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513 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
513 reviews
The Torchlight series' return from a scrapped free-to-play MMO experiment landed as a slimmer, shallower action RPG than its beloved predecessor — and six years on, its Mixed Steam rating hasn't moved an inch, even as the studio that made it no longer exists.
5.5 / 10
A single-tower roguelite defense game with a genuinely neat central hook — build and upgrade one tower instead of placing many — undercut at launch by narrow build viability, a cramped view window and a price several of its own fans said was too high for what shipped.
5.5 / 10
A cheap, chapter-based choose-your-own-adventure through an alternate 1888 British Empire from a developer better known for jigsaw puzzles — genuinely witty in places, undercut by a missing save system and a colonial-frontier premise played disappointingly straight.
5.5 / 10
A gorgeous, Breath of the Wild-indebted survival roguelite about a shipwrecked warrior sailing between procedural islands — praised for its art and boat-building, undercut by a identity crisis between story, survival and permadeath that most players never resolve, since fewer than one in eleven ever finishes it.
5.5 / 10
Talentless Person Games' pocket-sized clicker sends you smashing other planets apart to rebuild the home you lost, over a LoFi soundtrack and a run that's done in about an hour. It's a pleasant enough hour for the asking price, but "survival" in the title oversells a game with no hunger, health or threat system anywhere in it.
5.5 / 10
An ambitious three-person team's squad-based tactical RPG with real keep-building and army-management ideas, undercut by combat several detailed critics independently call shallow and repetitive, a thin story, and tactical bugs the developer's own "continuously improving" claim didn't hold up against a follow-up review.
5.5 / 10
A 2015 remaster of Firefly Studios' 2003 cult classic that turns out to be closer to The Sims in space than the SimCity-style colony builder its marketing suggests — a genre mismatch the overwhelming majority of its negative reviews describe independently, on top of real modern-PC stability bugs.
5.4 / 10
A genuinely deep, satisfying custom weapon-forging simulator wrapped in a dark, divisive narrative — undercut by a specific, severe structural flaw where wrong dialogue choices can permanently end a save with no warning, and unverified reviewer allegations of AI-generated content.
5.3 / 10
A tile-based, permadeath MMORPG built and coded almost entirely by one developer since 2017, released on Steam a day before this review with no cash shop of any kind, a single Frankfurt server capped at 500 players — and, at the moment of checking, three people actually on it.
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 NZ$13.25 roguelite auto-battler whose own top-voted review calls it "extremely misleading" for shipping under an idle/clicker banner — its solo developer admitted within three days of launch that he "didn't realize" how different an idle game and an autobattler are to players, then stopped adding content two weeks later.
5 / 10
A genuinely fun DayZ-and-Rust-but-you're-a-duck survival shooter that veteran genre players praised for its fast, rewarding early loop, undone across two years by cheating that never went away, a controversial kernel-level anti-cheat rollout, and a development pace that Steam's own patch history confirms has gone quiet since mid-2025.
5 / 10
A likeable single-character autobattler roguelike with a genuine "minmax and watch the number go up" dopamine loop, whose solo developer stopped patching within a month of release and, according to multiple reviewers, said outright that they no longer enjoyed working on the game.
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 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 idle RPG about farming, fishing and fighting for scrap, released by solo developer blevsoft in December 2023 and left without a content update since January 2024.
5 / 10
A genuinely novel business-sim sequel -- build and run an internet cafe complete with a working in-game browser -- undone by a single, specific, four-years-unfixed bug that keeps showing up in reviews: save files randomly corrupting or wiping hours of progress, in a game its own last content update predates by over four years.
5 / 10
A pixel-art post-apocalyptic survival action RPG with genuine crafting and base-building depth, undermined at launch by game-breaking bugs including inventory resets on zone transitions, though the developers have kept working on it for nearly two years, including a full public reboot.
5 / 10
A genuinely novel Early Access experiment in which every NPC's behaviour is driven by a language model the player supplies themselves, reviewed here on the strength of its complete 21-review Steam record and the solo developer's own unusually candid admission that this is one of three AI-driven projects competing for his attention, and currently not the one winning.
5 / 10
A WWII-flavoured, zero-gravity spin on Escape from Tarkov that launched with real promise in 2022, then spent four years wearing down that goodwill through persistent cheating, contested bans, and — as of an April 2026 developer post apologising for "the silence" — a 20-month content drought.
5 / 10
A Slay the Spire-style roguelike deckbuilder built around confronting phobias with coping-mechanism cards — a genuinely distinctive premise that a meaningful share of its own reviewers, including a reviewer identifying as a psychology lecturer, say the game doesn't earn, on top of a separate, more familiar complaint that the card system itself is too shallow to sustain repeat runs.
5 / 10
A Two Point Hospital-flavoured prison-management sim with genuine charm and a supportive launch window, undercut by thin long-term content, a restrictive early economy, and a developer that stopped updating it in August 2022 — confirmed by a news feed gone quiet and a concurrent-player count in the single digits.
5 / 10
A solo-developed management sim with real, distinctive depth — build and run a recreation centre down to the individual pool lane and arcade cabinet — that stopped receiving public updates in September 2022 and has spent the four years since accumulating an unusually self-aware review corpus that argues, in real time, about whether "abandoned" is fair to say out loud.
5 / 10
