A NZ$3.69 "meditative" crypto-trading toy with no fail state, no complex interface and pleasant background music, whose tiny nine-review corpus is entirely positive but includes at least one review that openly admits to being posted to support the developer's family.
A charming, cheap cat-run boba tea shop sim that earned a loyal following in its first five months of Early Access, then went quiet — no update since April 2023, no save mid-shift, and a growing pile of reviews from players who love what's there and are giving up waiting for the rest.
A promising fusion of FTL, Slay the Spire and Into the Breach that entered Early Access in September 2024 and remains there today, with real balance and RNG-punishment complaints from deeply invested fans set against a genuinely active, recently restructured development push toward a 1.0 launch.
Colossal Order's sequel to the beloved city-builder launched into one of the genre's most severe, well-documented disasters — severe performance failures, a "fake" simulation several reviewers describe finding through direct testing, and a real CEO controversy over blaming the community for backlash. This review can confirm, via the developer's own communications, that Colossal Order and publisher Paradox split entirely in November 2025, with a new studio, Iceflake Studios, now credited by a real, growing share of reviewers with a genuine turnaround since taking over development in 2026.
An Early Access idle shop sim built to be ignored — it lives in the corner of your monitor, restocks its own shelves and asks for a glance every twenty minutes. Charming, three dollars, and currently carrying a save bug that can wipe a 76-hour store.
A small, genuinely charming idle game about running vending machines that supply adventurers deep in a dungeon, hurt by thin content and rough number-tuning that even its own fans point out, from a solo developer who fixed the game's biggest early complaint fast and then went quiet.
A visually stunning UE5 adaptation of Bernard Werber's classic novel that nearly every reviewer agrees looks incredible and just as consistently says isn't the ant colony simulation its premise promised — reviewed here alongside a genuinely substantial free content update that answers some, if not all, of that disappointment.
Gaming's most famous redemption arc went into reverse — negative reviews fell to five in 2023, then spiked to thirty-one in 2025, and the players writing them have two thousand hours each and one complaint: the subscription.
An Early Access idle RPG built around planning automated action lists rather than a prestige loop, genuinely deep enough to hold dedicated fans for thousands of hours, but hobbled by a grind curve many reviewers say collapses into sluggish stagnation, real crash reports, and disclosed AI-assisted art that a meaningful share of players specifically dock points for.
A free civilization-building idle game with real depth and a small, genuinely devoted fanbase, undercut by heavy "clone" accusations aimed at bigger browser incrementals, a design that repeatedly punishes the player for progressing, and a studio that appears to have closed down over a year before this review, with no update since.
A NZ$3.83 debut-adjacent incremental from Shadow Games Software where you crank a hand generator, sell the joules you produce into a demand-driven market, and reinvest the money into wood and steel producers that build power plants across eight declared eras — real chain depth, but the marketing never actually promises the away-from-keyboard earnings the genre is built on.
A free-to-play incremental about growing a one-person garage venture into a tech empire, with a genuinely honest monetisation model let down by a midgame economy that stops making sense and a content well that runs dry fast.
A five-dollar space idler about mining, salvaging and shooting your way across eight planets — polished, fair-priced and almost entirely spent by the time the credits should be rolling.
A cheap, unabashedly Legend of Mir-flavoured idle RPG from solo Chinese developer okyakusama, built around a three-class autobattling party, an enormous rebirth ladder, and a near-total absence of real-money spending.
A cheap, charming procedural-generation island builder whose own title promises more than the finished game delivers — a short, one-sitting civilisation puzzle rather than the ongoing incremental system a meaningful share of its own reviewers say they expected.
A retro-desktop incremental where you grow a Brooklyn bodega into a global chain through loans, tax bills and an IPO prestige loop. The 90s operating-system framing is doing more work than the economy underneath it, and five days of Steam achievement data already shows where players stop.
A Cold War-flavoured tower defense about zombies on Mars, where the tension comes from physically running crew between turrets — and where the loudest, most consistent complaint in its review history is that every mission has exactly one correct build order.
A trap-dungeon builder-versus-raider game whose own fans and critics converge on the same diagnosis — a reward structure that pays only for kills, not fun, flooded the community with unbeatable "killbox" levels — and whose support appears to have wound down roughly a year ago after a real, multi-season run.
A fantasy necromancer-builder where you assemble undead minions from mismatched body parts and send them to defend your tower -- a genuinely inventive Very Positive hit at NZ$4.49, undercut by minion AI reviewers call frustratingly dumb and a publisher that moved on to a sequel while this one's bugs stayed open.
A charming, Evil Genius-styled boot camp management sim whose base-building and art direction win consistent praise, dogged from launch through three years of updates by the same complaint — reviewers keep calling it a "waiting simulator" with too little strategy underneath.
A solo-developed Roman city builder that pits Caesar 3-style urban planning against the Hydra, the Minotaur and Cerberus -- a striking-looking game whose 1.0 launch, six months after it started, split its own audience between "finally complete" and "rushed and abandoned."
An ambitious, Banished-inspired survival city-builder with genuinely deep production chains, weighed down by persistent balance problems, a currently game-breaking macOS bug, and rumours of developer abandonment the studio has publicly and directly denied.
A Megabonk-adjacent bullet-heaven with genuine base-building ambitions, launched as a full 1.0 in a state so rough that a majority of its own buyers said it should have shipped as Early Access — since substantially patched on the technical side, while a broken, too-generous progression economy remains an open complaint as recently as this week.
A Waterworld-flavoured survival crafting game still in Early Access, whose real fun core loop is undercut by genuine base-corrupting bugs and security concerns — and whose "abandoned by the developer" complaints, common in 2025 reviews, are directly contradicted by an active, multiple-updates-per-week patch history running right up to this review.