Hotline Miami
Fourteen years on, still one of the most influential action games ever made — and its most-upvoted negative review is really just a warning label its own fans agree with.
9 / 10
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Games released in 2012
9 games released in 2012 and reviewed here, best first.
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9 reviews
Guild Wars 2
No subscription, no level-cap treadmill and, fourteen years on, still no level 81 — Guild Wars 2's horizontal progression is either the smartest bet the MMO genre ever made or a slow-burn excuse for six expansions of buy-in. Reviewed with Visions of Eternity live.
8.5 / 10
Euro Truck Simulator 2
A thirteen-year-old trucking sim so meditative and beloved it has its own devoted subculture — now navigating a real, escalating backlash from its own longtime fans over a 2024-2025 UI overhaul many say broke what wasn't asking to be fixed.
8 / 10
Torchlight II
A 2012 answer to Diablo III's always-online auction house, built by former Blizzard North designers — and still worth playing today largely because of the mod scene that kept extending it after Runic Games itself closed down.
8 / 10
Counter-Strike 2
Its store page says 86% positive across 9.7 million reviews and a 2012 release date — both belong to a different game. Valve replaced CS:GO in place, inherited its decade of praise, and the most-upvoted negative review is about exactly that.
7.5 / 10
Diablo III
Diablo III launched in 2012 with a real-money item market that quietly rewrote its own loot tables, then spent the next two years proving the fix was worth the wait. Fourteen years and thirty-nine seasons on, it's a cheap, complete, still-excellent action RPG stuck in maintenance mode — and still carrying an always-online rule it no longer has a reason for.
7.5 / 10
Realm of the Mad God
A free bullet-hell MMO that's been asking the same brutal question for fourteen years — how far will you push a character you can never get back — and somehow still gets away with graphics that looked deliberately retro even in 2012.
7.5 / 10
Risen 2: Dark Waters
Reviewed the same day as its predecessor, this sequel trades Risen's dark, mystic fantasy world for a colonial pirate setting that a meaningful share of longtime fans describe as a worse, more streamlined direction — layered on top of a distinct, still-active crash bug tied to teleporting between towns, corroborated as recently as April 2026.
6.5 / 10
Midnight Mysteries: Salem Witch Trials
A genuinely well-regarded hidden-object mystery with strong art and atmosphere, undercut by a single, dominant, decade-old problem — broken Steam achievements that this review confirmed the developer never fixed, alongside real resolution and scaling issues on modern displays.
5.1 / 10