Browse by year
303 games released in 2022 and reviewed here, best first.
303 reviews
A solo-developer factory-automation game that ships complete rather than in Early Access, with a genuinely responsive dev and procedurally generated worlds, but that its own review corpus repeatedly measures against Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program — and finds wanting on the tutorial, controls and combat that stand between you and the automation.
6 / 10
A stripped-to-the-studs idle clicker about flipping coins for bigger numbers, whose own reviewers keep comparing it unfavourably to the same solo developer's later, better games — and to a persistent exit-crash bug the developer has reportedly known about for years.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely deep tycoon sim about building a cryptocurrency mining empire against real historical coin prices, praised for its depth by a one-person developer — undercut by a famously clicky interface and a structural flaw several reviewers point out: since the history is already known, the smartest move is rarely to actually run the simulation.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developed retro dungeon crawler with genuinely satisfying, weighty combat in the vein of Quake, Hexen and DUSK, undercut by a progression system reviewers call self-defeating and at least two specific bugs that went unpatched for the entirety of the game's four-year life.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely novel idea — a medieval village that grows along the bottom of your desktop while you work or browse — undermined by severe late-game performance problems that never got fixed despite a dense first year of support, plus recurring save-corruption bugs spanning years.
5.5 / 10
A charming, cheap Viking-themed tile-placement puzzler whose relaxed atmosphere is undercut by hidden rules players have to discover through trial and error, and a keyboard/mouse remapping option the developer promised was "coming very soon" back in December 2022.
5.5 / 10
A clever fuzzy-matching tile game from Ludum Dare 51 — pairs don't need to be exact, partial matches on colour or parity still score — undercut on phones by a confirmed layout bug that shrinks the board to tiles roughly 15 CSS pixels wide by default.
5.5 / 10
Kolibri Games takes the miner-elevator-warehouse template it invented in 2016 and reskins it as a bank, with Marketing, Service Windows, Vault and Main Hall standing in for the usual dig-lift-sell chain. The loop still works; the shop around it leans harder on ads and loot boxes than the studio's older, better-loved games.
5.5 / 10
A Cookie Clicker structure rebuilt around stock-photo burgers -- competent, cheap, and 100%-able in under a day, with reviewers consistently landing on the same verdict -- fine at first, boring well before the achievement list runs out.
5.5 / 10
An idol-management sim whose own title and store copy promise true idle progression, but whose review corpus — in English and Japanese alike, from critics and fans — agrees on one thing first: it isn't actually an idle game, it's a tight 15-to-20-minute time-management score-attack with no carryover between runs.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely distinctive robot-swarm base-management game with a satisfying resource loop and real accessibility care, undercut by a difficulty curve reviewers consistently call frictionless and a five-region structure that mostly reskins the same mechanics rather than building on them.
5.5 / 10
A turn-based tactical roguelite with a genuinely inventive three-phase combat system, Very Positive with the players who found it — undercut by an Early Access status that has sat completely frozen since a single update in September 2022, alongside an unresolved softlock bug reviewers say the developer stopped answering around the same time.
5.5 / 10
A small, chill background idle RPG about managing a tropical colony of mercenary creatures, genuinely enjoyed by a niche audience for low-pressure passive play, held back by real, consistently reported bugs and a UI several reviewers call unfinished.
5.5 / 10
A long-running idle RPG about a monster-forest slime clan grinding gear and dungeons, still pulling ten million-plus downloads years after launch — undercut lately by an ad frequency its own players say has quietly gotten much worse.
5.5 / 10
A confident turn-based roguelite spinoff of Ironhide's tower-defense franchise, held back from its own beloved series' standard by a mobile-carried-over interface, thin content for its price, and a single major post-launch update before the studio moved on to its bigger releases.
5.5 / 10
A survival-RPG built around one of anime's most punishing premises -- descend into a bottomless pit, and the climb back up gets progressively more gruesome -- undercut by clunky combat and a full-price tag that its own fans, almost unanimously, tell each other to wait out.
5.5 / 10
Read review of Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness
A genuinely satisfying physics-based off-road truck sandbox from a solo developer, comparable in spirit to BeamNG.drive, that shipped with real momentum in 2022 before slowing to a crawl and leaving real, unresolved bugs and unfulfilled Early Access promises still open.
5.5 / 10
A synthwave-styled grid-tactics deckbuilder with a genuinely acclaimed soundtrack, whose central design choice — enemies that automatically rotate to face the player — undercuts the exact positional-outsmarting appeal reviewers came to it looking for from its clearest genre touchstones.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$6.95 Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven from Amrita, Very Positive across 470 lifetime reviews but carrying a consistent, dated accusation from its own players — 19 of the 52 most-helpful English negatives name Vampire Survivors directly, several call it a near-identical asset-flip, and the developer's own patch history shows active Early Access support stopping the moment 1.0 shipped in February 2023, replaced since by two entirely new games from the same studio.
5.5 / 10
A nostalgia-driven inn-management sequel bringing back beloved characters from Softstar's decades-old Sword and Fairy RPG series, genuinely charming for longtime fans but criticised by a large share of its own audience for stripping out the exploration depth that made the original stand out.
5.5 / 10
A js13k 2022 "non-violent tower defense" — plant tombstones and dead trees to scare passersby out of your graveyard — well-liked by competition judges on desktop, but sunk for this shelf's purposes by a severe, directly confirmed viewport bug that leaves the game's core scoring readout physically off-screen on a phone with no way to reach it.
5.5 / 10
A refreshingly honest pitch for the genre — five stats, a stated finish line, no infinite treadmill — undercut since launch week by an interest-rate stat that several reviewers say breaks the game's own math and lets you finish in under two hours.
5.5 / 10
A visually stunning Dead Space spiritual successor that never fully recovered from a disastrous December 2022 performance launch — and whose save-corruption bugs, reported by reviewers three years apart, still haven't been fully resolved.
5.5 / 10
Square Enix promised a genuinely new fusion of real-time strategy and tactical RPG -- its own review corpus, positive and negative alike, spent the game's release week explaining that the pitch outran the execution, and that a workable build trivialises the "strategy" fast.
5.5 / 10
