user interface with community translations in several languages.
- Navmesh bots driven by behaviour trees, plus 2D minimaps and a real-time beacon system.
- Community maps and mods — servers can serve extra content, and clients stream custom maps and mods on join.
Why Use It
Unvanquished is the rare free game that feels like a modern commercial shooter while shipping its complete source code and art under free licences — no ads, no microtransactions and no account required. The two factions play genuinely differently, and because a team wins by out-building as much as out-shooting, teamwork and map control matter more than raw reflexes. It runs on modest hardware (2 GB RAM and 64 MB VRAM at the lowest preset) and scales up to an OpenGL 4.6 ultra preset on modern machines. Current stable release is 0.56.2 (May 2026).
Use Cases
- Team-based online matches on public servers, with a server browser and an active community.
- LAN games against bots when you want to play offline.
- Playing the alien builder (or laying out turret networks and armouries as a human) to steer a match.
- Enjoying a full-featured free shooter on old or low-power hardware.
Platforms
Official launchers for Linux (amd64, plus a Flatpak), Windows (amd64 and i686) and macOS (amd64 and arm64 via Rosetta 2). A universal zip covers Linux i686, armhf and arm64, and the engine can be built from source on FreeBSD. A fresh installation needs roughly 600 MB of disk space.
Licence
Free and open source — the source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (with a couple of GPL-compatible BSD-licensed files), and the game media is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.
Similar Games
- Xonotic — free and open source arena FPS in the directory.
- OpenArena — another free, open-source Quake-style multiplayer shooter.