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145 Survival games reviewed and scored, best first.
145 reviews
A factory game with one iron deposit. Skyformer caps how fast you can extract anything, so you can't solve problems by building another mine — and then it makes the weather you terraformed into existence come back and destroy your factories. Half a gigabyte, genuinely novel, and rough where it counts.
7 / 10
A content-dense, genuinely fun bullet-heaven roguelite with 22-plus characters and hundreds of skills, praised for its scope and exceptionally responsive small developer team — undercut by a real, consistently repeated complaint spanning both its fans and critics: despite the huge nominal variety, most builds converge on the same handful of optimal choices, and the endgame settles into what reviewers repeatedly, vividly call a "dodging simulator."
7 / 10
A ten-year-old space sandbox that still earns a Very Positive rating on the strength of its crafting-and-exploration loop and its modding scene — until you check the dates and find the developer has shipped one hotfix since 2019, then marked the tenth anniversary of its 1.0 launch with a vinyl record instead of an update, which is currently tanking the recent-review score in real time.
7 / 10
A genuinely beloved Early Access survival-crafting game about a lone robot scavenging a drowned Earth to save the last of humanity, Very Positive across more than 12,000 reviews for a premise and atmosphere reviewers describe with real passion — undercut by severe, well-documented performance problems, a persistent unresolved crash bug, and a motion-sickness accessibility gap that several devoted fans describe as painful to keep flagging.
7 / 10
An ambitious single-world MMO crafting sandbox from the studio behind SpacetimeDB, built around a genuinely deep, RuneScape-inspired grind that its own biggest fans openly embrace — undercut by a real tension between its "idle-friendly" marketing and punishing stamina systems, rampant player-on-player griefing the developers are criticised for under-policing, and a disclosed but under-communicated plan to wipe progress and convert to free-to-play after Early Access.
6.5 / 10
A dark fantasy roguelite dungeon crawler with a distinctive old-school RuneScape look and a genuine risk-everything extraction structure — reviewed on its complete 15-review sample, which reads as a small solo-developer project fighting real launch-week bugs rather than a broken game.
6.5 / 10
A brutal, deeply detailed survival sandbox set in Robert E. Howard's Hyboria that's held a genuinely devoted following since 2018, now carrying real, current frustrations over monetisation additions and mandatory online requirements introduced since Funcom's acquisition by Tencent.
6.5 / 10
The game that arguably invented the modern survival genre from an ARMA 2 mod is still running, still brutal, and still dividing its own reviews between people who lived through its infamous five-year alpha and people just discovering how unforgiving it remains today.
6.5 / 10
A generous, well-made free shooter whose most-upvoted review isn't about the shooting at all — it's about the kernel-level anti-cheat that reviewers say keeps running after the game is uninstalled.
6.5 / 10
A free, chaotic co-op dig-and-defend game where up to four friends mine for loot by day and fend off zombies by night — reviewed on its complete English review sample, which reads as a genuinely fun prototype whose launch-week bugs a solo developer has been patching almost daily.
6.5 / 10
Supermassive set up the best premise they've ever had — a shapeshifting alien aboard a crashed colony ship, where the horror is not trusting the crew — and then spent the second half forgetting to use it.
6.5 / 10
A post-Soviet extraction horror shooter where a creature hunts you by your heartbeat — reviewed on its full English review sample, a dated patch that directly addressed the mechanic's loudest complaint, and a real mismatch between its co-op marketing history and its shipped build.
6.5 / 10
A top-down sci-fi survival-crafting game built around two protagonists who trade places at dusk — one built for exploration and building, one built for the enemies that only come out at night — five months into an Early Access build that is still visibly finding its footing.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed space-colony sim that spent a year in Early Access fixing the exact problems its first reviewers complained about, then launched to a small but genuinely engaged audience most readers have never heard of.
6.5 / 10
The Dealer returns, and this time he's dealing cards over a bullet heaven. The card layer is the most interesting thing in the genre right now; the horde layer underneath it hasn't worked out how to make you feel powerful yet — and the deckbuilding in its own tagline is still on the roadmap.
6.5 / 10
A co-op horror-comedy about hauling wrong-looking wildlife through a national park that shouldn't exist, held back from the genre's top table by a punishment mechanic that erases a night's work for reasons the player often can't see coming.
6.5 / 10
A tense, atmospheric PvPvE bounty-hunting shooter that rebuilt itself on a new engine and a fixed 1896 setting — and split a deeply devoted, thousand-hour community right down the middle over whether the relaunch was a genuine improvement or a betrayal of what made the original special.
6.5 / 10
A post-apocalyptic idle game built around a genuine grid-inventory puzzle rather than a spreadsheet of upgrade buttons, undercut by a prestige system that does the math against itself and timers that make "idle" feel like the wrong word for long stretches of it.
6.5 / 10
Raise bees on floating islands, crossbreed them for traits, and rebuild a supply of honey for a dying Earth. A lovely, meditative idea shipped without an Early Access label straight into a week of blocking bugs — and patched fast enough that its Steam rating has been climbing ever since.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed first-person open-world RPG that regenerates a 250 km² province every campaign and wraps combat, crafting, family upkeep, crime and slavery-and-abolition systems around one shared skill ladder — launched into Early Access with an 18-to-24-month roadmap to 1.0 and its main storyline not yet in the build.
6.5 / 10
A co-op sky-island survival game that trades hunger bars and monsters for solar panels and delivery drones — charming and genuinely clever in its energy systems, but its progression runs out of new ideas long before the credits.
6.5 / 10
A pixel-art MMO built around reshuffling roguelite dungeons and a player-run overworld, launched into Early Access carrying the baggage of its previous life as an NFT game.
6.5 / 10
A survival game where you recruit tribespeople who keep working while you're logged out — a genuinely original idea, attached to a 1.0 launch so rough the developers published a public 90-day plan to fix it.
6.5 / 10
A solo developer's entry into the Vampire Survivors mould gives its weapons a personality of their own, and arrives with a genuinely large unlock list for a two-day-old free release — the question this first look can't yet answer is how it plays at hour twenty.
6.5 / 10
