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90 Automation games reviewed and scored, best first.
90 reviews
The factory-building sequel to NGU Idle swaps rebirth layering for conveyor belts and work orders, builds a genuinely interesting system out of it in its first six weeks, and then stops. It has been Early Access, unfinished, since April 2021.
6 / 10
An incremental dressed up as a slot machine parlour — pull the lever, earn virtual cash, automate your way out of debt — that most early reviewers finish in a single sitting, with the flattening mid-game progression curve as the main point of disagreement.
6 / 10
A solo-developer factory-automation game that ships complete rather than in Early Access, with a genuinely responsive dev and procedurally generated worlds, but that its own review corpus repeatedly measures against Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program — and finds wanting on the tutorial, controls and combat that stand between you and the automation.
6 / 10
An idle game about writing software that picks the smartest possible theme for the genre — and then hits a scaling wall a few tiers in, while its design is still being rewritten in public.
6 / 10
Read review of Yet Another Incremental Game (but this time about coding)
A US$2.99 solo-dev idle collectathon — Pokemon's capture loop grafted onto a Forager-style island economy — that Steam's own review corpus calls "Mixed" for reasons that are mostly about launch-week polish, not the underlying design, from a developer who patched hard for five months and then quietly moved on to other projects.
5.8 / 10
A NZ$4.49 Cookie Clicker-style incremental from EagleEye Games, checked against every single English Steam review it has — all 53, positive and negative — plus its own achievement-completion curve and vote-weighted community tags, which rank it an Idler and an Incremental well ahead of the official "Simulation" genre label.
5.7 / 10
One entry in a whole shelf of near-identical cheap idle RPGs from the same solo developer, with genuine long-term depth for players who push through — and a first hour so poorly explained that one reviewer called it "the easiest refund of my life."
5.5 / 10
A free grid-placement idle game about squeezing adjacency bonuses out of factories, power plants and research labs — a genuinely interesting core idea let down by CPU-hungry building animations, a map you can't scroll, and content that most players clear in an afternoon.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developed sci-fi colony sim with modular ships and a genuinely interesting machine-uprising threat, left to drift after a March 2025 launch while its one developer moved on to a different game.
5.5 / 10
A free-to-play idle strategy MMO about building an egg-themed civilization, split almost exactly down the middle between players who find real layered depth in its economy and combat systems, and players frustrated by a slow start, progress-halting bugs, and lingering distrust of the developer's previous game.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$1.43 pixel-art clicker about tapping a gold bar, buying pickaxes and mine carts across six palette-swapped regions, and running two short bonus minigames — checked a week after launch, with no prestige loop found anywhere in its own achievement list.
5 / 10
A free-to-play sci-fi idle game split almost exactly down the middle, with "AI slop" the single most repeated word in its negative reviews — and a store-page disclosure confirming AI tools were used across art, writing and UI text, rather than leaving that complaint unverified.
5 / 10
A cheap, no-frills automated-combat idle RPG from a developer who has released more than a dozen very similar games — genuinely relaxing for players who just want numbers to climb, undercut by a total lack of offline progress and a review base too thin and too non-English to lean on with confidence.
4.8 / 10
A post-apocalyptic reskin of developer FreeMind's own hit Farmer's Life, swapping the horse and hand-sown fields for a legged robotic tractor and a seed-drone, and landing at a Mixed rating with its harshest reviews arriving in the week it left Early Access rather than the months before.
4.5 / 10
A free, charmingly drawn pixel-art idle clicker that most players finish in under four hours and largely enjoy for what it is, undercut by resource usage several reviewers describe as alarming for such a simple game and a DLC presentation several find pushed harder than the content underneath deserves.
4.5 / 10
A NZ$12.49 seven-currency idle economy game whose own most-invested reviewers — median 23.7 hours played, well above its positive reviewers' 5.7 — describe a triple prestige system that resets everything for nothing, a save that "bricked itself" at 135 hours, and an achievement curve that halves at every difficulty gate.
4 / 10
A NZ$2.99 satire of Steam's own trading-card economy, where bots buy, sell and craft cards into badges to push a level counter upward — a clever premise that Steam's tiny, Mixed-rated review corpus says never grows past its opening idea.
4 / 10
A NZ$6.29 xianxia-themed idle herb farm from a Chinese solo developer who shipped a near-identical idle game five weeks earlier — a decorative thousand-card compendium and an auto-battling cultivator sit on top of a loop with exactly one real decision, and both patches and the developer's attention stopped inside the first week.
3 / 10
