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288 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
288 reviews
A social sandbox MMO with no vendors, no quest-givers and no safety net — genuinely distinctive when it comes to player-built villages and a player-run economy, but its land ownership system asks for real, recurring money in a way a lot of its own players resent.
6 / 10
An ambitious, Banished-inspired survival city-builder with genuinely deep production chains, weighed down by persistent balance problems, a currently game-breaking macOS bug, and rumours of developer abandonment the studio has publicly and directly denied.
6 / 10
An unabashed Ragnarok Online homage with seven classes, thirty maps and a community that loves it. Its Early Access launch also spent a fortnight with the servers falling over and player trading switched off entirely after dupers took the marketplace.
6 / 10
A genuinely pretty, systems-rich cozy farming life-sim whose Early Access launch was overshadowed by a real corporate-backing revelation, a suspected fake-review campaign, and a broken promise about paid content — a case where the discourse around the game may matter as much to a buyer as the game itself.
6 / 10
A farming sim with classes, magic and dragons, sold for twelve dollars with a hundred and seventy-four dollars of DLC behind it. Its recent reviews have collapsed to 74% — and most of them aren't about the farming.
6 / 10
A voxel-building MMO welded to an ARPG loot treadmill, still running eleven years after Trion Worlds made it and three community letters a month after gamigo took over. The question in 2026 isn't whether Trove survives — it clearly does — it's how much of it is still a game and how much is a storefront.
6 / 10
A solo-developed RTS that lets you drop out of the top-down view and fight alongside your army as a third-person hero unit — a genuinely distinctive hook undercut by a campaign that arrived late in development and a handful of real, independently reported bugs.
6 / 10
The most technically ambitious combat sim on Steam — planes, tanks and ships in one engine, free to install, twelve years of updates. Its 35 add-ons total more than NZ$2,100, and after a decade the single most consistent thing players say about it is that the grind is designed to sell you out of itself.
6 / 10
A ten-dollar guild-management tactics RPG with a genuinely clever idea — your weapon determines your class — sitting behind a 90% Steam rating that doesn't survive close inspection. The game is decent. The review page is the story.
6 / 10
A free-to-play, Clicker Heroes-style idle mining game from a solo developer, split almost exactly down the middle — praised for being addictive and free, criticised by several independent reviewers for a progression curve that breaks within the first hour.
5.5 / 10
An idle incremental RPG wrapped around a genuinely creepy generational-horror premise — die, pass your DNA to the next generation, grow stronger, discover who's really benefiting — undercut by a specific, well-corroborated complaint from two independent reviewers that the core power fantasy runs backwards.
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 pixel-art village-builder that wants to be an idle game and a management sim at once, and spends its first year of updates finding out how hard it is to be both without either side suffering.
5.5 / 10
The game built to match its own fake advertisement, and one of the highest-grossing mobile titles on earth. Rated 4.7 by nearly half a million people, mocked everywhere else as a bait-and- switch — and both of those are accurate descriptions of what happens after you install it.
5.5 / 10
You pilot a walking mech fortress across a desert, scavenging wrecks and extracting with the loot. Three hundred thousand people bought it in a fortnight. Its recent reviews are running at 41% positive, and the reasons are structural rather than cosmetic.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developed extraction RPG whose "Mixed" score understates a real design problem with its combat, and whose review section contains an unusual, specific pattern worth reporting plainly — at least two detailed reviews that read as substantively critical while marking the game recommended, explicitly out of sympathy for the developer.
5.5 / 10
Medieval survivors defend a magic stone from monsters dropped by an alien ship, sever limbs, fit prosthetics and forge weapons out of what they cut off. A genuinely strange five-dollar idea from two developers — and about four hours of Early Access with the AI still half-working.
5.5 / 10
A years-in-the-making, Kickstarter-backed open-world farming sim that finally hit Early Access — and immediately ran into the one thing its audience cared most about. The co-op isn't the shared-farm co-op people bought it for, and the Mixed rating is mostly that discovery happening 392 times.
5.5 / 10
A ground-up Unreal Engine 5 remaster of one of survival gaming's biggest franchises, sold as a paid upgrade that a huge share of its own reviewers say carried over the original's bugs while demanding hardware far beyond what the visual improvements justify.
5 / 10
A cel-shaded, kingdom-building idle RPG that looks better than most of the genre and runs a genuinely competent hero-collection loop underneath — until its 0.2% top-tier gacha rate turns "collect dozens of heroes" into the game's actual monetisation engine.
5 / 10
A mining extraction roguelite from a solo developer that launched broken enough to earn a "Mostly Negative" tag — softlocks, an unexplained tutorial, and rough performance — while simultaneously earning some of the most sympathetic, patient negative reviews this library has seen, because the developer has been visibly fighting to fix it in real time.
5 / 10
A Facebook-era MMO strategy game from 2011 finally arrived on Steam this July, and its first reviewers are overwhelmingly its own long-lost veterans — many disappointed by what fifteen years and a free-to-play economy have done to the game they remember.
4.5 / 10
KIXEYE's post-apocalyptic base-building MMO strategy game, running continuously since its 2011 Facebook debut, finally arrives on Steam — met largely by returning veteran players whose reviews describe over a decade of accumulated pay-to-win pressure and unaddressed cheating that the platform switch hasn't changed.
4 / 10
A free, solo-developed fantasy survival and settlement-builder that its own store page admits is "an early test version currently intended only for selected players" — and its first reviewers, largely sympathetic to the idea, confirm that disclaimer is accurate rather than modest.
3 / 10
