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288 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
288 reviews
A Japanese-mythology roguelike deckbuilder that lets you dial your own difficulty and reward up or down mid-run through a "narration" choice — reviewed on launch day, when its own review corpus is still zero and the only real evidence is a year-old public demo.
7 / 10
A free incremental with one reviewer clocking 31,732 hours and a persistent complaint from the rest — that a game with "idle" in its title keeps asking you to click.
7 / 10
Erkberg Games' short incremental about washing ash off a dead planet with a rain-cloud and a skill tree — a review of how far a three-hour, five-dollar cozy game can stretch its one good idea before it runs out of road.
7 / 10
A genuinely beloved Early Access survival-crafting game about a lone robot scavenging a drowned Earth to save the last of humanity, Very Positive across more than 12,000 reviews for a premise and atmosphere reviewers describe with real passion — undercut by severe, well-documented performance problems, a persistent unresolved crash bug, and a motion-sickness accessibility gap that several devoted fans describe as painful to keep flagging.
7 / 10
Nineteen years old and still the only MMO that treats Tolkien's geography and timeline as a design constraint rather than a skin. Reviewed with Kingdoms of Harad current, asking what that licence discipline actually buys a player in 2026 — and what a new one genuinely has to pay to see it.
7 / 10
A brand-new semi-idle browser-style MMORPG that wears its RuneScape and Melvor Idle influences openly — guilds, a tabbed skill list, a world map gated by level bands — two days into Early Access and already patching multiple times a day.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental built for a 2025 game jam, about hauling a strange substance up out of a mining town's collapsing depths — deliberately short, unusually confident about its Lovecraftian ending, and patched several times since launch to fix the rough edges that shipped with it.
7 / 10
A Kickstarter-backed, pro-player-built sci-fi RTS that arrives in Early Access as the most credible StarCraft successor in years, welded to a commander RPG layer that mostly earns its place — if you're still willing to relearn macro from scratch.
7 / 10
A solo-developed guild management idle RPG with eleven classes, eleven tiered professions and hour-long raids, sold once for NZ$7.39 with no ads and nothing else to buy — an ambitious system let down at launch by dungeons and raids that don't repeat on their own, which is a strange gap in a game built around leaving it alone.
6.5 / 10
A four-player co-op deckbuilder that solves the genre's most obvious gap — playing Slay the Spire-style card combat as an actual shared party instead of a shared seed — and then spends the years after its Paradox acquisition undermining that achievement with DLC pricing its own community calls predatory.
6.5 / 10
The same demonstrate-it-once robot scripting that made Autonauts click, now defending a base against raiders with automated squads — a genuinely fun idea that never quite justifies asking for a second full-price purchase.
6.5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder that fuses Scrabble with Balatro, from GoldenEye and TimeSplitters veterans — genuinely praised for its core idea, and shadowed by an AI-art controversy the developers walked back after launch-week backlash.
6.5 / 10
An ambitious single-world MMO crafting sandbox from the studio behind SpacetimeDB, built around a genuinely deep, RuneScape-inspired grind that its own biggest fans openly embrace — undercut by a real tension between its "idle-friendly" marketing and punishing stamina systems, rampant player-on-player griefing the developers are criticised for under-policing, and a disclosed but under-communicated plan to wipe progress and convert to free-to-play after Early Access.
6.5 / 10
A ten-year-old pixel dungeon-crawler that never quite decided whether it wants you clicking through fights or leaving them to auto-battle, held together by a four-currency stamina economy that structures every session it doesn't quietly monetise.
6.5 / 10
A Chinese-developed xianxia tactics RPG with a genuinely good grid on it, sold at a fair price with 19 chapters already in the box — and a cultivation ladder that turns out to be the thinnest system in the game.
6.5 / 10
A one-time-purchase idle RPG that borrows every visual and structural trick of gacha hero collectors — six rarities, duplicate fusion, a 70-champion banner — and then declines to sell any of it, which makes it one of the more interesting monetisation experiments the genre has produced this year.
6.5 / 10
A brutal, deeply detailed survival sandbox set in Robert E. Howard's Hyboria that's held a genuinely devoted following since 2018, now carrying real, current frustrations over monetisation additions and mandatory online requirements introduced since Funcom's acquisition by Tencent.
6.5 / 10
Devsisters folds its 300-million-player Cookie Run cast into an idle auto-battler with genuinely tactical positioning, then hangs the whole thing on the same gacha currencies that turned Cookie Run: Kingdom into a case study in monetisation backlash.
6.5 / 10
A free idle RPG with the genuine article — true 1:1 offline progression — attached to a retention design that keeps demanding you come back and play minigames by hand.
6.5 / 10
The game that arguably invented the modern survival genre from an ARMA 2 mod is still running, still brutal, and still dividing its own reviews between people who lived through its infamous five-year alpha and people just discovering how unforgiving it remains today.
6.5 / 10
A cheap, honestly-scoped mining incremental about drilling a low-poly planet layer by layer for roughly two hours — well liked by its first handful of reviewers, with one detailed bug report worth taking seriously before you buy.
6.5 / 10
The best-feeling shooter ever made, attached to the most punishing content model in mainstream gaming. Its harshest reviews come from players with two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand hours logged — and the phrase they keep reaching for is "the best game I can't recommend".
6.5 / 10
A short, charming incremental about a young mole drilling into a meteor crater — genuinely distinctive for giving its dig-upgrade-repeat loop an actual story, but held back by spiky progression pacing and a back half that plays itself.
6.5 / 10
Twenty-two years old, twenty-two expansions deep, and still shipping a full expansion every December — EverQuest II is one of the most content-dense MMOs ever built, sold through a free-to-play shell that takes away the auction house, the chat channels and the top half of your spellbook until you subscribe.
6.5 / 10
