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1610 Action games reviewed and scored, best first.
1610 reviews
Analgesic Productions' first 3D game turns exploration itself into the combat system, wrapping a strange, sincere story of memory and identity around a hidden-in-plain-sight overworld that critics adore and a vocal share of players found thinner than promised.
7.5 / 10
A visually extraordinary sequel that nearly every reviewer, on both sides of the score, agrees looks and sounds better than its beloved predecessor -- while a wide majority of its critics argue the writing that made that predecessor special didn't come along for the ride.
7.5 / 10
Ubisoft rebuilt Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag from the ground up on the current Anvil engine rather than simply upscaling it, and the parts that made the 2013 original a fan favourite — Edward Kenway, the Jackdaw, the whole rotten, beautiful Caribbean — survive the trip largely intact. What doesn't survive as cleanly is some of the combat identity Ubisoft chose to strip out along the way.
7.5 / 10
The most beautiful open world Ubisoft has built, and the clearest case study in gaming of a cash shop reaching backwards into a game's design. Eight years on it costs NZ$19.99 and holds 89% — but the level gates it built around its XP boosters are still exactly where they were.
7.5 / 10
A Hades-and-Dead-Cells-flavoured roguelite metroidvania whose art, combat feel and hub writing draw strong praise for its opening hours, with a consistent, specific counter-argument that its meta-progression grows passive rather than build-defining once the difficulty ramps up.
7.5 / 10
Obsidian trades the open world it once pitched for four dense, handcrafted regions of Eora, and the trade mostly pays off — sharp first-person combat and companions with real opinions, wrapped around a plague mystery that resolves faster than it deserves to.
7.5 / 10
Power Wash Simulator, but the walls are watching Backrooms Cleanup Crew tasks you and your crew with scrubbing up after a previous exploration team's disastrous trip into the B
7.5 / 10
Supergiant Games' hand-painted debut about a shattered world and the narrator who comments on your every move, still Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 28,000 reviews — and one where a consistent minority of players describe the art and narration as carrying a combat loop and story structure that never quite lives up to them.
7.5 / 10
Irrational Games' 2013 spiritual successor to BioShock trades Rapture for the floating city of Columbia, delivering a story reviewers still call unforgettable more than a decade on — while a genuinely huge, well-documented reviewer backlash targets a mandatory third-party launcher 2K added years after release, a real anti-consumer controversy this review takes seriously rather than dismisses.
7.5 / 10
An action-combat MMO where the fighting is closer to a character-action game than a tab-target RPG, the real long-term game is an offline worker economy running nodes and trade routes while you're logged out, and gear upgrades can fail hard enough to destroy the item you spent months building. Ten years old, still getting weekly content, and still the most mechanically dense MMO most players will ever half-understand.
7.5 / 10
A neon-drenched, psychedelic retro arcade shoot-'em-up roguelite that pairs a genuinely novel "start your next run fully stacked" power-up system with old-school Robotron-style difficulty, backed by an early review pool that is unanimous but still small enough to treat with some caution.
7.5 / 10
A horde-survival roguelite that makes you actually fight, forcing constant swaps between melee and ranged weapons against enemies built to resist whichever one you're not holding — a deliberate answer to the genre's reputation for playing itself.
7.5 / 10
Koji Igarashi's Kickstarter-funded spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night is still a deep, generously-supported Metroidvania seven years on -- but a December 2025 switch to requiring Epic Online Services has visibly dragged its recent review score down from Very Positive to Mostly Positive.
7.5 / 10
A free, remarkably polished student-made action-adventure where you play a warrior swordfish who impales enemies on its beak and throws them back as weapons, gorgeous and inventive but over almost as soon as it finds its footing.
7.5 / 10
A stylish, retro CRT-inspired 1-4 player Pong successor for couch and online play, widely praised for its addictive, easy-to-learn-hard-to-master competitive gameplay and gorgeous presentation, but undermined at launch by a Steam Deck regression from its well-liked demo.
7.5 / 10
A from-scratch, MIT-licensed rebuild of the real-time area-denial puzzle Microsoft shipped in its 1990s Entertainment Pack — wall off empty sections of the board to trap bouncing balls before they can wreck an unfinished wall, rebuilt here with dedicated touch controls rather than a mouse-only port.
7.5 / 10
A tightly designed, gorgeously scored solo or co-op roguelike shooter about fighting your way up an ever-taller tower of bugs, held back from greatness only by how quickly its 80 waves run out once you've seen them.
7.5 / 10
A Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven squeezed into js13k's 13-kilobyte limit, starring a black cat that auto-attacks waves of enemies while you drag it around a flower field — and the drag-to-move touch control genuinely works.
7.5 / 10
Developer Kittens in Timespace, published by Megabit Publishing, delivers a chaotic, melee-focused 2D action game starring nine playable stray cats reclaiming a city from a villainous corporation, earning near-unanimous praise for its character variety, art and soundtrack from a small but strongly Positive review base, tempered by a single, specific complaint about visibility on smaller or zoomed-out screens.
7.5 / 10
A PSX-style first-person survival horror game that sends players scavenging a killer-clown-infested 1999 summer camp for supplies and lore notes, winning over nearly its entire review pool with its retro aesthetic, unexpectedly strong writing, and generous accessibility options, despite combat that most reviewers found too easily exploited to stay tense for long.
7.5 / 10
A visually stunning, richly written supernatural action game widely called a Remedy highlight — with a genuinely well-documented 2021 "Ultimate Edition without the Ultimate DLC" controversy, and a still-unresolved oddity for a single-player game requiring an internet connection just to launch.
7.5 / 10
A short, free precision tunnel-runner starring a fully voice-acted Count Dracula accelerating endlessly downward through an obstacle-filled tube, praised by its small review pool as a surprisingly polished, funny aim-trainer disguised as a novelty game.
7.5 / 10
Your Desktop Is The Arena Now CPU Invaders - Aim Hero, released January 30, 2026 by Microblast Games as a spiritual sequel to the studio's earlier Steam Awards-nominated overla
7.5 / 10
Pearl Abyss's massive, visually stunning open-world action-adventure launched to a rocky Mixed reception — a specific, documented 51% positive Steam score in its first days — before climbing to Very Positive within a week and staying there through five months of relentless, near-weekly patches, even as a real, ongoing thread of criticism argues the game never fully shakes its origins as an MMORPG stripped of its multiplayer.
7.5 / 10
