X4: Foundations
The most completely simulated economy in games, eight years of free updates, and one recurring problem — in a game about giving orders to AI, the AI is what 61 of its hundred negative reviews complain about.
7.5 / 10
The Wanderer reading room
Game Reviews
Idle RPGs, MMOs, browser games and mobile RPGs, taken apart properly. Every review carries a score out of 10, what the game does well, what it does badly, and the kind of player it is actually for.
Browse the reviews
Abiotic Factor
A co-op survival crafting game that traps scientists inside a Half-Life-flavoured secret research facility after a containment breach, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 41,000 Steam reviews for its inventive setting and crafting depth — with a remarkably consistent, still-current complaint that its final act and late-game content don't live up to everything that came before.
8 / 10
AETHUS
A solo developer in Edinburgh shipped a complete, story-driven survival-crafting game straight to 1.0 with no Early Access period — a genuine feat that's earned near-universal respect, complicated only by a real and recurring complaint that the store page sells it as something more open-ended than the tightly linear campaign it actually is.
7.5 / 10
All Hail the Orb
A solo-developed, short, deliberately silly incremental about worshipping a mysterious orb and recruiting cultists to do the clicking for you — charming enough to earn 95% positive reviews, and refreshingly willing to end rather than pad itself out with an unnecessary prestige loop.
7.5 / 10
Anomaly President
Campaign for votes by day, fight the incumbent's gangs by night, and steal each boss's supernatural power when you beat them. A genuinely novel roguelike from the Anomaly Agent studio — one day old, visibly unfinished, and carrying a 97% score that needs reading carefully.
7 / 10
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced
Ubisoft rebuilt Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag from the ground up on the current Anvil engine rather than simply upscaling it, and the parts that made the 2013 original a fan favourite — Edward Kenway, the Jackdaw, the whole rotten, beautiful Caribbean — survive the trip largely intact. What doesn't survive as cleanly is some of the combat identity Ubisoft chose to strip out along the way.
7.5 / 10
Assassin's Creed Odyssey
The most beautiful open world Ubisoft has built, and the clearest case study in gaming of a cash shop reaching backwards into a game's design. Eight years on it costs NZ$19.99 and holds 89% — but the level gates it built around its XP boosters are still exactly where they were.
7.5 / 10
BALL x PIT
A brick-breaker, base-builder and roguelite mashed together into something genuinely novel — and, by a large and coherent share of its own fans, something that runs out of ideas within its first ten hours and never quite finds a reason to justify the dozens more it invites.
8 / 10
Battle Brothers
You hire desperate men, name them, watch them die, and hire more. Nine years on it's still the best mercenary-company RPG ever made — and still arguing with its own players about whether a 75% hit chance that misses four times running is good design.
8 / 10
Berry Bury Berry
A genuinely bizarre, endlessly quotable first-person incremental game about growing berries and sacrificing them to a sentient hole — Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 8,000 reviews and driven to virality by a streamer discovery, with an honest, consistent minority complaint that its horror-tinged mystery and mid-game unlock tree don't live up to the strength of its opening hook.
7.5 / 10
Big Hops
A charming, wildly inventive indie 3D platformer from a small team, its tongue-swinging, free-climbing movement earning direct, specific comparisons to Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time — undercut by real, honestly documented technical rough edges, including soft-locks and physics inconsistencies, that an exceptionally responsive developer has spent months patching at a near-daily cadence since launch.
7.5 / 10
Birdwatching Notebook
A desktop-postcard idle game about attracting and photographing over 130 real bird species, charming enough to convert players who weren't birdwatchers or idle-game fans going in — held back at launch by a genuinely rough technical start that the developer has spent the months since steadily patching away.
7.5 / 10
Blue Prince
A genre-defying puzzle roguelike-lite set in a mysterious manor whose floor plan you draft anew each in-game day, celebrated with a 92 Metascore and widely called one of the most creative puzzle games in years — beloved specifically by players willing to take pages of physical notes, and marked by a real, still-unresolved design tension between its puzzle-solving brain and its randomised, roguelike-lite execution.
8 / 10
Cast n Chill
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
Clickpocalypse II
A nearly decade-old mobile idle RPG that still gets one thing right that most of its modern competitors don't even try — a completely fair, no-IAP, no-gacha monetisation model — and undercuts it with technical rough edges that have apparently never been fully sanded down.
7 / 10
Colony Survival
A voxel colony-building strategy game crossing Minecraft's block-by-block construction with genuine tower-defense stakes, still in Early Access more than nine years after its 2017 debut — sustained by an unusually transparent weekly developer blog and a loyal Very Positive fanbase, with a persistent, still-current complaint that its mid-to-late game never quite matches the promise of its opening hours.
7 / 10
Crimson Desert
Pearl Abyss's massive, visually stunning open-world action-adventure launched to a rocky Mixed reception — a specific, documented 51% positive Steam score in its first days — before climbing to Very Positive within a week and staying there through five months of relentless, near-weekly patches, even as a real, ongoing thread of criticism argues the game never fully shakes its origins as an MMORPG stripped of its multiplayer.
7.5 / 10
Crusader Kings III
The best character-driven strategy game ever made, and the clearest case in gaming of DLC that doesn't just add content but withholds answers. Its players log 117-hour medians and write four-hundred-vote reviews about the storefront.
7.5 / 10
Cyberpunk 2077
The most famous broken launch in modern gaming is now, five years and one total rebuild later, one of the best open-world RPGs you can buy. Ninety-six of its hundred most recent reviews are positive. The thing to check before buying isn't the game any more — it's the licence.
9 / 10
Dead Space
Motive Studio's remake of the 2008 survival-horror classic remains Very Positive across nearly 70,000 Steam reviews, widely credited as one of the finest remakes ever made — a reputation undercut by a real, severe, persistent Denuvo-caused stuttering problem and a mandatory always-online requirement for an entirely single-player game, both of which this review can confirm went unfixed after EA redirected developer Motive Studio to other projects roughly two months after launch, with the studio's own pitches for a sequel subsequently rejected.
7 / 10
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Kojima Productions' sequel arrived on PC nine months after its PlayStation 5 exclusive launch with one of the best-optimised AAA ports in recent memory and genuinely expanded delivery and combat systems, sitting Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 26,000 Steam reviews — tempered by a real, remarkably consistent complaint from longtime fans that its writing, pacing and a hand-holding new companion character fall well short of the original's atmosphere and restraint.
7.5 / 10
Decktamer
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
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Eidos-Montreal's cyberpunk immersive sim remains Mostly Positive across more than 42,000 Steam reviews for its genuinely excellent stealth gameplay and world-building — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent complaint that its story ends abruptly mid-arc, a flaw this review can confirm the game's own writer has since publicly acknowledged, tied to a since-cancelled sequel that would have resolved it, and to real, dateable studio layoffs still affecting Eidos-Montreal as recently as March 2026.
7 / 10
Disco Elysium
A detective RPG with no combat, twenty-four skills that argue with you inside your own head, and writing that has no real rival in the medium. Its negative reviews are almost entirely from people who call it a masterpiece and ask you not to buy it.
9.5 / 10