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104 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
104 reviews
An adorable desktop-companion idler where pixel animals roam the bottom of your screen while you work — undercut by a genuinely strange design choice for a game in this genre, its own idle mascots get sick if you leave them alone for too long.
7 / 10
A genuinely promising return for a cult-favourite action RPG series, currently sold at full future price for a slice of content that doesn't yet match the ambition of its class system.
7 / 10
A solo developer's debut that welds an automated turret to a twin-stick Asteroids clone, then closes the whole arc out in an afternoon — a sharp, cheap hook let down by a mouse-hostile upgrade screen and a progression curve that peaks right as the credits roll.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental built for a 2025 game jam, about hauling a strange substance up out of a mining town's collapsing depths — deliberately short, unusually confident about its Lovecraftian ending, and patched several times since launch to fix the rough edges that shipped with it.
7 / 10
Ubisoft's feudal Japan entry delivers genuinely beautiful visuals and a widely loved shinobi protagonist, undercut by a real, consistently repeated "formula fatigue" complaint — towers, icons, repetition — a verified gap between Ubisoft's public promise of full offline play and what reviewers report experiencing in practice, and a heavily monetised in-game store layered on top of a full NZ$109.95 purchase.
6.5 / 10
EA's biggest Battlefield launch in franchise history — 20 million units sold, record concurrent players, genuinely praised gunplay and an unusually stable launch — undercut by a widely repeated "bait and switch" narrative in which an acclaimed beta gave way to aggressive post-launch monetisation, and shadowed by a real, independently verified wave of layoffs across the studios that built it just months after that record-breaking success.
6.5 / 10
An ambitious single-world MMO crafting sandbox from the studio behind SpacetimeDB, built around a genuinely deep, RuneScape-inspired grind that its own biggest fans openly embrace — undercut by a real tension between its "idle-friendly" marketing and punishing stamina systems, rampant player-on-player griefing the developers are criticised for under-policing, and a disclosed but under-communicated plan to wipe progress and convert to free-to-play after Early Access.
6.5 / 10
A well-loved anime school RPG going through a gacha revolt in real time. Nine of its last hundred English reviews are positive — and the change they're protesting isn't in the version most Steam players are running yet. Reviewed 4 August 2026, mid-storm.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely deep idle civilization builder — a hundred-plus technologies, era-spanning wonders, a real global trading market — undercut by a headline feature that's been advertised for over a year without actually existing.
6.5 / 10
A free idle RPG with the genuine article — true 1:1 offline progression — attached to a retention design that keeps demanding you come back and play minigames by hand.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed space-colony sim that spent a year in Early Access fixing the exact problems its first reviewers complained about, then launched to a small but genuinely engaged audience most readers have never heard of.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely beautiful open-world dress-up game whose Steam score is a permanent record of the worst month in its life — and whose players describe it, accurately, as both a work of art and a predatory gacha.
6.5 / 10
A solo developer's yard-cleanup incremental turns raking leaves into a genuine tool-upgrade power fantasy — reviewed for whether a two-hour runtime and a single backyard are worth the Overwhelmingly Positive reputation, or just too little game for the price of admission.
6.5 / 10
Nexon's Roblox Studio-style pivot for its 250-million-lifetime-player MapleStory IP — drag-and-drop and Lua-scripted creator tools built on 30 million ready-made assets, backed by real creator funding programs, and still working out an economy that pays creators less per sale than several of its platform peers.
6.5 / 10
A free scratch-card incremental with 91% positive reviews, median playtimes near 100 hours — and an achievement called "Reviewed" that 40% of its owners have unlocked. The engagement is real. So is the asterisk on the score.
6.5 / 10
A turn-based hero collector that grafts Uma Musume's training sim onto Honkai: Star Rail-style combat, with presentation to match — undercut by optimisation problems and a PvP ladder that leans harder on spending than its otherwise generous gacha deserves.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed love letter to Skyrim, West of Loathing and Supraland that reviewers consistently say nails its first two hours — and just as consistently say runs out of ideas, and occasionally soft-locks, well before the credits.
6.5 / 10
A perfectly decent Anno wrapped in one of the least generous packages of 2025 — a NZ$99.95 base game, a Year 1 Pass that doesn't cover all of year one's DLC, Denuvo, a required Ubisoft account, and a disclosed use of AI tools for in-game assets.
6 / 10
Nineteen months into Early Access, the driving model is superb and the game around it has been getting smaller — the career economy was removed in February 2026, and the open world people bought it for still isn't here.
6 / 10
A looter-shooter with genuinely well-regarded gunplay, undercut by severe, persistent PC performance problems and a real, extensively documented public-relations crisis in which Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford spent days publicly dismissing player complaints — telling PC gamers to "code your own engine" and that "premium games are made for premium gamers" — turning a technical problem into what press outlets have called "the great Pitchford Twitter crashout of 2025."
6 / 10
The raid loop it invented is still the best in the genre, and the company around it is the problem. NZ$85.99 to buy, another NZ$51.99 if you want the PvE mode, and a Steam launch so broken that 58 of the most-upvoted negative reviews were written in a single month.
6 / 10
A dense, genuinely deep idle RPG from solo Japanese developer Hapiwaku that gives six heroes real class and skill decisions, then buries a chunk of its quality-of-life behind a premium coin store steep enough to have turned a chunk of its own audience against it.
6 / 10
A genuinely excellent basketball simulator wrapped in an economy where one season's pass costs more than the whole discounted game — and where the sequel went on pre-order while those passes were still being sold.
6 / 10
An idle horde-survival RPG with a genuinely distinctive structure — a defined ending rather than an endless grind — undercut for a meaningful share of players by scripted, low-choice progression, a "no offline progress" design that sits oddly for an idle game, and a pattern of developer replies to negative reviews that multiple players independently describe as combative.
6 / 10
