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167 Automation games reviewed and scored, best first.
167 reviews
A genuinely inventive Lua-scripted sandbox for building retro-styled electronic gadgets, held back by a punishingly steep learning curve and a real Early Access wobble that's only recently given way to substantial, active development again.
6.5 / 10
A free scratch-card incremental with 91% positive reviews, median playtimes near 100 hours — and an achievement called "Reviewed" that 40% of its owners have unlocked. The engagement is real. So is the asterisk on the score.
6.5 / 10
A co-op sky-island survival game that trades hunger bars and monsters for solar panels and delivery drones — charming and genuinely clever in its energy systems, but its progression runs out of new ideas long before the credits.
6.5 / 10
A survival game where you recruit tribespeople who keep working while you're logged out — a genuinely original idea, attached to a 1.0 launch so rough the developers published a public 90-day plan to fix it.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed space factory incremental with a five-hour campaign and a clean ending instead of an endless ladder. The idea is refreshing; the execution runs out of steam exactly when the prestige system should be taking over.
6.5 / 10
A factory-automation game that puts the camera underground and gives you a gun that deletes stone, so verticality and terrain destruction do real design work instead of being a setting. The idea is stronger than the execution — a convoluted tech tree, a frame rate that sags under a big base, and a developer that's gone quiet since the 1.0 launch hold it back.
6.5 / 10
A free text-based idle RPG with more than 3,000 branching story actions and a genuinely active five-year development history, buried behind one of the least welcoming first hours the genre has to offer.
6.5 / 10
Mike Forest's debt-payoff idle game about chopping wood, mining stone and hiring dogs is genuinely funny and relaxing at first, but reviewers keep hitting the same wall once the forest is gone.
6.4 / 10
Read review of Forest Hustle Review: A Charming Idle Sim That Runs Out of Trees to Chop
A niche worth cracking Eggstreme Farming takes the well-worn cozy farming-sim template and narrows its focus down to one specific obsession: eggs. Chickens, ducks, geese, and turke
6.1 / 10
A cheap, genuinely inventive recursive-automation game built around "shrinking" whole factory sub-units into single reusable blocks — an idea reviewers compare favorably to shapez.io, undermined by a tutorial and interface multiple independent players call actively hostile to learning the game at all.
6 / 10
A zero-gravity factory-automation sim that bolts asteroids and planetoids onto a mobile space platform, winning over genre fans with a genuinely fresh Satisfactory-meets-Raft premise and an unusually responsive solo developer, but held back at 1.0 by broken multiplayer sync, a clunky building interface, and a tech tree many reviewers call illogically paced.
6 / 10
A cheap, honestly-derivative factory-automation puzzle that swaps Shapez's shapes for arithmetic on a hex grid, backed by a real seven-month patch record before the developer moved on to build a more complete spiritual successor.
6 / 10
Bridge Constructor Portal merges the engineering-puzzle series with the Portal license, guided by Ellen McLain's GLaDOS through 60 test chambers of portals, propulsion gel, and wobbly bridge physics. The crossover concept and voice work earn genuine praise, while a specific, repeated complaint about jittery bridge physics and a near-absent tutorial runs through a large share of the review sample.
6 / 10
A charming, Scottish-voiced sci-fi cantina clicker where you shoot drinks at patrons and mop up their vomit — genuinely addictive for its first couple of hours, but reviewers and Steam's own achievement data agree the systems thin out fast after that.
6 / 10
Schedule 1's Shadow Looms Large Dirty Business entered Early Access on July 22, 2026, from developer Plan Dirty Games, pitching a criminal-empire management sim built around a
6 / 10
A Lumber Empire That Builds Itself Fellwood casts the player as the operator of an escalating fantasy woodcutting encampment: place buildings that fling axes, ballistas, cannons, a
6 / 10
A Single Rock and a Very Long Road to an Industrial Empire Fracture Field starts small: one rock, one timed swing, one satisfying thwack. Solo developer Type Ten's debut is an
6 / 10
A charming, ambitious co-op survival-automation hybrid about defending a towering avian city from underground insectoid swarms, whose real bugs and rough edges reviewers consistently forgive once they learn the honest, difficult story behind them — a small studio that shrank from ten developers to one and kept working anyway.
6 / 10
A genuinely unique text-based cyberpunk hacking sandbox that teaches real JavaScript through actual play and hosts a deep, emergent player economy — undercut by two specific, detailed accounts of the developer wiping progress and banning creative play in ways reviewers say contradict the game's own hacking-sandbox premise.
6 / 10
A solo developer's Early Access debut that grafts an upgrade tree, phase gates and a purchasable "Idle Mode" onto a classic Breakout loop — except the game's own tooltip says flatly that idle mode does not earn points while the game is closed, four days into a launch that so far has three concurrent players and one review.
6 / 10
A NZ$3.83 debut-adjacent incremental from Shadow Games Software where you crank a hand generator, sell the joules you produce into a demand-driven market, and reinvest the money into wood and steel producers that build power plants across eight declared eras — real chain depth, but the marketing never actually promises the away-from-keyboard earnings the genre is built on.
6 / 10
A solo-developed factory-and-idle hybrid that grafts a miniature Factorio-style belt economy onto a prestige loop, released in July 2023 with roughly five stated hours of content and an open-source codebase.
6 / 10
A solo-developed, node-based automation game that scratches the Factorio itch without Factorio's build-everything-yourself demands, still in Early Access two and a half years in and still being actively rebalanced — most recently to remove the exact progression walls its players have been complaining about since launch.
6 / 10
A cheap idle dungeon-crawler with a genuinely fast-moving development cycle — five patches in its first eight days — whose Mixed rating comes less from the core loop than from a CPU-hungry launch build and a balance-nerf backlash that arrived just as its most-invested players were settling in.
6 / 10
