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14 games released in 2014 and reviewed here, best first.
14 reviews
A tower-defense game where the enemy isn't units but a fluid — cellular automata standing in for an AI, spreading through terrain rather than pathing along it. Reviewed on its full lifetime and recent Steam review corpora, an 11-year-old cult favourite that some of its own harshest critics have played for thousands of hours.
8.5 / 10
The 2011 browser game that helped drag tower defense out of the Flash-portal era and into a genre of its own, still sitting at 96% positive on Steam a decade after its 2014 Unity port — mostly because the core loop of towers, heroes and boss fights it invented is still the one every entry since, including Ironhide's own sequels, gets measured against.
8.5 / 10
The roguelike that taught the genre what item synergy could be, at 97% across 439,000 reviews. Twelve years and hundreds of items later, its most experienced players are asking whether it now has too many.
8.5 / 10
A free browser incremental that hides its difficulty in storage caps and the calendar rather than big numbers — you are never fighting an enemy in Kittens Game, you are fighting your own granary.
8 / 10
The game that Epic Battle Fantasy 5's critics kept holding up as the better one — except it rates two and a half points lower than the sequel they were complaining about.
7.5 / 10
Widely considered the best of Harebrained Schemes' three Shadowrun tactical RPGs — richer writing, a real home base to return to, characters worth following — undercut for a meaningful number of players by a long-standing soft-lock bug near the campaign's end that this review can't recommend around.
7.5 / 10
Twelve years and eight chapters after launch, The Elder Scrolls Online still lets you start anywhere and stay relevant everywhere. Level scaling bought that freedom; the trade-off is a levelling arc with no real stakes and a monetisation model dense enough to need a spreadsheet. Reviewed with Season One: Return of the Thieves Guild live.
7.5 / 10
A one-person city-building survival game from 2014 that still holds a Very Positive Steam rating across 37,800-plus reviews, built on a genuinely unusual pitch — no money, no skill trees, no combat — that a decade of players keep bumping up against the same mid-game ceiling to enjoy.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental that turns a single click-to-catch-fish button into a full sea-life economy, an artifact-driven prestige loop and — almost uniquely for the genre — a real ending, even though its own developers insist it isn't actually an idle game.
7 / 10
The mobile gacha RPG that the rest of the genre was quietly built on top of is still running twelve years later, and the direct ancestry to Raid: Shadow Legends' gear system makes it the rare case where reviewing the original after the imitation actually changes the verdict.
7 / 10
MachineGames' 2014 reboot remains Very Positive across more than 61,000 Steam reviews a decade later, widely credited with successfully reviving a dormant franchise through genuinely strong gunplay and an unexpectedly earnest story — undercut for AMD graphics card owners by a severe, reproducible technical incompatibility this review can confirm has gone unresolved in the developer's own communications for well over a decade.
7 / 10
A 2014 browser incremental where larvae become drones, drones become queens and queens build nests — one of the earliest games to make a production chain the entire point, later rebuilt in 3D as the free-to-play Swarm Simulator: Evolution on Steam and Android.
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
Lemonade stand to interplanetary conglomerate in three clicks and one very persistent gold shop. A forensic look at the idle clicker that made "buy, automate, reset" a mobile business model as much as a game design.
6 / 10
