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167 Automation games reviewed and scored, best first.
167 reviews
A solo-developed post-apocalyptic RTS blending a global map-painter structure with They Are Billions-style horde defense and Factorio-style production chains, genuinely praised for its ambitious hybrid concept, held back by real endgame performance problems, unit-tracking bugs, unclear resource management at scale, and a generative-AI disclosure several buyers say they missed before purchasing.
6 / 10
A charming automation game about a mining operation staffed entirely by moose — genuinely addictive for its first several hours and backed by one of the most sustained, hands-on support records covered in this lane, but missing the prestige loop and offline progression that experienced idle-genre fans say the whole category depends on.
6 / 10
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
ByerN's abstract number-chain puzzler strips idle-automation design down to pure arithmetic, and its Mostly Positive review sample largely agrees the core hook is genuinely clever, but a wide and specific set of complaints about a confusing UI, a hard space constraint, and late-game repetition keeps the score short of Very Positive.
6 / 10
A local couch co-op logistics-chaos game in the Overcooked mold, casting players as warehouse workers racing to pack, sort, and ship boxes across conveyor belts, forklifts, and cranes — genuinely fun and often very funny with a partner in the room, but held back by consistently criticized vehicle controls and a persistent, unanswered demand for online multiplayer.
6 / 10
A visually striking solo-developer factory game that deliberately refuses to be a clean clicker, idler, or automation game, and ends up frustrating a large share of players who bought it expecting to fit neatly into one of those genres.
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 deeply systemic space-station engineering simulation covering atmospherics, electrical grids and manufacturing, Very Positive across nearly 6,000 reviews for genuine simulation depth — held back by an extraordinarily consistent complaint that its interface is deliberately, unapologetically obtuse, and by nearly nine years in Early Access without several originally promised systems.
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
A free-to-play node-based system-management idler from EnigmaDev Studios that thousands of reviewers describe as genuinely, dangerously addictive, undercut by a controversial 2.0 update that reviewers say reset progress and dramatically increased grind and monetisation, plus a missing undo button that several players report has erased hours of careful work in a single misclick.
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 cozy click-and-craft alchemy sim with a genuinely satisfying early game, whose automation system, meant to be the whole point, falls apart in the back half, leaving both fans and critics grinding through the same manual resource-clicking they thought they'd left behind.
5.9 / 10
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
Kerbal Space Program for Nuclear Weapons Design Nuclear Design Bureau is a hardcore engineering sandbox that casts you as a junior engineer at a thinly-fictionalized Kurchatov Inst
5.6 / 10
A factory-automation puzzle game about programming a robotic fast-food kitchen, with a genuinely appealing concept undercut by a widely criticized, click-heavy interface and level designs a large share of reviewers say are more restrictive than genre comparisons like Factorio suggest.
5.5 / 10
A sprawling, deliberately grindy desert shopping-center automation sim that has earned genuinely enormous playtimes from a devoted fanbase across nearly two and a half years of dense solo-developer updates, complicated by real disputes over onboarding, confirmed AI-generated art, and multiple independent reviewer accounts of hostile developer conduct toward critics.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely inventive genre mashup disguised behind a joke title, blending dungeon exploration, base-building automation, and creeping dread as a prisoner forced to wash dishes in a dystopian facility, whose real atmosphere and mystery are near-unanimously undercut by an almost farcically consistent complaint — a punishing, poorly-controlled parkour section at the very end that appears to frustrate nearly every reviewer regardless of how much they otherwise enjoyed the game.
5.5 / 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 dwarven voxel automation game with a genuinely satisfying dig-craft-automate loop and a nearly two-year Early Access support record to match, held back by persistent building and inventory bugs that reviewers say still make the base-building half of the game harder than it should be.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely satisfying trash-sorting job-sim for its first ten hours, let down by a content ceiling reviewers describe with remarkable consistency, a confirmed use of AI-generated art that a large share of its own audience specifically objects to, and a base-game recycling chain that reviewers say only becomes complete once you buy a separate paid DLC.
5.5 / 10
An early-20th-century factory and logistics tycoon sim with a genuinely deep production-chain concept, undercut by a clunky, information-poor interface that forces spreadsheet-tracking and heavy manual micromanagement of every supply link.
5.5 / 10
