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136 games released in 2018 and reviewed here, best first.
136 reviews
SYMMETRY wraps a survival-management sim in genuinely striking retro-futuristic vector art and a mysterious, half-told sci-fi story. Its own reviewers largely agree the atmosphere is the best thing about it, and just as largely agree the actual click-and-wait management loop underneath is one of the most punishing, repetitive experiences in the genre.
5 / 10
A charming, tiny 64x64 Bitsy game built around a dynamic torch-light mechanic for LOWREZJAM 2018 - keyboard movement works correctly, but the game's own touch-swipe movement path is genuinely broken in the exported build, confirmed by direct player-position checks across every direction rather than assumed from a screenshot.
5 / 10
A prettily illustrated but extremely short visual novel mystery, undercut by an obvious, spoon-fed whodunnit, repetitive dialogue-loop gameplay, and text riddled with editing errors that a decade of silence has never fixed.
4.5 / 10
Albireo Games' cheap, no-frills tile-matching solitaire does exactly what its title promises and nothing else — pleasant enough for a short sitting, but its own players report a shuffle algorithm that regularly hands out unsolvable boards.
4.5 / 10
A hardcore post-apocalyptic survival MMO with real base-building and PvP depth, Mixed at 67 percent across more than 23,000 reviews — split not so much over the survival gameplay itself as over a remarkably consistent, years-long pattern of long-tenured players accusing the development team of banning critics from its own community spaces.
4.5 / 10
A free 2018 city-building idler, and the earliest of solo developer Aleksandr Golovkin's three Steam idle games — genuine strategic depth in its building trees and "Assimilation" prestige system, undercut by save-corrupting crashes that go back to launch week and a game the developer stopped touching for content in August 2018.
4.5 / 10
A Prohibition-era mafia grand strategy game with a genuinely rare premise and almost none of the depth needed to carry it past the first few hours.
4.2 / 10
Read review of The Commission: Organized Crime Grand Strategy
The paid sequel to one of idle gaming's founding games spent almost six years in Early Access, tore up its own design twice, and was quietly pulled from sale in 2024 without ever reaching version 1.0. A look at what it tried to build and why it never finished building it.
4 / 10
A Greek-mythology idle clicker with a genuinely dense set of systems layered under the clicking — armor crafting, class trees, recruitable gods and a companion mini-game — last patched in February 2020 and never formally updated since, despite still being sold as if it were a live product.
4 / 10
A Hexen/Heretic-inspired retro FPS sold as a full release but shipped with roughly a tenth of its promised content — this review found and verified the developer's own quoted promise of more maps and ten hours of playtime, broken since 2018 with no updates since.
3.6 / 10
Fury Games Production's 2018 budget clicker promises a tycoon and delivers a five-achievement tap loop that its own tiny review base says is finished, and forgotten, within an afternoon.
3.5 / 10
A NZ$3.69 mobile port that charges upfront and then layers in-app purchases on top anyway — the single complaint its small review corpus has repeated, unprompted, for eight straight years, alongside a progression wall around planet 40-60 and a broken "offline progress" promise that shows up twice, four years apart.
3.5 / 10
A one-developer gladiator hack-and-slash that launched in 2018 as a stripped-down single-player sliver of a much bigger multiplayer Roman-arena RPG its own official website still describes as "upcoming" and "in alpha" — three Steam reviews total, and the one detailed negative report says the settings menu doesn't work.
3.2 / 10
A casual mini-game collection with a genuinely decent underlying concept, undercut by a messy, buggy implementation reviewers say is at times dreadful, a specific level-73 bug that can block completion, and a widely repeated claim that it largely reuses assets from its own predecessor.
3.2 / 10
A genuinely novel premise — build a crypto-mining empire starting in 2014 — abandoned by its developer mid-development, left with a reported unwinnable debt bug that can end a run outright, and dogged by real performance and security concerns this review could not fully resolve.
3 / 10
An imaginative premise — a giant mobile castle fleeing monsters across an open world — sold at an extraordinary NZ$289.99, which this review's own check of Steam's public records shows spent roughly six years in Early Access before quietly "leaving" it in 2024 with a single achievement and, by ten of eleven reviewers' accounts, barely a tutorial's worth of content.
1.8 / 10
