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478 Action games reviewed and scored, best first.
478 reviews
A real-time roguelike dungeon crawl where the resource system is a Picross grid — solve Nonogram puzzles fast enough and correctly enough to charge the energy that fuels every attack, shield and finisher.
7 / 10
A noir-western action-platformer whose fluid movement and art draw strong, consistent praise — reviewers compare its platforming favourably to Celeste — undercut by a title weapon gimmick that a large share of players say never gets used in genuinely interesting ways, and a story that leans heavily on narrative weight it hasn't earned.
7 / 10
A gorgeously styled action roguelike casting you as an overworked Death cleaning house on a rogue corporate afterlife, whose Early Access growing pains have mostly faded — leaving a more current, specific complaint about late-game difficulty spikes and level variety in their place.
7 / 10
A visually striking, thematically ambitious action-adventure whose bold "no map, no quest markers" promise turns out, according to a large share of its own players, to mean hunting for symbol-matched locks and keys rather than genuine intuitive exploration — and whose combat, marketed heavily in trailers, is repeatedly described by its own fans as not actually the point.
7 / 10
One of gaming's most notorious commercial flops of 2023 — an independently verified $125 million budget, half the studio laid off within months, EA later handing 100% of net revenue to the developer — sits at a genuinely solid 72% positive on Steam, with reviewers criticising clichéd dialogue and poor optimisation while frequently defending the combat and expressing real sympathy for a game whose commercial failure outpaced its actual reception.
7 / 10
A Chinese-developed roguelike bullet-hell shooter about a hero possessed by an escaped demon king, wrapping a huge auto-attack build-crafting system and a class-change progression ladder in an RPG genre tag it only half earns.
7 / 10
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
A gorgeous, Pixar-adjacent debut from first-time studio Ember Lab that launched on PlayStation and Epic in September 2021 to near-universal praise for its visuals -- and a just as consistent complaint, across years of reviews, that the combat and story underneath don't quite match them.
7 / 10
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
Smilegate RPG's isometric action MMO still has the best raid encounter design the genre has produced, and still asks players to climb a honing ladder brutal enough that Amazon is now shipping a way to skip most of it. Reviewed as the Western service heads into an August 2026 server merge.
7 / 10
A handsome, deliberately linear twelve-hour crime story in 1900s Sicily that three in five buyers actually finish — released at NZ$119.95, which is the number most of its arguments are really about.
7 / 10
A $2.99 voice-controlled spell duel that turned a solo developer's Early Access experiment into one of 2025's biggest indie surprises — a year on, the novelty has mostly held, but the update cadence and the mic's grasp of accents have not kept pace.
7 / 10
One of the greatest games ever made, rebuilt shot for shot and shipped at NZ$114.99 with performance problems Konami stopped patching in January — now 60% off, eleven months later, for reasons the review page makes obvious.
7 / 10
Mojang's accessible, co-op-first loot crawler wearing Minecraft's blocky skin over a Diablo-style structure — broadly loved for local and online co-op, and carrying one specific, heavily documented complaint its own Steam reviews won't let go of.
7 / 10
A budget soulslike built around a genuinely inventive hook — inhabit the bodies of dead warriors rather than levelling a character of your own — that's spent five years since launch as a genuinely divisive game, with real, still-current complaints about content thinness and unfixed bugs sitting alongside a devoted fanbase, just days ahead of a sequel's official release.
7 / 10
A neon-pixel run-and-gun roguelite that wears its Binding of Isaac influence openly and well enough to earn Strong critical reviews and a Very Positive Steam score, though a real share of players say the grindy unlock structure and a shrinking item pool wear thin faster than the genre's best.
7 / 10
A shapeshifting action RPG from the makers of Guacamelee whose nineteen unlockable forms draw genuine, specific praise for build variety, undercut by a keyboard-and-mouse experience its own players were still calling broken more than four years after launch, and a co-op mode widely described as an afterthought.
7 / 10
Hotta Studio's follow-up to Tower of Fantasy trades sci-fi towers for a neon-lit supernatural city, and the open world it built to fill that city is a genuinely bigger achievement than the parry-and-dash combat sitting inside it.
7 / 10
A darkly satirical colony sim crossed with a first-person roguelite shooter, where you build a totalitarian regime and personally lead mechanised assaults against alien threats — a strong Early Access launch overshadowed for some players by the game's previous life as an NFT-funded project called Earth From Another Sun.
7 / 10
A co-op heist shooter whose Mixed lifetime badge is a fossil of one of the decade's worst launches — always-online even solo, missing basic menu options, paid DLC sold mid-disaster — set against a genuinely verified three-year recovery that has its most recent reviews running 78% positive on the back of monthly updates and a peer-to-peer overhaul.
7 / 10
A pixel-and-polygon retro boomer shooter with weapons, movement and gore its own review base calls some of the best in the genre, undercut for years by a single, near-unanimously criticised design decision — dying carries no real penalty — that the developer only partially addressed roughly a year after its full release.
7 / 10
A gorgeous voxel-art fairytale action RPG, the finale of Cococucumber's Voxel Trilogy, originally launched day-one on Xbox Game Pass in 2023 and now available on Steam as an enhanced "Legendary Edition" with reworked combat and bosses.
7 / 10
A densely systemic bullet-heaven survivor-like that grew from a simple, focused Early Access hit into something several hundred-hour veterans now describe as buried under its own added complexity — alongside real, current complaints about difficulty balance and performance.
7 / 10
A solo-developed bullet-hell roguelite where every spell comes from a six-sided die — reviewed on its complete 20-review sample, which lands squarely in Enter the Gungeon and Nuclear Throne territory while surfacing one real, repeated onboarding complaint worth knowing about first.
7 / 10
