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186 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
186 reviews
A digital adaptation of a real tabletop primer used by Fight Club International's professional military wargaming network — a 20-minute hex-and-counter hill assault built to teach the genre's core mechanics, shipped day one with zero user reviews and no achievement data to check its claims against.
6.5 / 10
A football sim that puts you on the whistle instead of the ball — full 3D matches where every foul, dive, card, penalty and VAR review is your call, marked out of ten afterward, with a four-league career and 1-4 player online co-op where friends run the lines. Launched into Early Access 6 August 2026 from a solo Swedish developer.
6.5 / 10
The base game is free and the creative tools are still the best in the genre. The full catalogue — all 113 add-ons — costs about NZ$1,580, and almost every negative review this game has ever received is about that number.
6.5 / 10
A short, atmospheric first-person horror sim from a solo developer with an established following, whose genuinely effective scares and Night of the Living Dead homage were nearly undercut by real launch bugs — since addressed by nine patches in the game's first week alone.
6.5 / 10
East Side Games' 2017 licensed idle tycoon turns Sunnyvale Trailer Park into a business-management loop, wraps its prestige reset in the show's own running joke about jail, and is still getting seasonal updates on mobile nine years later — even after its Steam PC version was quietly abandoned and delisted.
6.5 / 10
A grand-strategy game brave enough to be about economics instead of conquest, four years and seventeen DLC later still arguing with its own players about warfare — and its newest expansion needed nine hotfixes in two months.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed hybrid that welds grand-strategy nation management onto clicker mechanics — genuinely novel in concept, but a divisive combat rework, opaque economy and buggy pathfinding have left its Early Access reception stuck at Mixed.
6 / 10
A perfectly decent Anno wrapped in one of the least generous packages of 2025 — a NZ$99.95 base game, a Year 1 Pass that doesn't cover all of year one's DLC, Denuvo, a required Ubisoft account, and a disclosed use of AI tools for in-game assets.
6 / 10
Nineteen months into Early Access, the driving model is superb and the game around it has been getting smaller — the career economy was removed in February 2026, and the open world people bought it for still isn't here.
6 / 10
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.
6 / 10
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.
6 / 10
A one-developer desktop pet that evolves from a slime into a dark sorceress and is allowed to shake your windows and flash your taskbar along the way — reviewed on its Early Access launch day, with zero user reviews yet to check it against and an achievement sample so small it can be read as a raw account count.
6 / 10
The raid loop it invented is still the best in the genre, and the company around it is the problem. NZ$85.99 to buy, another NZ$51.99 if you want the PvE mode, and a Steam launch so broken that 58 of the most-upvoted negative reviews were written in a single month.
6 / 10
A cozy magical farming sim that survived its own near-death experience — two rounds of studio layoffs, an announced shutdown of its online features, and a last-minute rescue by a new publisher just days before the servers were due to go dark.
6 / 10
A cheap, good-looking incremental about feeding a black hole until it either swallows a leaderboard spot or collapses on you, undercut by a threadbare research tree and a wave of recent reviews accusing the whole project of being thrown together with AI.
6 / 10
A turn-based idle grinder built around hiring the monsters you've just killed, with a genuinely clever risk-versus-reward twist buried under a spreadsheet-dense interface and a release so quiet that Steam has barely registered it exists.
6 / 10
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.
6 / 10
A solo-developed, node-based automation game that scratches the Factorio itch without Factorio's build-everything-yourself demands, still in Early Access two and a half years in and still being actively rebalanced — most recently to remove the exact progression walls its players have been complaining about since launch.
6 / 10
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.
6 / 10
A small, calm mining sim about drilling deeper for a couple of evenings — pleasant while it lasts, and honest about how little it's asking of your time.
6 / 10
A desktop pet, not a game in any conventional sense — Wukong or Amei sit on your screen, react to your typing and clicking, and let you draw their outfits by hand. Reviewed two days after launch, with almost no review corpus yet to judge it by.
6 / 10
A genuinely excellent basketball simulator wrapped in an economy where one season's pass costs more than the whole discounted game — and where the sequel went on pre-order while those passes were still being sold.
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
