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145 Survival games reviewed and scored, best first.
145 reviews
A beloved co-op space-building sandbox with three distinct eras in its review history — an adored Early Access, a 1.0 launch derailed by an EULA backlash that had nothing to do with the game, and a 2025 wave of long-term fans warning newcomers about DLC and premium currency arriving after a "strategic acquisition."
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
An open-world zombie survival game with a genuine cult following that grew after release — launched on PC in 2021 with one of the most severe, best-documented data-collection controversies this library has seen, since resolved with an opt-out but still shaping how the game is remembered.
7.5 / 10
A survival MMO that actually earns its licence — stillsuits, spice addiction and sandworms all function as real systems — held back by an endgame that still leans too hard on forced PvP for players who came for the desert, not the fight.
7.5 / 10
Techland's return to Kyle Crane and the original Dying Light formula, widely, specifically praised as a genuine "return to form" after the divisive Dying Light 2 — backed by an unusually clean, well-optimised launch and an explicit, kept promise to ship without microtransactions — undercut for a real minority of players by parkour-unfriendly map design and a genuine, documented fairness controversy over how a later Definitive Edition treated existing Deluxe Edition owners.
7.5 / 10
A survival-automation game that makes terraforming the actual win condition instead of a late-game side quest, tying every conveyor belt and machine you build to a planet visibly coming back to life around it.
7.5 / 10
A voxel survival game that welds on a real RPG skill tree and dares you to dig, sculpt and build inside a world that is actively trying to kill you on a clock. Two and a half years into Early Access, with a 1.0 date finally on the calendar, the question is whether the fog and the talent tree were ever really talking to each other.
7.5 / 10
Bethesda's sprawling open-world RPG has weathered two separate, nearly identical controversies seven years apart — Creation Club's paid mods in 2017, and a 2024 "next-gen update" that broke almost everything the modding community had built to fix it.
7.5 / 10
A medieval survival city builder from the makers of Grim Dawn that spent three years building the deepest farming and disease system in the genre, then left Early Access in October 2025 to a Very Positive Steam rating and a still-vocal minority saying the milestone patch didn't fix what was wrong with it.
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 squad-based open-world RPG with no main quest, no level cap on how far you can fall, and an engine that has been fighting its own interface since a Steam Early Access launch in March 2013 — five and a half years before the "release date" most storefronts show. Its systemic freedom is genuinely unmatched; its performance and UI never caught up to the ambition.
7.5 / 10
A solo developer's co-op scavenging horror-comedy that became one of the defining games of its era, still funny and still tense two years on — while its own reviews increasingly argue about whether the person who made it has moved on from it.
7.5 / 10
Barrel Smash Studios' two-person Early Access debut drowns the world and asks you to build a colony on whatever's still floating — rafts, sinking islands, shark attacks and a corporate conspiracy buried in scavenged bunkers, all wrapped around a Rimworld-flavoured survivor sim.
7.5 / 10
Six years in Early Access, and the 1.0 landed this week. You play a broke shipbreaker with a loan and a flying coffin, building a ship out of salvage one bolt at a time. Nothing else does what it does — and its own most devoted players think it needed another year.
7.5 / 10
A haunting, atmospheric car-survival roguelike whose single biggest obstacle to a wider audience isn't its horror or its driving physics — it's a save system that a large, consistent share of reviewers say makes the game genuinely incompatible with an interrupted life.
7.5 / 10
A physics-driven co-op extraction horror that wears its Lethal Company debt openly and still carved out its own identity — helped, oddly, by a store banner so deliberately ugly that half its own reviews open by apologising for it.
7.5 / 10
Jagex takes twenty-five years of RuneScape skill icons and welds them onto a Valheim-shaped survival loop. Fifteen months into Early Access, with a 1.0 date now on the calendar, the question is whether the skilling actually survived the move or just changed clothes.
7.5 / 10
A visually extraordinary, boldly original entry in Konami's horror franchise — trading the series' familiar American fog town for 1960s rural Japan, with a story from acclaimed writer Ryukishi07 and a score featuring series composer Akira Yamaoka — undercut by a combat system that reviewers on both sides of the recommendation line agree fights against the psychological dread the series has always been known for.
7.5 / 10
Endnight's sequel to The Forest is the best-looking survival-horror island you can build a base on, and its rockiest reviews — mostly written in the first weeks after launch — argued a beautiful map was hiding surprisingly little to actually do. Recent sentiment suggests the gap between the two has narrowed since.
7.5 / 10
A village builder where everything — villagers, berries, houses, monsters — is a card on a table, and you craft by dragging one onto another. Twelve dollars, 96% positive, genuinely inventive. Then your table fills up and there is no way to automate anything.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely excellent, atmospheric successor to one of survival gaming's most beloved titles, selling two million copies in twelve hours — whose launch was immediately overshadowed by a well-documented controversy over an unusually restrictive EULA from publisher Krafton, set against a pre-existing, publicly reported dispute over developer bonuses that the community rallied around in real time.
7.5 / 10
A first-person open-world RPG built openly in the shape of Skyrim, but set in a bleaker, more literary Arthurian world where night itself turns hostile — ambitious, well-written and visibly under-budgeted in the faces of the people telling its story.
7.5 / 10
