The Wanderer reading room
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.
A tactical turn-based roguelite that fuses combat with rhythm-game input timing, where debuffs literally complicate your button presses — a genuinely novel hook reviewers praise strongly, wrapped around a progression and balance layer several of the same reviewers find shallower than the concept deserves.
7 / 10
A charming, adorable-looking spiritual successor to Advance Wars whose dominant, stable complaint across every year since launch is a direct, unfavourable comparison to that very franchise — reviewers who came looking for Advance Wars' tactical depth consistently describe Wargroove's combat and unit variety as shallow by comparison.
6.5 / 10
Reviewed the same day as its predecessor, this sequel draws a genuinely different complaint than the original — rather than being measured against Advance Wars for tactical depth, Wargroove 2's dominant criticism is excessive, often unskippable dialogue and exposition, alongside a specific features trade several longtime fans see as a net loss.
6 / 10
A retro pixel-art shooter whose sound design and lore fidelity draw ecstatic praise, set against a specific, achievement-verified finding — echoed by the game's own top-voted review — that only around one in ten buyers ever finishes it, corroborating a real structural complaint about locked-arena repetition and mapless backtracking.
7 / 10
A well-regarded XCOM-style tactics game reviewers repeatedly compare favourably to the genre's best, undercut by punishing difficulty spikes around its wound-recovery system, a recurring Denuvo DRM complaint present since a 2022 launch, and a turn-ending freeze bug one 2026 reviewer describes as still unresolved years later.
7.5 / 10
Four-player co-op combat reviewers on both sides call some of the best in the genre, weighed down by a genuinely notorious launch — a fully functional cosmetic cash shop shipped alongside missing promised systems — and an ongoing pattern of unfulfilled roadmap promises, even as recent sentiment has recovered dramatically since 2022.
7.5 / 10
A turn-based mercenary tactics game that launched to genuine XCOM-starved enthusiasm and a rough, bug-heavy 1.0 — plus a specific, repeated allegation from multiple reviewers that it's a rebrand of an earlier, since-delisted game, which independent research on Steam's own listings substantially corroborates.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed WWII hex-tactics game built for fast, objective-capture skirmishes rather than slow attrition, entering Early Access six days old with a working single-player campaign, online PvP and a map editor already in place — and next to no reviews yet to judge any of it by.
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 fantasy hero-collector that grafts real tower-defense strategy onto the gacha RPG formula, praised for genuinely spectacular presentation and a free-to-play track reviewers call unusually generous for the genre, while gacha odds stay undisclosed and top-tier purchases climb to NZ$160-plus a pop.
6.5 / 10
An isometric immersive sim from Dishonored and Prey veterans that delivers on emergent, reactive storytelling almost every reviewer singles out for praise, wrapped around combat, companion AI and interface decisions that a large and articulate share of its own players call the weakest part of the experience.
7 / 10
A densely written, well-regarded text-based RPG set in the World of Darkness, praised by its own fanbase as the strongest Choice of Games entry yet, undercut by a near-total absence of a save system, day-one paid DLC gating two playable tribes, and a tonal choice that splits its review base sharply.
6.5 / 10
Read review of Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names
A genuinely inventive climbing-horror roguelike in Early Access that earned an Overwhelmingly Positive badge across a massive review base, whose own biggest, most consistent complaint is that it "does not respect the player's time" — permadeath resets progress through well-tuned early content, and reviewers say newer biomes added since launch haven't been tuned as carefully as the original two.
7.5 / 10
A creature-collecting twist on the Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven that spent seven months in Early Access absorbing genuinely substantial content updates before reaching 1.0 — most of its harshest criticism predates that work and describes a build that no longer exists, though a real, smaller cluster of post-1.0 complaints, including one raised inside a positive review, says its opening 30 minutes still aren't fixed.
7 / 10
A charming desert gardening-survival hybrid, genuinely loved for restoring a wasteland into bloom and hugging frogs along the way, undercut by an unpopular mandatory data-collection agreement at launch and a development pace that appears to have stopped roughly 16 months in while reviewers were still asking for polish.
6.5 / 10
Motion Twin's lightning-fast co-op roguelite from the creators of Dead Cells, nearly two years into an Early Access run that has seen the developer visibly respond to community backlash (removing a widely hated "sudden death" co-op mechanic), while solo players, value-for-money and content depth remain real, recurring points of contention.
6 / 10
A genre classic that reviewers still describe as one of the best CRPGs ever made as recently as this year, held back for a meaningful subset of buyers by a persistent, unresolved technical problem — the Steam release simply failing to launch on modern Windows — that this review found reported as recently as February 2026, seven years after the complaint first appeared.
7 / 10
A co-op spinoff whose launch-era complaint — unwanted RPG and looter-shooter systems grafted onto a beloved franchise — never really faded, and whose recent sentiment has fallen further still for a distinct, structural reason this review independently confirmed: the free Buddy Pass trial that let a friend join your co-op game at no cost has been delisted from Steam.
5 / 10
Team Ninja's fantastical Three Kingdoms take on the Nioh formula has real fans of its deflect-driven combat, but this review's negative sample is dominated by a catastrophic launch PC port — fps drops tied to specific in-game actions, including crashes on deathblows — that remained a proportionally large complaint well over a year after release.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed deckbuilder with no combat and no timers, built around resettling shattered islands using real historical Japanese woodblock art. Reviewers keep calling it one of the best games they've played this year — and the one honest complaint in its near-perfect record is worth reporting with real care rather than either dismissing or overstating it.
8.5 / 10
A Xianxia-flavoured hybrid of tower defense and bullet-hell idle combat, sold on Steam with a promise of thirteen fully-voiced languages that its own small English review sample says never actually arrived, from a developer whose visible support stopped within a month of launch.
4.5 / 10
A faithful, deeply strategic digital port of Fantasy Flight's landmark diplomacy board game, undercut by a five-year-old AFK problem that can freeze an entire multiplayer match and a thin, hard-to-find player base.
6.5 / 10
Read review of A Game of Thrones: The Board Game - Digital Edition
A fantasy 4X that reviewers call one of the genre's best for its faction-building system — sitting under a DLC schedule so relentless that "Age of DLC" has become the negative-review corpus's own nickname for it.
7 / 10
A survivors-style auto-harvester where you point a magic weapon at crops instead of monsters, built around a skill tree and prestige loop that a majority of players clear in a single sitting — and whose own achievement data backs up the negative reviews' loudest complaint, that one starting crop breaks the balance for everyone else.
6 / 10
