Hero of Aethric
Orna's class-and-gear rulebook, unplugged from GPS and pinned to a handcrafted continent instead. The systems survive the transplant; the thing that made its sibling famous doesn't.
7 / 10
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Crafting & Building reviews
288 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
288 reviews
Idle Hacking: An Inaction RPG
A free browser and Steam idler that swaps cookie-clicker simplicity for Path of Exile-style affix hunting, guild-like Syndicates and a marketplace — then leaves its own community to sell the experience as much as the systems do.
7 / 10
Idle Planet Miner
Tech Tree Games' 2019 space-mining idle has outlasted most of its mobile peers by giving the genre's usual ore-and-upgrade loop a manager layer, a reset-friendly prestige system and weekly ranked tournaments — then undercutting some of that goodwill with a loot-box-flagged IAP menu and a persistent offline-tracking bug.
7 / 10
I'm No Demonlord
A Chinese-developed roguelike bullet-hell shooter about a hero possessed by an escaped demon king, wrapping a huge auto-attack build-crafting system and a class-change progression ladder in an RPG genre tag it only half earns.
7 / 10
Infection Free Zone
A zombie-apocalypse colony builder with a genuinely singular hook — using real-world map data to let you fortify your own actual neighbourhood — that's spent more than two years in Early Access with the same recurring complaints, about squad micromanagement and interruption pop-ups, still surfacing in this week's reviews.
7 / 10
Keep on Mining!
A NZ$7.39 mining incremental that sold 100,000 copies in seventeen days, is finished by three quarters of the people who buy it, and spends its second half padding a two-hour game past the refund window. Its own reviewers name the trick.
7 / 10
Kin and Conquest
The Fox Knocks follows up their mining incremental Kin and Quarry with a tighter, faster hybrid — Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven combat wrapped around a genuine incremental gear economy — and lands it well enough on day one that the loudest complaint is simply wanting more of it.
7 / 10
Leafy Corner
A plant shop sim so pleasant that almost nobody has a bad word for it — and so short that the people praising it keep mentioning they finished everything in four hours. Lovely, cheap, and about three systems away from being something you'd still be playing next month.
7 / 10
Lost Vessel
A free-to-play sci-fi idle RPG built around a genuine, developer-stated no-pay-to-win promise, an active in-game chat community, and an engaged solo developer — praised by a striking number of very-high-playtime reviewers, with real friction over gear durability and one serious, unverified allegation about how the launch event tracked activity.
7 / 10
Medieval Dynasty
A first-person survival sandbox about hunting, farming and building a village that eventually runs itself, wrapped around the promise of a multi-generational dynasty that almost nobody who owns it ever actually reaches — a Very Positive, 42,000-plus-review Steam favourite that has spent the last two years answering "what's missing" with paid cosmetics instead of the content its own late-game silence keeps calling for.
7 / 10
Minecraft Dungeons
Mojang's accessible, co-op-first loot crawler wearing Minecraft's blocky skin over a Diablo-style structure — broadly loved for local and online co-op, and carrying one specific, heavily documented complaint its own Steam reviews won't let go of.
7 / 10
MISERY
A chaotic, genuinely addictive co-op survival game set in a STALKER-flavoured nuclear exclusion zone, praised by players for its dark comedy and bunker-crawling tension even as a substantial share of the same review sample argues its "1.0" label is misleading for content this thin — and whose launch was briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented DMCA dispute with STALKER 2 developer GSC Game World and an admitted offensive Discord incident from a member of the small development team.
7 / 10
Modulus: Factory Automation
A factory-automation puzzle game where you cut, stamp, and paint your own voxel building parts, then squeeze the whole production line onto a sky island with a real, paid ceiling on space. Polished and distinctive, but priced like the genre giants it can't yet match in scale.
7 / 10
Moonlight Peaks
A vampire farming sim with the best time-pressure idea the cosy genre has had in years, and almost no progression ladder to spend that pressure on.
7 / 10
My Time at Portia
A charming, Ghibli-inspired post-apocalyptic crafting and farming life-sim that's built a genuinely devoted, cross-generational fanbase over six years — while a long, consistent thread of its own reviews keeps arguing the developers never quite finished fixing it.
7 / 10
Nova Lands
A pixel-art automation game that grafts Factorio-style conveyor belts onto a Forager-style hand-gathering loop. The first ten hours are genuinely charming; the back half turns into a long wait for timers to finish, and a cluster of recent reviews accuse it of bundling data collection players can't fully switch off.
7 / 10
Once Human
A genuinely strange free survival MMO whose defining flaw — seasonal servers that wiped everything you built — has quietly been fixed, while its veterans have moved on to a different argument entirely.
7 / 10
Paralives
The indie life sim that spent seven years being the great Sims alternative, now 91% positive and a million copies sold — with a build mode people adore and a live mode its own supporters say isn't finished.
7 / 10
Planetbase
A decade-old space colony sim with a specific, detailed design complaint at the heart of its negative reviews — one terrain quirk that some players call a fatal flaw and others, including a 900-hour veteran, call simple mismanagement.
7 / 10
Skyformer
A factory game with one iron deposit. Skyformer caps how fast you can extract anything, so you can't solve problems by building another mine — and then it makes the weather you terraformed into existence come back and destroy your factories. Half a gigabyte, genuinely novel, and rough where it counts.
7 / 10
Slay the Spire 2
Mega Crit's sequel to one of the most acclaimed deckbuilders ever made adds co-op, two new classes and a rebuilt Ascension ladder, then spends its first five months in Early Access getting hammered by its own veteran players over balance whiplash, a boss nobody could agree on, and a genuine RNG bug a fan had to prove existed.
7 / 10
Space Rock Breaker
A NZ$4.79 incremental about shooting asteroids and dropping the ore into a Plinko machine. Its achievement curve is the flattest this library has measured — almost everyone who buys it finishes it — and its prestige system is the one part that doesn't work.
7 / 10
Starbound
A ten-year-old space sandbox that still earns a Very Positive rating on the strength of its crafting-and-exploration loop and its modding scene — until you check the dates and find the developer has shipped one hotfix since 2019, then marked the tenth anniversary of its 1.0 launch with a vinyl record instead of an update, which is currently tanking the recent-review score in real time.
7 / 10
Stellaris
A decade-old 4X space strategy game beloved enough to produce reviewers with 2,000+ hours logged — and, since 2024, a wave of those exact same veteran players turning against Paradox over DLC pricing, a specific performance regression, and player-reported AI-generated content.
7 / 10