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140 Roguelike games reviewed and scored, best first.
140 reviews
A solo-developed, critically adored twin-stick shooter from a Housemarque alumnus, widely hailed by its own fanbase as a spiritual successor to Geometry Wars — Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with a 93 Metascore, undercut for many players by a steep, unevenly tutorialised difficulty curve that even genre veterans describe as a genuine barrier to entry.
8 / 10
A top-down action-roguelite from the studio behind Dungreed, built around a Tetris-style artifact inventory that turns loadout planning into its own puzzle game — dense, generous with content, and let down late by a damage-sponge final boss and a steep endgame DPS wall.
8 / 10
A grid-tactics deckbuilder that fuses Into the Breach-style positioning with a real card engine and a Space Invaders-flavoured alien assault, backed by a Metacritic 85 and an Overwhelmingly Positive Steam score — with real, specific complaints about UI clarity and balance outliers sitting underneath the acclaim.
8 / 10
A survivors-like roguelike that reads the lyrics of any MP3 you import and turns each word into a battlefield effect — reviewed on a complete, unanimously positive 22-review sample from a solo developer's first days in Early Access.
8 / 10
Poncle and Nosebleed Interactive take the cast of a bullet-heaven phenomenon and lock them into turn-based card combat instead. The pivot works far better than it has any right to, right up until the deck-breaking builds that make the genre fun also make the back half of a run trivial.
8 / 10
Read review of Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors
The deckbuilder that removed the luck. You see every reward in advance and rebuild your deck between every fight — which makes it the most controllable game in its genre, and is exactly why some players bounce off it. Six dollars, 251 achievements, and criminally under-noticed.
8 / 10
Orangepixel's turn-based space roguelike gets a time-loop makeover, and the smartest decision it makes is turning "you died" into "you left something behind" instead of "start over."
7.8 / 10
A hand-illustrated roguelike deckbuilder that swaps cards for dice — you don't collect relics so much as permanently rebuild the six faces of your own dice — landing close enough to Slay the Spire and Dicey Dungeons that its own reviewers keep naming both games unprompted.
7.5 / 10
Backpack Hero turns the inventory screen itself into the entire combat system — item shape, orientation and neighbouring slots decide what a fight looks like, not a separate stats page. A look at whether that idea, and the game built around it, survived the jump from a free browser prototype to a finished commercial release the developer has since gone quiet on.
7.5 / 10
A submarine survival-horror sim where the alien monsters outside are rarely the reason a run ends badly — its own review corpus is unusually consistent that the biggest threat is the crew, whether through griefing, incompetence, or seven years of accumulated engine jank.
7.5 / 10
A horde-survival roguelite that makes you actually fight, forcing constant swaps between melee and ranged weapons against enemies built to resist whichever one you're not holding — a deliberate answer to the genre's reputation for playing itself.
7.5 / 10
A Korean-folklore-themed bullet-heaven roguelite that entered Early Access after roughly two and a half years of private playtesting, already showing unusually confident art direction and a distinctive cultural setting — with one concrete, currently reported performance issue around its dash mechanic.
7.5 / 10
A charming, tightly designed card-battler with a genuinely novel single-axis spaceship positioning system, whose own most-upvoted reviews — positive and negative alike — converge on the same honest complaint: not quite enough content or variety to sustain long-term mastery.
7.5 / 10
A rune-socketed action roguelite where the world gets more dangerous the more of it you uncover — a genuinely inventive build system wrapped around a dodge that refuses to behave like the souls-likes it keeps getting compared to.
7.5 / 10
Red Hook rebuilt Darkest Dungeon as a roguelite road trip instead of a long campaign, and three years later the review corpus still splits almost exactly down that line — not a launch controversy that faded, but a genre identity change some fans never made peace with.
7.5 / 10
A tiny, atmospheric roguelite built on one sharp idea — your torch is both your only light and your only weapon, so every swing costs you visibility — that's landed a perfect early score across two separate language communities in its first two days.
7.5 / 10
A deckbuilding roguelite where you draw your hand by working a claw machine. The gimmick is genuinely brilliant for about twenty hours — and then the argument starts about how much of each run you're actually deciding.
7.5 / 10
FromSoftware compresses Soulslike boss combat into 40-minute three-player runs, trading Elden Ring's open-ended build freedom for ten fixed heroes, a shrinking map and a clock that never stops.
7.5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder where your deck is literally the train you've assembled car by car, and every collision on the tactical grid can chain into a fight-ending disaster for whoever's standing in the way.
7.5 / 10
A pencil-drawn tactics RPG where combat plays out on a shared timeline both sides can sabotage, off to a strong start on a tiny early sample and a distinctive hook, with a controller gap and an unproven long game keeping the verdict cautious three days after launch.
7.5 / 10
Dante is a girl, Hell is a bullet heaven, and the deck-building actually works. The most beautiful thing in the genre right now runs into a difficulty wall at the second circle that has stopped six players in seven — and the studio is patching it weekly.
7.5 / 10
A slot machine you build synergies into, with rent due every few spins. Players credit it as the game that taught Balatro the trick — and the gap between the two is exactly what its critics complain about.
7.5 / 10
A vertical, three-floor twist on the deckbuilding roguelike that Slay the Spire built, still sitting Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam more than five years after launch — and still worth playing on its own terms, even with the numbers showing exactly where its late-game balance stops holding up.
7.5 / 10
Moonlighter splits itself between a dungeon-crawling roguelite and a shop-management sim, and the two halves are tied together by a genuinely clever idea — you set your own prices and read the customers to find out if you got it right. The question worth answering eight years on is whether that idea, and the combat around it, still hold up once the spreadsheet gets written.
7.5 / 10
