Browse by year
42 games released in 2021 and reviewed here, best first.
42 reviews
Klei Entertainment's deck-building roguelite wraps card combat and card-based negotiation around real narrative choice — praised widely for its writing and world, while a consistent, thoughtful minority argue the cards underneath don't hold up to the genre's best.
7 / 10
A minimalist incremental where every life is a countdown to a death that actually matters — the queue you plan, the story chapter you're on, and the instincts you've earned all carry forward, right up until the game itself stopped moving forward three years ago.
7 / 10
A first-person survival sandbox about hunting, farming and building a village that eventually runs itself, wrapped around the promise of a multi-generational dynasty that almost nobody who owns it ever actually reaches — a Very Positive, 42,000-plus-review Steam favourite that has spent the last two years answering "what's missing" with paid cosmetics instead of the content its own late-game silence keeps calling for.
7 / 10
A budget soulslike built around a genuinely inventive hook — inhabit the bodies of dead warriors rather than levelling a character of your own — that's spent five years since launch as a genuinely divisive game, with real, still-current complaints about content thinness and unfixed bugs sitting alongside a devoted fanbase, just days ahead of a sequel's official release.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental where the resource you're actually optimising is your character's lifespan — age through a job and skill web, die at seventy unless you've trained around it, and rebirth into a faster run. Small in scope next to the genre's marathons, and handed to the community as public domain, which explains why it's been forked well over a hundred times.
7 / 10
A relentlessly demanding, meditative off-road trucking sim that reviewers describe with genuine reverence and dark humor in equal measure — undercut for years by unreliable multiplayer and crossplay stability, and an extensive DLC roster reviewers say pushes toward $200 for the full experience.
7 / 10
A NZ$10.29 fusion of time-loop adventure and idle incremental that has held a Very Positive Steam rating across four and a half years — not by avoiding friction, but by turning the loop's reset into the exact mechanism that makes idle progression permanent, while never fixing the one interface complaint players have repeated since launch week.
7 / 10
A tiny, no-combat runner/metroidvania about a cat who can't fight and can only sprint past danger — a nearly five-year-old Early Access project the developer just released for free after its funding fell through, reviewed on its complete review sample old and new.
6.5 / 10
Arkane's stylish time-loop shooter won Game of the Year honours from multiple outlets in 2021, but sits Mostly Positive across more than 30,000 Steam reviews — a notably wider gap between critical acclaim and player reception than sibling title Dishonored 2, driven by a real, detailed "undershoots Dishonored and Prey" complaint from longtime Arkane fans, and by a persistent Denuvo DRM and mandatory-online requirement this review can confirm, unlike Dishonored 2's, has not been removed even five years after launch.
6.5 / 10
A brutally tense, atmospheric co-op horror shooter built entirely around four-player coordination — undercut for years by the one thing it never properly solved: no server browser or real matchmaking, leaving solo players locked out unless they already have a premade squad.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely distinctive, hardcore 100-player WWII shooter built around resource-based meta-strategy and a dynamically shifting front line, still Very Positive across nearly 150,000 Steam reviews five years on — undercut by a real, sustained, multi-year complaint that Team17's 2023 acquisition of the game brought a persistent decline in update quality, and a genuine, currently active cheating problem several reviewers describe as severe enough to have driven entire dedicated communities away.
6.5 / 10
One of the most beautiful cyberpunk worlds ever built, wrapped around bugs that delete your save — reported in 2021, still reported in 2026, with an announcement feed containing five years of sales and no patch notes.
6.5 / 10
A free text-based idle RPG with more than 3,000 branching story actions and a genuinely active five-year development history, buried behind one of the least welcoming first hours the genre has to offer.
6.5 / 10
A Fallout-inspired isometric RPG with a genuinely excellent opening act — original setting, meaningful choices, sharp writing — that a remarkably consistent share of its own reviewers say collapses in quality once that first act ends.
6 / 10
A genuinely well-designed session-based survival game from DayZ creator Dean Hall, buried under eighteen separate paid DLC packs that together cost more than six times the base game itself — and it's the single loudest complaint in the game's entire review history.
6 / 10
The factory-building sequel to NGU Idle swaps rebirth layering for conveyor belts and work orders, builds a genuinely interesting system out of it in its first six weeks, and then stops. It has been Early Access, unfinished, since April 2021.
6 / 10
A veteran-defined tank warfare MMO whose Steam launch stumbled over locked-out existing accounts in 2021, and whose long, escalating pay-to-win reputation reached a documented breaking point in May 2025 when Wargaming introduced tiered loot boxes that sent its most invested ten-year players heading for the exit.
5 / 10
A 3D incremental Action RPG that opened Early Access with real presentation and a genuine spark of promise in 2021, then stopped receiving updates entirely a few months later — a cautionary tale about buying into Early Access on faith rather than track record.
4 / 10
