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409 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
409 reviews
A NZ$6.39 solo-dev idle clicker where you drag a collector circle across an overgrown field for timed harvest rounds, upgrading tools between them — let down by a Prestige system that resets nothing about how much your crops are worth.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, cosy alchemist life-sim whose own review base repeats the same verdict with striking consistency — beautiful and charming on the surface, thinner than its genre neighbours underneath, and sold alongside more than thirty individually priced decoration DLC packs that together cost nearly as much as the base game.
6 / 10
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."
6 / 10
An H.R. Giger-inspired biomechanical nightmare eight years in the making, whose extraordinary art direction is praised almost unanimously by the same review base that overwhelmingly describes the actual game underneath it as short, clunky and built on a store description its own most-upvoted review calls factually false.
6 / 10
A NZ$1.49 solo-developer horror game about a child escaping a cult's private chapel — verified here against Steam's own genre field ("Indie," which says nothing) and its top-voted community tag ("Idler," which says something wrong). Three puzzles, two endings, no idle or incremental mechanic anywhere in it.
6 / 10
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.
6 / 10
Firaxis's boldest structural gamble in the series' history — mandatory "Age" transitions that force players to swap civilizations twice per campaign — split the Civilization fanbase down the middle at launch and still sits Mixed across nearly 58,000 Steam reviews eighteen months later, even as a genuinely major, free "Test of Time" update rebuilt huge parts of the game in direct response to that backlash.
6 / 10
A darkly hilarious, genuinely well-written stock-market satire in the Space Warlord universe, undercut at launch by real, repeated complaints that the underlying trading gameplay is too shallow and RNG-heavy for its price — a gap the developer has since addressed with five content updates.
6 / 10
A genuinely pretty, systems-rich cozy farming life-sim whose Early Access launch was overshadowed by a real corporate-backing revelation, a suspected fake-review campaign, and a broken promise about paid content — a case where the discourse around the game may matter as much to a buyer as the game itself.
6 / 10
A farming sim with classes, magic and dragons, sold for twelve dollars with a hundred and seventy-four dollars of DLC behind it. Its recent reviews have collapsed to 74% — and most of them aren't about the farming.
6 / 10
A NZ$4.49 duck-themed incremental whose own store page promises offline income and careful balance — and whose players report an "extremely slow" AFK system and upgrade costs that hit a flat "MAX" wall well before the 15-achievement list is done.
6 / 10
A solo-developer factory-automation game that ships complete rather than in Early Access, with a genuinely responsive dev and procedurally generated worlds, but that its own review corpus repeatedly measures against Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program — and finds wanting on the tutorial, controls and combat that stand between you and the automation.
6 / 10
A cheap, cheerfully-written Early Access merchant RPG whose title promises trading and whose actual difficulty curve punishes it — this review's full read of every English-language negative review finds a consistent, two-year-old complaint that carrying trade goods is what gets a caravan killed, alongside a smaller but serious cluster of reports of full system crashes.
6 / 10
An emotionally resonant underwater narrative adventure about grief and isolation, sold to many buyers expecting a Subnautica-style survival game and undercut for keyboard-and-mouse players by controls the game itself warns you to avoid.
6 / 10
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
A genuinely striking noir art style and story wrapped around two half-realized game systems — a business sim too simple to satisfy and a detective clue-connecting mechanic several reviewers call arbitrary enough to feel like a coin flip.
5.9 / 10
A genuinely deep double-prestige incremental wearing a crypto-mining skin, undone by a UI that assumes you'll join the Discord to understand it and a leaderboard economy built on premium currency that decays before you can spend it.
5.8 / 10
A US$2.99 solo-dev idle collectathon — Pokemon's capture loop grafted onto a Forager-style island economy — that Steam's own review corpus calls "Mixed" for reasons that are mostly about launch-week polish, not the underlying design, from a developer who patched hard for five months and then quietly moved on to other projects.
5.8 / 10
A NZ$4.49 Cookie Clicker-style incremental from EagleEye Games, checked against every single English Steam review it has — all 53, positive and negative — plus its own achievement-completion curve and vote-weighted community tags, which rank it an Idler and an Incremental well ahead of the official "Simulation" genre label.
5.7 / 10
A genuinely engaging shop-management horror hybrid with a story reviewers say is worth seeing through to the end, undercut by real repetition once the novelty wears off, a save system that can lose hours of progress to crashes, and one serious complaint about its handling of mental illness themes.
5.6 / 10
A visually striking underwater city-builder whose post-apocalyptic survival premise promises real struggle, but whose actual build-research-wait loop draws consistent, specific comparisons to a much easier Anno — pretty to look at, reviewers say, with too little game underneath.
5.5 / 10
A post-apocalyptic 3D colony sim from the team behind RimWorld's Combat Extended mod that launched into Early Access far rougher than its years of hype promised — genuine game-breaking bugs and missing basics, offset by real community goodwill toward developers open about the production troubles that forced an early, underfunded launch.
5.5 / 10
A medieval settlement-builder with a genuinely strong building system wrapped around combat many call broken and a grind several find exhausting, complicated further by community anxiety about the developer's history — anxiety this review's own check finds only partly holds up against Bellwright's own active patch record.
5.5 / 10
A cosy casino management game whose own defenders say critics judged it by the wrong yardstick — it was never trying to be SimCasino, and the reviewers who wanted a hardcore tycoon sim with real failure states were always going to be disappointed by a game built to be impossible to lose.
5.5 / 10
