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.

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Immersive SimWindows PC

Dishonored 2

Arkane's supernatural stealth-action sequel remains Very Positive across more than 66,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest immersive sims ever made — a reputation that survived a severe, well-documented 2016 launch-performance crisis this review can confirm was genuinely fixed, though a separate, newer, still-unresolved AMD CPU plus Nvidia GPU launch-failure bug persists in reviews dated as recently as August 2025, alongside real, current uncertainty over Arkane's own future following a July 2026 Xbox restructuring.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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First-Person ShooterWindows PC

DOOM: The Dark Ages

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

Reviewed

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MOBA / Competitive StrategyWindows PCmacOSLinux

Dota 2

Every hero free, nothing purchasable that affects a match, thirteen years of updates, and a median recent reviewer with 1,078 hours logged. It is also one of the least welcoming games ever made, and that is not an accident of tone — it's the cost of the depth.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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JRPGWindows PC

DRAGON QUEST VII Reimagined

A visually gorgeous, warmly voice-acted remake of one of the Dragon Quest franchise's most beloved and expansive entries — Very Positive on Steam, but built around a genuinely controversial decision to substantially trim the content that made the original and its 3DS remake so sprawling, a cut acknowledged even by the game's own fans rather than disputed.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Survival Horror Action RPGWindows PC

Dying Light: The Beast

Techland's return to Kyle Crane and the original Dying Light formula, widely, specifically praised as a genuine "return to form" after the divisive Dying Light 2 — backed by an unusually clean, well-optimised launch and an explicit, kept promise to ship without microtransactions — undercut for a real minority of players by parkour-unfriendly map design and a genuine, documented fairness controversy over how a later Definitive Edition treated existing Deluxe Edition owners.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Hack-and-Slash Action RPGWindows PC

DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS

A genuine, widely-acclaimed reinvention of KOEI TECMO's long-running hack-and-slash series — praised by veteran fans as the best entry in over a decade for its overhauled combat — built around a deliberate, controversial trade-off that a large share of the same fanbase argues cost the series something real: a single silent protagonist replacing the roster of dozens of playable historical officers, and a story that stops at the Battle of Chibi, leaving half the classic Three Kingdoms tale untold at launch.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Point-and-Click AdventureWindows PC

Endacopia

A point-and-click adventure dressed as a 1996 educational CD-ROM, with something wrong underneath it. One of the highest-rated games on Steam this year at 99% positive — and its single-save-file design is the reason that number isn't higher still.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Metroidvania Action RPGWindows PC

ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist

A dark-fantasy metroidvania sequel to the beloved Ender Lilies, trading a slower Early Access build for a widely admired 1.0 release — gorgeous, meticulously quality-of-life-focused, and Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 17,000 reviews, with its most thoughtful critics agreeing on exactly one thing: it's a better game than its predecessor and, for some, a lesser story.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Bullet Hell RoguelikeWindows PCLinux

Enter the Gungeon

A genre-defining bullet-hell roguelike about diving through a fortress of guns to find the one weapon that can kill the past — nearly a decade old and still Overwhelmingly Positive across almost 80,000 reviews, with fans logging thousands of hours apiece, undercut by a steep, RNG-heavy difficulty curve and a still-raw 2025 controversy over online co-op arriving on mobile years before it ever reached PC or console.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Isometric CRPGWindows PC

Esoteric Ebb

A tabletop-inspired isometric CRPG that invites Disco Elysium comparisons directly in its own marketing — Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 8,000 reviews for fans who embrace its absurdist, Discworld-flavoured take on the formula, with an equally substantial and thoughtful critical minority arguing it borrows Disco Elysium's structure without matching the literary subtlety that made the original work.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Farming and Life-Sim RPGWindows PCLinux

Fields of Mistria

A pixel-art farming and life-sim RPG that spent two years in Early Access proving it isn't just another Stardew Valley clone — jumping, real combat, D&D nights at the tavern, and writing sharp enough to win over players who'd sworn off the genre — reviewed on the eve of its 1.0 launch with 97.7% of nearly 30,000 reviews already behind it.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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RacingWindows PC

Forza Horizon 5

Playground Games' open-world racer remains Very Positive across nearly 279,000 Steam reviews nearly five years after release, still receiving weekly content updates today — undercut by a real, specific, dateable complaint that Playground introduced paid car-pack microtransactions roughly two years after launch despite Premium and Ultimate edition buyers having already paid for a "car pass" that was marketed as covering exactly this content.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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City Builder / Society SurvivalWindows PC

Frostpunk 2

11 bit studios' sequel trades the original Frostpunk's intimate, one-building-at-a-time survival for a zoomed-out, district-based political simulation set 30 years later — a deliberate redesign that draws Mostly Positive reception on its own terms, but recurs across a remarkably consistent share of longtime fans as having lost the emotional, personal intimacy that made the original a genre-defining classic.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Open-World Action RPGWindows PC

Gothic 1 Remake

A faithful, expanded rebuild of one of open-world RPG history's most influential games — the 2001 original that reviewers credit as a direct forerunner to The Witcher — that returned to the Colony to Very Positive reception and 500,000 copies sold, undercut at launch by genuine, severe bugs and softlocks that the developer has since addressed through a rapid, transparent patch cadence.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Co-op ShooterWindows PC

Helldivers 2

The best co-op shooter of its generation and one of the most argued-about games on Steam. Its top negative review has thirty-four thousand helpful votes, its second has twenty-two thousand, and neither is about the shooting — which is superb.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Horde Survival / DeckbuilderWindows PC

Hell Maiden

Dante is a girl, Hell is a bullet heaven, and the deck-building actually works. The most beautiful thing in the genre right now runs into a difficulty wall at the second circle that has stopped six players in seven — and the studio is patching it weekly.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Turn-Based RPGWindows PCmacOS

Hermit and Pig

An Earthbound-flavoured turn-based RPG about a socially anxious old man, his truffle-pig best friend, and a corporate conspiracy involving giant mushrooms — built around a genuinely novel idea where awkward conversations function as real combat encounters, and near-unanimously loved by the players who've played it.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Rhythm ActionWindows PC

Hi-Fi RUSH

Tango Gameworks' rhythm-action surprise remains Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 36,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest games Xbox has published in a decade — a reputation shadowed by a genuinely poignant, fully documented history this review can confirm in

9 / 10

Reviewed

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MMO Idle RPGWindows PCmacOS

Idle Clans

A free-to-play multiplayer idle RPG built openly in RuneScape and Melvor Idle's image, adding a genuine social and clan layer those single-player idlers don't have — undercut by paywalled skills, expensive cosmetics, and an "idle" framing that some players say demands more constant attention than it should.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Co-op AdventureWindows PC

It Takes Two

Hazelight Studios' GAME OF THE YEAR-winning co-op adventure remains one of gaming's most celebrated couch-co-op experiences, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 266,000 Steam reviews and independently confirmed to have sold over 23 million copies — undercut for a real, recurring minority of players by a genuinely dark, forced late-game "torture" sequence, and by online connectivity friction this review can confirm was substantially, though not entirely, fixed by a documented May 2024 update removing the mandatory EA Launcher requirement.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Action RogueliteWindows PC

Katanaut

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

Reviewed

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Incremental Action-AdventureWindows PC

Kin and Conquest

The Fox Knocks follows up their mining incremental Kin and Quarry with a tighter, faster hybrid — Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven combat wrapped around a genuine incremental gear economy — and lands it well enough on day one that the loudest complaint is simply wanting more of it.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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