Treasure Beach
A cozy beach-scavenging and trinket-repair sim from a studio with a recognisable formula — charming and addictive for its first few weeks, but reviewers consistently report the loop running dry well before the endgame.
6 / 10
Browse by genre
Crafting & Building reviews
1090 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
1090 reviews
Trove
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
Unbound Souls
A short, wave-based action RPG where clearing encounters opens up a small world to explore, with a light crafting and leveling system underneath simple, smooth combat and a modest story, praised by its small early audience for a polished, enjoyable if grindy few hours.
6 / 10
Wall World 2
Developer and publisher Alawar returns to its mining roguelite with Wall World 2, a bigger, mission-structured sequel to 2023's Wall World, earning praise for its expanded city hub, meta progression and new enemies from a Mostly Positive review base sharply divided by a dominant complaint that its mission-based structure and per-run upgrade resets betray what made the original's open-ended climb so appealing.
6 / 10
WARSHIFT 2
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
War Thunder
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
Weapon Shop Fantasy
A year before Moonlighter made "run a shop by day, loot a dungeon by night" a genre unto itself, Weapon Shop Fantasy tried the same dual-loop pitch from the other direction — stay behind the counter, send your staff out adventuring, and craft what they bring back into gear to sell. The idea holds up better than its rough edges do.
6 / 10
Wizard with a Gun
A stylish co-op survival roguelite about wizards who shoot rather than cast, widely described at launch as feeling rushed and early-access-like — and, as of June 2024, permanently frozen in that state after developer Galvanic Games officially disbanded.
6 / 10
Wonderland
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
Xeno Strike CCG
A free-to-play sci-fi collectible card battler whose tactical deck-building genuinely hooks players, but whose rough alpha-grade presentation, gacha-style monetisation, and a strikingly thin online player base leave it feeling like a promising foundation rather than a finished game.
6 / 10
Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles
A deliberately combat-free, chore-and-exploration adventure that sold itself as a Zelda meets Stardew Valley hybrid -- reviewers who took that pitch literally have spent nine years saying the same thing, that the surface is genuinely lovely and almost every system underneath it is thinner than the comparison implies.
6 / 10
Forage Wizard
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
Gaia Maker
Gaia Maker is a free-to-play planetary terraforming sandbox built on real physics and geology, and this review's Positive sample (12 of 13 reviews) reads it as an affectionate, well-crafted homage to 1990's SimEarth rather than a genuinely new take on the genre, undercut by a balance curve several reviewers found too forgiving once mastered.
5.9 / 10
Harvest Cafe Review: A Charming Stardew-Style Opening That Reviewers Say Thins Out Fast
A farming-and-restaurant sim that blends Stardew Valley-style crop growing with a cook-and-serve business layer, drawing warm praise for its opening hours and cruelty-free animal husbandry, while one detailed critical review argues the content and polish drop off sharply once the tutorial ends.
5.9 / 10
Magic Forge Tycoon Review: A Clever Arms-Dealer Premise That Runs Out of Runs
A weapon-crafting tycoon that casts the player as an arms dealer fuelling wars between fantasy kingdoms, praised by reviewers for a genuinely interesting political hook but repeatedly criticised for a short, repetitive loop that mostly solves itself after one playthrough.
5.9 / 10
Read review of Magic Forge Tycoon Review: A Clever Arms-Dealer Premise That Runs Out of Runs
Mining Survivors Review: A Short, Sweet Loop That Runs Out of Ore Fast
A budget-priced mining-and-horde-survival hybrid earns real praise for its addictive early hours, but a recurring chorus of reviewers says the game's content runs dry well before its prestige and roguelike systems have anything meaningful to offer.
5.9 / 10
Read review of Mining Survivors Review: A Short, Sweet Loop That Runs Out of Ore Fast
Myth of Empires: Throne Review: A Deep Free Sandbox Undercut by Pay-to-Win
Myth of Empires: Throne is a free-to-play seasonal survival sandbox with a genuinely deep crafting, taming, and base-building loop, but persistent server instability and an unmistakable pay-to-win edge in PvP have left the reception split down the middle.
5.9 / 10
Read review of Myth of Empires: Throne Review: A Deep Free Sandbox Undercut by Pay-to-Win
The Guild 1 Remake: Europa 1410 Review
A Faithful Return to a 25-Year-Old Medieval Rags-to-Riches Sim The Guild 1 Remake: Europa 1410 is a medieval economic and political life sim from developer Ashborne Games, publishe
5.9 / 10
Alchemist Shop Simulator
A cozy medieval potion-shop sim with genuinely charming customer writing and a satisfying brewing loop, undercut by a grindy garden-watering chore, save-file bug reports, and missing basics like rebindable keys.
5.8 / 10
Archipelago: Island Survival
A solo-developer survival RPG that stacks base building, faction reputation, dungeon crawling and an 11-category weapon system onto an escalating chain of islands — an enormous feature list for the price, but one that remains almost entirely unreviewed nearly two years after launch.
5.8 / 10
Medieval Kingdom Wars
A three-person studio's ambitious mash-up of Total War sieges, Stronghold-style town building and a Crusader Kings-flavoured campaign map — held back by a jittery frame rate, a threadbare interface and a developer now selling the same idea for the fourth time.
5.8 / 10
Rogue Night
A cozy-crossed-with-roguelite survival RPG from Grey November Games that lands to a genuinely Mixed reception — reviewers who love its Zelda-like exploration sit against others who found its roguelite, town-building, and progression systems shallow or confusing at launch.
5.8 / 10
The Walking Trade
The Walking Trade is a $11.99 shop-management sim set in a zombie apocalypse from developer Microwave Games and publisher PlayWay S.A., and this review's large Very Positive sample praises a genuinely addictive, distinctive core loop while repeatedly documenting rough launch bugs, weak tutorialisation, and erratic staff AI, offset by an unusually active post-launch patching schedule.
5.8 / 10
Village Tale
Village Tale is a desktop-companion idle village builder from Knight Owl Games, released on Steam on 27 July 2025 in the wake of Rusty's Retirement popularising the format: a s
5.8 / 10