Having played almost everything in the genre, here's what I have to say about them...

• X-Wing - The original wing commander clone that made wing commander irrelevant by doing it better. X-Wing is unapologetically hard and the only choices the game offers you are git gud or eat shit. What you will eventually learn is that the mooks that are attacking YOU are the least of your concerns.

• TIE Fighter: For about half the game you don't have shields and take hits about as well as Mario, but it's alright because you're a veteran of the previous game's much more ruthless mission scripting. Any rebel not in an A-Wing has stormtrooper-grade aim.

• TIE Fighter Defenders of the Empire: SO MANY EXPLOSIONS SO MANY EXPLOSIONS SO MANY EXPLOSIONS SO MANY EXPLOSIONS SO MANY EXPLOSIONS OMG THRAWN SO MANY EXPLOSIONS

• X-Wing Alliance: Holy shit, we can afford enough polygons that fighters don't look like origami when viewed head on. Goodbye gouraud shading, hello really shitty low res bitmap textures. And let's squeeze in all the EU ships since we've got a whole CD to play with.

• Descent FreeSpace: Despite sharing basically no assets, story, or code with Descent, we'll call it that because Freespace is trademarked. The GTF Apollo is shit, you're supposed to think it's shit, and it never gets better. Eventually you unlock the GTF Hercules and the Prometheus cannon, at which point the game has to give the shivans an invincible supership to stop your march of terror.

• Independence War: WHEEEE I CAN DO THAT STARFURY THRUSTER TRICK FROM BABYLON 5. Too bad the game disc went to pressing with a catastrophic bug towards the end of the storyline that has a coin-toss chance of bricking your campaign that takes a save hack to fix.

• I-War 2: Sold pretty well in the UK, but they're about the only market that got discs it; stateside it was on shelves for all of about a month. By the time I got my hands on a copy of it I'd already played the much better...

• FreeSpace 2: The end of the genre. Seriously, after this there was nothing. The prometheus cannon from the first game was so good they have to contrive a reason to take it away for two thirds of the game. Unlike last time, nothing the shivans have is strictly speaking invincible; if you want to spend half an hour holding the trigger you WILL eventually kaser their juggernaut to death.

Descent: Freespace 1 and 2 are both very similar to Wing Commander but a few years more recent. They were both well received.

Wing Commander: Privateer was definitely my favorite Wing Commander, but it's different from the main series. It was then followed by Freelancer, made by the same guy who did Wing Commander, before he was given infinite money lost his mind while making Star Citizen. Freelancer is from 2003, so slightly less "retro". Privateer and Freelancer are both more about making your own way in a big universe and less about being a soldier and playing a series of missions. If you want more player freedom at the expense of less plot and cutscenes, definitely check them out. The modern version of these games is egosoft's X3 and it's expansions, which I recommend if you aren't specifically looking for retro, but the more recent X: Rebirth and X4 are both trash.

Someone recommended TIE Fighter, I recommend the rest of the series as well. X-Wing for the Episode IV plot, X-Wing Alliance for huge modding opportunities, and X-Wing vs TIE Fighter to act as a long form tutorial for the other games (the keybinds are mostly the same across all 4 games). See their respective PCGW articles for any bug fixes you may need (DG VooDoo is a must for running them as they were intended).

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is another one to try, being very much on the "simulator" side of the space sim spectrum, with things like power management, plotting nav coordinates to warp, and (in the campaign) multi choice dialogue.

Please get the GOG versions of these games, they are far more likely to work out of the box.

Since we're talking Wing Commander, I'm gonna go a little out in the pasture and recommend Terra Nova: Strike Force Centari. It's somewhere in between an FPS and a mechsuit simulator, wide open maps for each mission, and terrible FMVs, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the dropship cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumble bees on them.

Memes aside, Wing Commanders FMV scenes made the Terra Nova devs feel they had to include FMV scenes, and I have fond memories of playing that game.

Protip: In some missions the Multipulsar sometimes has more range than the enemy AI, which means you can SLOWLY pick off an enemy at range if a mission is giving you a hard time.

If you really want something with futuristic fighters, try Fury^3, Hellbender, Terminal Velocity, all very similar games by the same devs, but you're in atmo.

Can your PC run TIE Fighter? Or is it too advanced to run such old junk?

Here's a recommendation that is a little different but for a more casual game have you considered Flight Simulator? I remember a game called Ace Combat, that had multiple titles

I too am so lazy I can't be bothered to look anything up to help myself.

I thought I was on reddit when I saw this post. Nothing like waiting around for other people to solve your problems and find your entertainment. This kind of laziness is precisely how hallucinating AI grows in popularity, everyone demands instant answers for their lack of any effort. Pathetic kid, learn how to research your hobbies instead of being a pantywaste