These games are most popoular to play in Linux, all the games is playable without “wine” and most of them are free software.

I wrote about top 15 strategy Linux games before, now its time to write about the action games.

1. Postal 2 – Share the pain

Scissors has released a free download version of Postal 2: Share the Pain. This is the complete multiplayer portion of the game, with the single player campaign removed.

2. Nexuiz

Nexuiz is a free, cross platform, first person shooter distributed under GNU General Public License by Alientrap Software. It started back in May 31 2005 with version 1.0 using DarkPlaces, a significanlty modified quake engine. The current version, 2.2.3, was released on January 26, 2007. Nexuiz’s logo is based on the chinese character “力” which means strength.

Several notable features of the game include

• ability to multiplay up to 64 players
• ability to generate bots for practice sessions
• dynamic lighting system similar to Doom 3

3. Sauerbraten

Sauerbraten (a.k.a. Cube 2) is a free multiplayer/singleplayer first person shooter, built as a major redesign of the Cube FPS.

4. America’s Army

America’s Army is a tactical, multiplayer, first-person shooter owned by the United States Government and released as a global public relations initiative to help with U.S. Army recruitment. The first version, Recon, was released on 4th July 2002. The current version 2.8.1 was released on 22nd Mar 2007.

It’s the first well known computer game used for political aims. The game is used as a playable recruiting tool and critics have charged the game serves as a propaganda device. A counter on the homepage of the PC version shows over eight million registered accounts as of 2007. GameSpy tracked the game usage and reported an average of 4,500 players at any one time between 2002 and 2005. It is enough for America’s Army to rank in the Top 10 Online Games chart.

5. Enemy Territory : Quake Wars

is a first-person shooter follow-up to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It also has the same science fiction universe as Quake 4, with a story serving as a prequel to Quake II. Quake Wars is the second multiplayer-only game in the Quake series after Quake III Arena. The gameplay is almost the same as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but with the addition of controllable vehicles and aircraft, asymmetric teams, much larger maps and the option of computer-controlled bots. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is being developed by Splash Damage for the PC using a modified version of id Software’s Doom 3 engine and MegaTexture rendering technology.

At E3 2006(Electronic Entertainment Expo), the game won the Game Critics Award for Best Online Multiplayer.

6. Tremulous

Tremulous is an open source team-based first-person shooter with a game play that is similar to Gloom(a quake 2 mod) and Natural Selection (a Half-Life mod). The game features two teams, humans and aliens, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game has been downloaded over 200,000 times and was voted “Player’s Choice Standalone Game of the Year” in Mod Database’s “Mod of the Year” 2006 competition.

7. World Of Padman

WOP is a new and free comic style game that uses the Quake 3 engine. The game was recently featured in 3 German magazine covers; PC Action, ‘BRAVO Screenfun’ and ‘Linux Intern’.

8. Alien Arena 2008

Alien Arena is a completely free FPS started by COR Entertainment in 2004 comprising of a science fiction ambience and a Quake like gameplay. This game is playable in single player mode against bots, but the action and thrill lies at the online multiplayer mode. Features of the Alien Arena 2008 include an internal server browser for finding other people to play online and an external program that acts as an IRC interface. There are 6 game types and 6 game mutators that changes the gameplay. Cattle Prod is a new game type that requires you to herd robotic cattle to earn points. Alien Arena 2008 is playable in Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.

9. Urban Terror

A mod of Quake III Arena, Urban Terror focuses a lot on realism. Number of weapons and gear that can be carried is limited. Accuracy is reduced when fired while moving and magazines require reloading upon expension. Damage areas are identified throughout the body. Wounds require bandaging and slows down movement significantly if the damage is not bandaged. Even a stamina bar is present to indicate if the player is able to sprint or jump. Released on 1st April 2007, Urban Terror 4 introduced 4 new features namely, ‘powersliding’, new weapons, player models and improved hit detection. It also supports anti cheating tools like PunkBuster, BattleEye and RunDMC.

10. Warsow

Warsow is a free FPS based in Qfusion 3D engine playable on Windows and Linux developed under the motto ‘by gamers for gamers’. Beta testers from the community goes through internal testing sessions and gives feedback on public releases where the main developers will carefully judge suggestions and comments made. Gameplay is focused a lot on agility. Weapons picked up will have weak ammo until a new ammo pack is found. Graphic effects are minimal, clear and visible.

11.TrueCombat: Elite

TC:Elite happens to be a total-conversion modification of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory by Team Terminator and Groove Six Studios. The game is free and playable across all platforms. Notable features include iron sights aiming (no crosshair), multi layer object penetration, letterbox / wide screen view modes, lag compensation, client side bullet prediction and support for PunkBuster, the anti cheat software.

12. Blob Wars: Blob And Conquer

In Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid, you take on the role of a fearless Blob agent, Bob. Bob’s mission is to infiltrate the various enemy bases around the Blobs’ homeworld and rescue as many MIAs as possible. But standing in his way are many vicious aliens, other Blobs who have been assimilated and the evil alien leader, Galdov.

13. Excalibur: Morgana’s Revenge v3.0

EMR 3.0 is a unique scenario based upon the Aleph One (Marathon) engine. It is a first-person action adventure game, featuring an epic and in-depth story line. It brings more exciting new maps, new high resolution textures and landscapes, a completely new set of weapons, new monsters and friends, new scenery, new 16-bit sounds, original music, and a carefully woven original story line that transcends time.

14. Smokin’ Guns

The Smokin’ Guns game started its life under the name of Western Quake³. It was originally developed by a team known as Iron Claw Interactive. They released WQ3 beta 2.0 in 2003, after which development all but ceased. In May 2005, development of Western Quake³ was taken over of by a bunch of cowboys calling themselves The Smokin’ Guns with the blessings of the former team. With the release of the stand alone version in 2008, the game was renamed to Smokin’ Guns, and the team to Smokin’ Guns Productions.