Browse by year
250 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
250 reviews
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
A social sandbox MMO with no vendors, no quest-givers and no safety net — genuinely distinctive when it comes to player-built villages and a player-run economy, but its land ownership system asks for real, recurring money in a way a lot of its own players resent.
6 / 10
A solo-developed Roman city builder that pits Caesar 3-style urban planning against the Hydra, the Minotaur and Cerberus -- a striking-looking game whose 1.0 launch, six months after it started, split its own audience between "finally complete" and "rushed and abandoned."
6 / 10
A NZ$1.49 solo-developer horror game about a child escaping a cult's private chapel — verified here against Steam's own genre field ("Indie," which says nothing) and its top-voted community tag ("Idler," which says something wrong). Three puzzles, two endings, no idle or incremental mechanic anywhere in it.
6 / 10
Firaxis's boldest structural gamble in the series' history — mandatory "Age" transitions that force players to swap civilizations twice per campaign — split the Civilization fanbase down the middle at launch and still sits Mixed across nearly 58,000 Steam reviews eighteen months later, even as a genuinely major, free "Test of Time" update rebuilt huge parts of the game in direct response to that backlash.
6 / 10
A solo-developer incremental RPG where you buy upgrades, unlock companions and grind through numbered stages toward a final boss, priced at NZ$2.99 and finished by most reviewers in a single sitting -- earning it a rare, near-unanimous verdict that it's honestly worth the asking price, alongside a pointed complaint that it's far shorter than the genre veterans it's priced against.
6 / 10
A miniature-diorama tactics game that improves on Wartile's combat by its own fans' account, held back at its 1.0 launch by selection and mouse-control bugs several reviewers call game-breaking, alongside crashes that persisted past release despite a genuinely long, well-supported Early Access run.
6 / 10
One of the best-received remasters this library has covered at launch, and one of the most soured a year later — recent English sentiment has fallen to 54% positive, sixteen months after 9 million players jumped in, because the performance problems that greeted launch day were never fixed.
6 / 10
A fast-paced Advance Wars-style tactics game that launched with promised features missing and a genuinely broken economy system, provoking real backer anger — followed by an unusually sustained year of active patching that has narrowed, without fully closing, the gap between what was promised and what shipped.
6 / 10
A solo-developed found-footage horror game that drops a lost teenager into the Backrooms, hunted by a sound-sensitive entity — scary for its first twenty minutes, then a jumpscare-heavy fetch quest for the rest.
5.8 / 10
Read review of The Backrooms 1998 - Found Footage Survival Horror Game
A post-apocalyptic 3D colony sim from the team behind RimWorld's Combat Extended mod that launched into Early Access far rougher than its years of hype promised — genuine game-breaking bugs and missing basics, offset by real community goodwill toward developers open about the production troubles that forced an early, underfunded launch.
5.5 / 10
Everyone expects the complaint about this game to be Ultimate Team. It isn't — Ultimate Team appears in 14 of its hundred most-helpful negative reviews, and memory leaks, resetting settings and save-wiping crashes appear in far more.
5.5 / 10
Five years of development, a new engine, a genuinely brilliant tactical system — and an interface that its own 25,000-hour veterans call a nightmare, on a game that shipped missing features it had a decade ago.
5.5 / 10
A four-soldier squad, an alien invasion in the Ural mountains, and an action-point system where reloading a rifle costs almost your whole turn. There's a real tactics game trying to get out from under the jank — the question is whether NZ$14.75 is enough to forgive the jank first.
5.5 / 10
Read review of Future War Tactics: SOF vs Alien Invasion – Turn-Based Strategy
A genuinely well-realised Westeros action RPG — strong voice acting, a story that respects its source lore, and combat reviewers compare favourably to Assassin's Creed Odyssey — buried under monetisation so aggressive that a meaningful majority of even sympathetic reviewers describe it as the single thing actively ruining the game, right down to a pay-to-revive prompt at the moment of death.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$1.46 one-person idle business tycoon with a real prestige tree and an inflation mechanic that actually works as advertised — undercut by a save system that can eat hours of progress and a developer who stopped patching two days after launch.
5.5 / 10
A free grid-placement idle game about squeezing adjacency bonuses out of factories, power plants and research labs — a genuinely interesting core idea let down by CPU-hungry building animations, a map you can't scroll, and content that most players clear in an afternoon.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$10.99 co-op village-building idler from solo French studio Eragone, checked against its own achievement data and a 37-review Steam corpus — both of which say the "together" in the title is something most owners never actually use.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$17.49 semi-AFK tavern sim whose own reviewers keep naming the same superior rival, Tavern Master, unprompted — and whose staff AI several report collapsing once a tavern grows past a few dozen employees, with no update in the nine months since it left Early Access.
5.5 / 10
A co-op sky-sailing survival sandbox from Bossa Studios -- spiritual successor to their abandoned MMO Worlds Adrift -- that pairs a genuinely loved grapple-and-shipbuilding core with a rushed five-month Early Access run, a save-corrupting bug streak that outlived the 1.0 launch, and a development pace that stalled for the better part of a year before recent fixes started landing.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developed sci-fi colony sim with modular ships and a genuinely interesting machine-uprising threat, left to drift after a March 2025 launch while its one developer moved on to a different game.
5.5 / 10
A nostalgic mobile spin on Ragnarok Online's class fantasy, undercut by the one thing an idle game can least afford to paywall — the automation itself.
5.5 / 10
An old-school MMO-flavoured idle RPG about building a raid squad from twenty classic classes, undone by a progression curve both its fans and critics describe as breaking within the first hour, and a total playtime measured in single-digit hours that a May 2025 update didn't meaningfully fix.
5.5 / 10
A roguelite tactics-autobattler hybrid set in the Legend of the Five Rings universe that launched to real praise for its lore fidelity and build variety, but whose more recent reviews have swung sharply negative around one specific, damning complaint — the developer has stopped updating it.
5.5 / 10
