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 NZ$14.99 monster-staffed factory idler from Eragone, the solo French studio behind Idle Together — checked against a review base of exactly 15 write-ups, every one of them positive, and all but one written months before the game's actual 1.0 release.
7 / 10
A NZ$1.49 clicker-idler that strips the genre down to a single warrior fighting an endless line of enemies, with just enough achievement structure to hold completionists — and just little enough content to leave everyone else asking what happened after 2021.
5.2 / 10
A fifteen-year-old browser empire-builder that finally came to Steam in 2017 and went fully free-to-play in 2021 — Illyriad's 400+ technologies and player-run economy reward the kind of patience most modern strategy games no longer ask for, but its Steam premium account duplicates what the original site gives away, and "Grand Strategy MMO" undersells just how much of this is Tribal Wars with a research tree bolted on.
6.5 / 10
A free idle RPG where automated heroes grind an endless dungeon and three stacked prestige layers turn the numbers exponential — sharp and generous early on, then quietly hollowed out by the same "just maximise damage" problem that hits most of the genre.
6.5 / 10
A digital card game that pioneered simultaneous turns in 2012 and never got copied properly — still free, still patched, and still almost nobody is left to play it against.
5.5 / 10
A striking-looking body-horror survival sim with a hollow core underneath — most reviewers, including fans, describe an idle grind with no real ending or consequence — and a tonal concern raised independently by more than one reviewer that this review could not verify but takes seriously enough to flag plainly.
4.3 / 10
A genuinely fun arcade racer with a driving model reviewers on both sides praise, badly undercut by a widely repeated complaint that it launched with no public multiplayer lobbies despite the iRacing name, thin content, and a real, checkable four-month gap since its last patch.
4.4 / 10
Unfrozen's tactical roguelike hands you the dungeon instead of the raiding party — you're the necromancer stitching an undead army out of whatever your enemies leave behind.
7.8 / 10
A blacksmithing sim with a genuinely appealing pitch — forge weapons, armor and tools in a sandbox medieval town — undercut by a buggy, unfinished launch its own reviewers call abandoned, backed by a Steam listing that has had no update and zero recorded players since release day.
3.6 / 10
A solo-developer SRPG about running a guild of summoned adventurers, seven months into Early Access with a genuinely rare trait for the genre — a developer who ships updates almost every fortnight and replies to reviews within the hour.
6.5 / 10
A gorgeous Norse-mythology horde-survivor that almost every one of its 3,141 English reviewers agrees has the best graphics in its genre — and just as many agree the systems underneath don't go anywhere near as deep.
6.5 / 10
A turn-based duel-roguelike where combat is a match-3 grid that loops at the edges — a genuinely clever twist on a tired mechanic, wrapped around a run structure that's thinner than its 180-item loot pool wants you to believe, and prone to grinding to a standstill once enemies start stacking defence.
6.5 / 10
A solo developer's flood-recovery clicker built entirely from free Unity Asset Store art — cheap, honestly priced, and stopped cold by a progression wall its own achievement data confirms.
4.5 / 10
The fourth mainline Kingdom Rush flips the series to the villain's side and adds a pre-stage tower loadout, and Steam's 93.9% all-time positive score says it landed — but a loud, specific and consistent chorus of long-time fans call it the weakest entry yet, over tighter tower plots, trivialising hero balance and two paid campaign DLCs sold years after launch.
7.4 / 10
A genuinely well-regarded action RPG from a studio whose real-world collapse is as notable as anything in the game itself — reviewed here through a "remaster" its own longtime fans call barely more than a resolution bump on top of years-old, still-unfixed bugs.
6.5 / 10
A ricochet-shooting, box-lighting puzzle-platformer with genuine VR ambitions, undercut by a headtracking mismatch that a near-unanimous run of negative reviews says causes motion sickness within seconds, plus jump and movement controls several players call broken outright.
4.3 / 10
A genuinely appealing top-down bunker-survival concept undercut by severe ammo scarcity that can become permanently unrecoverable, real progression-breaking bugs, and a tutorial barely half of buyers ever finish — despite one documented rebalance patch that didn't fully resolve the complaints that followed it.
4.1 / 10
A reverse dungeon crawler where you play the dungeon, not the hero — stock traps, hire monsters and watch a party of "heroes" die across a career measured in in-game weeks. Steam's 1,604 English reviews call it fun but thin, and the three post-launch DLCs are the corpus's single biggest sore point.
7.2 / 10
Read review of Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Manager
AutoAttack Games turned a Warcraft III custom map into a standalone PvP tower defense where you don't just build turrets — you send waves at an opponent's lane too. Twelve million legion combinations and nearly a decade of live balancing make it the deepest competitive TD on Steam, if you can stomach matchmaking queues and a chat box that's gone unmoderated for years.
7.7 / 10
A GUI-driven text adventure about a priest's disappearance and the son retracing his steps, running two timelines and two protagonists through 78,000 words of prose. Every one of its 23 Steam reviews is positive, and the achievement data backs up what reviewers say about the pacing — most players who start it see it through.
6.8 / 10
A tiny, stark, art-forward interactive short story from the makers of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk, held back almost entirely by one specific, near-universally criticised element — its English voice acting — rather than its atmosphere or premise.
5 / 10
A genuinely charming licensed VR game with the anime's real voice cast and a flying feel reviewers call exhilarating, undercut by rough, Quest-first visual polish that never received a proper PC pass, and a persistent, specific request for real versus multiplayer that never arrived.
6.8 / 10
A free mobile-style idle roguelike with a genuinely playable core loop, sixteen separate paid DLC packs, and a cluster of high-vote negative reviews alleging the developer paid a third-party site for fake positive reviews — an allegation this review couldn't independently confirm, but couldn't ignore either.
4.3 / 10
A souls-like that launched broken and clawed its way to "Mostly Positive" through two years of relentless post-launch support — only to reopen the wound in 2026 by bolting on kernel-level anti-cheat that a fresh wave of reviewers say they can no longer trust.
6.5 / 10
