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60 Automation games reviewed and scored, best first.
60 reviews
A game about ratios, throughput and the compulsion to make one number slightly bigger than it was five minutes ago, built with an engine precise enough to run that compulsion at a million entities without falling over. Ten years on, it is still the reference point every other automation game gets measured against.
9.5 / 10
Fifteen years past release, the hardest part of reviewing Minecraft isn't judging whether it's good — it's telling a new buyer which of its two incompatible engines to actually install, and being honest about what stopped changing while the block count kept climbing.
9 / 10
An automation game solved in three dimensions instead of two, where every belt run is something you physically walked and every ratio problem is also an architecture problem. Five years after leaving Epic exclusivity, its 1.0 release confirms it was worth the wait.
9 / 10
A hacking-themed incremental where the automation you'd normally unlock with currency is automation you write yourself, in real JavaScript against a real API — free, open source, and still getting rewritten out from under its own players five years after launch.
8.5 / 10
A mining sandbox that turns "just one more tile" into a genuinely well-paced RPG — skills level as you use them, bosses gate the map instead of a level counter, and up to eight players can dig through it together.
8.5 / 10
A tower-defense game where the enemy isn't units but a fluid — cellular automata standing in for an AI, spreading through terrain rather than pathing along it. Reviewed on its full lifetime and recent Steam review corpora, an 11-year-old cult favourite that some of its own harshest critics have played for thousands of hours.
8.5 / 10
Build a machine that makes gold, then spend three hours making it smaller — 97.1% positive, nine years old, and still receiving patches a fortnight ago.
8.5 / 10
A space-colony simulation where the number that scales isn't a character level — it's the tangle of pipes, wires and thermal gradients you're personally responsible for keeping alive, and the game never once lets physics take a day off.
8.5 / 10
Two and a half years after the meme that ate January 2024, Palworld's 1.0 finishes the job — a survival sandbox whose real subject is labour, with 72 more Pals, a level-80 ceiling and two new regions bolted onto the top of it.
8.5 / 10
An automation game that skips the usual pretend-programming abstractions and just hands you a Python-shaped scripting language, then asks you to actually write the loops and functions that run your farm. The rare "learn to code" game that works as a game first.
8.5 / 10
Erik Asmussen rebuilds his own factory-town formula from the ground up around a controllable avatar, a hungry volcano deity and a full ocean of islands — a sequel that risks alienating veterans of the original in its opening hours before proving, mechanic by mechanic, that almost every change was worth making.
8 / 10
A factory game where your conveyor belts double as your ammo supply, so a bottleneck in copper isn't a spreadsheet problem, it's a hole in your wall. Free and open source on Android and itch.io, a paid one-off on Steam, and one of the most distinctive marriages of automation and tower defence around.
8 / 10
A pure factory-automation puzzle stripped of combat, scarcity and even failure, where the only opponent is a shape's own geometry. The tightest version of this genre's core loop yet built, and a useful test of what's left once every source of friction is removed.
8 / 10
You move to Shenzhen, take a job building circuits, and read a manual you're expected to print out — and the most-upvoted negative review, at 905 votes, recommends it anyway.
8 / 10
The game that started a genre, fifteen years old, and the lowest-rated of the seven engineering puzzlers in this library — which turns out to say more about being first than about being worst.
8 / 10
A city builder where the antagonist isn't a raid or a monster roster but a drought timer, and every dam, canal and reservoir you build is really an answer to a scheduling problem. Beavers are the theme; water is the game.
8 / 10
The most austere game Zachtronics ever made, and the one whose store page promises least — which is exactly why it rates higher than the siblings that promised more.
8 / 10
A colony sim that turns its whole progression system into a programming lesson — you don't unlock better robots, you unlock better scripts, and the game lives or dies on whether that scripting language can keep up with the colony you build with it.
7.5 / 10
A factory-automation colony sim where the terrain itself is a resource — you mine the ground you build on, dump waste that physically piles up, and the island's shape becomes a side effect of every production decision. Four years into Early Access, with two to four more to go by the developer's own estimate.
7.5 / 10
A factory-automation game whose endgame isn't a bigger number but a visible megastructure eclipsing a star. Five years into Early Access, the premise is still the best in the genre — the question is whether the game around it has caught up.
7.5 / 10
A survival-automation game that makes terraforming the actual win condition instead of a late-game side quest, tying every conveyor belt and machine you build to a planet visibly coming back to life around it.
7.5 / 10
A 1997 hacker fantasy where you write assembly to keep a disease at bay — and where the puzzle is usually working around what the language deliberately can't do.
7.5 / 10
Bluehood Games' incremental mining sim nails the first ten hours — hand-mining gives way to smelteries, upgrade trees and a claimable world map of parallel dig sites at a fair one-time price. The prestige layer that's supposed to carry the back half is where players keep hitting a wall.
7.5 / 10
A free browser incremental where every attempt is a program — a fixed mana budget, an action queue you write in advance, and a loop that runs it out to the letter. Skills carry over between attempts, the interface never stops being a spreadsheet with buttons, and the game has outlived three different maintainers without ever quite finishing.
7.5 / 10
