Browse by year
104 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
104 reviews
A first-person open-world RPG built openly in the shape of Skyrim, but set in a bleaker, more literary Arthurian world where night itself turns hostile — ambitious, well-written and visibly under-budgeted in the faces of the people telling its story.
7.5 / 10
A tower-defence game, a factory incremental and a scripting sandbox welded into one free island, where the real endgame is writing the AI that plays it for you.
7.5 / 10
Two Point Studios' museum management sim remains Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 13,000 Steam reviews, widely credited by longtime series fans as the best entry yet — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent complaint about its "Thieves" mechanic, which recurring reviewers describe as a poorly-tuned frustration distinct from the rest of the game's gentle, decoration- focused design, alongside a real, repetitive "expedition loot-box" content-acquisition loop.
7.5 / 10
The week's biggest "new release" is actually a year-old Early Access game that just hit 1.0 — and the 1.0 finally brought the co-op everyone was waiting for. It's funny, generous and hugely popular. It's also a management sim that never lets you stop doing the menial jobs yourself.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, enormous free wuxia open world with some of the most charming systems design in any live-service RPG — welded to an energy meter, five battle passes and a cosmetic gacha that its own store page describes as cosmetics-only.
7.5 / 10
A handsome late-Ming soulslike carrying a Mixed badge that English-speaking players didn't give it — and a post-launch patch that changed the story out from under the people who'd finished it.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, genuinely soothing pixel-art fishing game that lets you fish actively or let an idle mode do it for you — beloved enough to have gotten real players off the couch and back onto real lakes with their own families, undercut at launch by a real, consistently documented complaint that idling outperforms actually playing, and that there simply wasn't much game underneath the vibe.
7 / 10
A creature-taming roguelike deckbuilder with a genuinely distinctive hook — recruit your enemies into your deck instead of collecting pre-made cards, then lose them permanently if they die in battle — undercut for a meaningful slice of players by steep, RNG-heavy difficulty spikes that a dedicated "Difficulty Update" only partly resolved.
7 / 10
id Software's medieval-set prequel trades DOOM Eternal's frantic weapon-juggling for a slower, shield-and-parry combat framework — widely respected as a deliberate, distinct evolution even by reviewers who call it the "weakest" of the modern trilogy — shadowed by a real, well- documented Xbox layoff that cut the studio by more than half the day before its major DLC launched, and by a long-simmering, genuinely disputed soundtrack controversy resurfacing now that composer Mick Gordon hasn't returned.
7 / 10
A free roguelike RPG port of a long-running mobile game — with the microtransactions stripped out, a year of updates its own reviewers said would never come, and only 49 English reviews to judge it by.
7 / 10
A solo developer's three-years-in-the-making cosmic-horror action roguelite that draws passionate praise for its atmosphere and combat feel, while a consistent thread of its own fans worry it's chasing Dead Cells a little too directly to fully stand on its own.
7 / 10
A NZ$7.39 mining incremental that sold 100,000 copies in seventeen days, is finished by three quarters of the people who buy it, and spends its second half padding a two-hour game past the refund window. Its own reviewers name the trick.
7 / 10
A handsome, deliberately linear twelve-hour crime story in 1900s Sicily that three in five buyers actually finish — released at NZ$119.95, which is the number most of its arguments are really about.
7 / 10
A $2.99 voice-controlled spell duel that turned a solo developer's Early Access experiment into one of 2025's biggest indie surprises — a year on, the novelty has mostly held, but the update cadence and the mic's grasp of accents have not kept pace.
7 / 10
One of the greatest games ever made, rebuilt shot for shot and shipped at NZ$114.99 with performance problems Konami stopped patching in January — now 60% off, eleven months later, for reasons the review page makes obvious.
7 / 10
A chaotic, genuinely addictive co-op survival game set in a STALKER-flavoured nuclear exclusion zone, praised by players for its dark comedy and bunker-crawling tension even as a substantial share of the same review sample argues its "1.0" label is misleading for content this thin — and whose launch was briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented DMCA dispute with STALKER 2 developer GSC Game World and an admitted offensive Discord incident from a member of the small development team.
7 / 10
A free incremental built around filling concentric, spinning colour rings instead of the usual bar chart of numbers — genuinely huge in scope, openly derivative in structure, and popular enough to have accumulated over seven thousand English Steam reviews doing it.
7 / 10
A densely systemic bullet-heaven survivor-like that grew from a simple, focused Early Access hit into something several hundred-hour veterans now describe as buried under its own added complexity — alongside real, current complaints about difficulty balance and performance.
7 / 10
A factory game with one iron deposit. Skyformer caps how fast you can extract anything, so you can't solve problems by building another mine — and then it makes the weather you terraformed into existence come back and destroy your factories. Half a gigabyte, genuinely novel, and rough where it counts.
7 / 10
A content-dense, genuinely fun bullet-heaven roguelite with 22-plus characters and hundreds of skills, praised for its scope and exceptionally responsive small developer team — undercut by a real, consistently repeated complaint spanning both its fans and critics: despite the huge nominal variety, most builds converge on the same handful of optimal choices, and the endgame settles into what reviewers repeatedly, vividly call a "dodging simulator."
7 / 10
A NZ$4.79 incremental about shooting asteroids and dropping the ore into a Plinko machine. Its achievement curve is the flattest this library has measured — almost everyone who buys it finishes it — and its prestige system is the one part that doesn't work.
7 / 10
Shift Up's PS5-exclusive-turned-PC-port lands with genuinely praised combat, striking visuals and one of the strongest PC ports of its console-exclusive generation, undercut by a real, widely repeated "style over substance" complaint about shallow side content and a thin story — one this review can confirm the game's own director has publicly, directly admitted was underdeveloped.
7 / 10
A genuinely beloved Early Access survival-crafting game about a lone robot scavenging a drowned Earth to save the last of humanity, Very Positive across more than 12,000 reviews for a premise and atmosphere reviewers describe with real passion — undercut by severe, well-documented performance problems, a persistent unresolved crash bug, and a motion-sickness accessibility gap that several devoted fans describe as painful to keep flagging.
7 / 10
An action RPG that layers levelling on top of levelling — your character, your skills, your weapons and your items all grow independently — and earns real comparisons to Diablo and Last Epoch for its first ten hours, before a near-universally hated grind wall right before the final boss undoes a lot of that goodwill.
7 / 10
