Browse by genre
1090 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
1090 reviews
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 Prohibition-era bootlegging business sim that swaps Schedule 1's drugs for moonshine and custom-labeled liquor, praised for a satisfying crafting-and-progression loop wrapped in a genuine mystery about a brother's imprisonment, but held back at launch by frequent crashes, clunky controls, and content that thins out once production gets automated.
6.5 / 10
A genre mashup its own fans call an "uncut diamond" — Fallout-flavoured post-apocalyptic exploration, Darkest Dungeon-style combat and a real card-battler deckbuilding layer — whose lifetime review score is dragged down mostly by complaints from over a year before its actual 1.0 release.
6.5 / 10
The Escapists 2 sends up to four players into a series of increasingly elaborate prisons to plot their breakout through crafting, routine-management, and careful rule-breaking. Its sandbox premise draws real, sustained praise, tempered by a specific, well-documented complaint that escape plans are far more scripted than the marketing suggests, and by a development history that's been effectively dormant for years.
6.5 / 10
An ASCII-styled endless dungeon crawler built around a Minesweeper-inspired tile-reveal mechanic and fast, Fruit-Ninja-like arcade combat, layering deep crafting and itemization systems beneath a chill, self-paced descent — reviewed from a single but unusually detailed 848-minute account, backed by a hundred-achievement completion curve that maps neatly onto the reviewer's account of early depths being accessible and deep ones remaining a real challenge.
6.5 / 10
A cozy idle RPG from solo developer vkaike2, casting the player as a brown shih tzu named Ramon searching for his missing friends, earning a Positive launch reception for its charm and developer responsiveness, tempered by one detailed reviewer's honest complaint that its resource chains are too indirect for either true idle or true hands-on play.
6.5 / 10
A slow-paced, atmospheric survival simulation set in the frozen Canadian wilderness after a geomagnetic disaster, Very Positive across nearly 41,000 reviews for its enduring, celebrated sandbox survival mode — clouded by a decade-long wait for its narrative campaign's final chapter, which launched in March 2026 to a wave of disappointed reviews, and by reported community moderation of critical players.
6.5 / 10
An Early Access idle ARPG where an uncapped, skill-based party grinds levels well past a thousand while you check in occasionally to manage gear, weight and hunger, praised by its tiny early review base for genuinely comfy, chill idling, but consistently undercut by reports of party pathfinding so rough that it can take a full minute just to hunt down a single deer.
6.5 / 10
A visually faithful Tolkien survival-crafting game whose negative sample is dominated by a genuine promise-versus-delivery gap — the store page promises resettling and restoring a thriving dwarven kingdom, but reviewers describe a mostly solitary escape through repetitive, procedurally generated tunnels that nobody ever comes to actually live in.
6.5 / 10
The base game is free and the creative tools are still the best in the genre. The full catalogue — all 113 add-ons — costs about NZ$1,580, and almost every negative review this game has ever received is about that number.
6.5 / 10
A meditative, procedurally generated town-building toy from Oskar Stålberg, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 10,600 reviews for its gorgeous, satisfying click-to-build magic — held back by an extremely consistent complaint that it's a short, feature-light toy rather than a game, with tedious single-click placement, no real player control over layout, and effectively no development since a mid-2023 patch.
6.5 / 10
A solo/small-team deckbuilding roguelite auto-battler built around a deliberately minimalist "1+4" card system, Very Positive across 225 English reviews for genuinely addictive run-to-run strategy and a year-plus of monthly content updates -- while carrying an unusually loud and well-corroborated controversy over AI-generated art and music that the developers disclose openly on the store page rather than deny.
6.5 / 10
Vlad the Landlord is a $5.99 solo-developed pixel-art vampire management sim from Melinus Games that has players stocking a mansion "pantry" of tenants, managing thirst, and unlocking vampiric powers to eventually become human again, and this review's small, unanimously Positive sample praises its unusually genuine take on vampire fantasy and surprising depth.
6.5 / 10
Relic Entertainment reunites the original Dawn of War and all its expansions under one modernised package, delivering real technical improvements but falling short of the gold-standard remaster bar set by titles like Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition.
6.5 / 10
Read review of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition Review
A turn-based mercenary tactics game that launched to genuine XCOM-starved enthusiasm and a rough, bug-heavy 1.0 — plus a specific, repeated allegation from multiple reviewers that it's a rebrand of an earlier, since-delisted game, which independent research on Steam's own listings substantially corroborates.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely inventive Monster Hunter rival, launched at a premium price in a state so broken that its own launch-week reviews accused EA of "buy now, patch later" — and, seven months on, EA reportedly considered ending support altogether, a story Steam's own aggregated press coverage keeps returning to years later.
6.5 / 10
A charming desert gardening-survival hybrid, genuinely loved for restoring a wasteland into bloom and hugging frogs along the way, undercut by an unpopular mandatory data-collection agreement at launch and a development pace that appears to have stopped roughly 16 months in while reviewers were still asking for polish.
6.5 / 10
An open-world witch adventure that swaps the usual survival toolbox for spellwork — spirit jumps instead of ladders, conjured forests instead of chopped trees, familiars instead of tames. Seven weeks into Early Access, the magic system is the best reason to be here; the world around it hasn't caught up yet.
6.5 / 10
A free-to-play digital trading card game from the original designer of Infinity Wars, praised by TCG veterans for a fresh simultaneous-turn Devotion system and genuinely generous free-to-play economy, but held back at Early Access launch by a rough new-player onboarding experience and a thin, low-population matchmaking pool.
6.5 / 10
A hand-drawn Slavic-folklore action RPG about a one-handed, cursed blacksmith, still Very Positive on Steam seven years on -- but critics and players have agreed, with striking consistency since launch week, that the art, story and Romanian folk soundtrack are carrying a combat and crafting system that never got fixed.
6.5 / 10
A Lovecraftian hotel-management dating sim, built by a two-person Chinese studio through two crowdfunding campaigns, landing Very Positive despite an unedited machine translation and a live, still-unresolved dispute over undisclosed AI-generated background art.
6.5 / 10
A 3D coin-pusher arcade game wrapped around a lich army-building RPG layer, released November 2023 after its solo developer publicly paused production over the Unity pricing controversy, and still receiving support patches in August 2026.
6.5 / 10
A stylish, Slay the Spire-inspired roguelike deckbuilder about blasting sentient planets apart with trash and junk, whose distinctive art style and card-fusion mechanic earn real affection, tempered by a widely reported launch-era feeling of unfinished polish that this review can confirm the developer directly addressed through a substantial post-launch content patch.
6.5 / 10
A deep, actively-updated Chinese idle RPG with genuinely rich buildcrafting and pet fusion, badly undercut by a controversial anti-piracy gate that forces even paying customers through a playtime-and-screenshot verification process to unlock DLC content.
6.5 / 10
