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90 Automation games reviewed and scored, best first.
90 reviews
A free browser incremental where every attempt is a program — a fixed mana budget, an action queue you write in advance, and a loop that runs it out to the letter. Skills carry over between attempts, the interface never stops being a spreadsheet with buttons, and the game has outlived three different maintainers without ever quite finishing.
7.5 / 10
Zachtronics in three dimensions, and the one its own siblings' reviewers keep calling fun — except it rates below them, costs the most, and its critics say it isn't the factory game the name implies.
7.5 / 10
A five-dollar semi-idle RPG that sends three-adventurer teams into dungeons on their own while you sort, salvage and re-gear what they drag back — and a look at whether that loop still has somewhere to go once the opening classes stop being new.
7.5 / 10
A co-op mining sim where the underground has no fixed layout, bolted onto a genuine factory-automation game — dig your own tunnels with a squad of up to four, then turn what you find into a production line with conveyor belts, robots, and delivery contracts.
7.5 / 10
The 2020 game that started the shape-cutting automation genre, built by stripping Factorio down to logistics alone — no combat, no scarcity, no enemies. Cheap, historically important, and rougher than the sequel it spawned.
7.5 / 10
An auto-battler where you never touch the character directly, animated entirely in ASCII art, and built around Stonescript — a real scripting language for programming your own companion's combat behaviour instead of just watching it fight.
7.5 / 10
A cozy pixel-art gathering and crafting game about rebuilding a village, sold on a shelf full of idle games and repeatedly mistaken for one. It isn't. It's a thirty-hour hand-managed crafting loop with a warm story attached, and at six dollars it's one of the easiest recommendations of the summer — for the right player.
7.5 / 10
A tower-defence game, a factory incremental and a scripting sandbox welded into one free island, where the real endgame is writing the AI that plays it for you.
7.5 / 10
A base-building, Factorio-flavoured action RPG that launched in October 2021 to strong acclaim, then spent nearly four years failing to deliver a promised co-op mode -- and finally did, in August 2025, bundled with a loot rework substantial enough to spark a fresh wave of complaints from the veterans who'd waited for it.
7.5 / 10
Build a working CPU from NAND gates upward — a genuinely singular idea, sold as education, and 57 of its 100 most-helpful negative reviews say the teaching is the part that doesn't work.
7.5 / 10
A cheap, finite incremental about piloting a ship from Earth to the edge of the observable universe, with an unusually healthy completion rate to back up its warm reception, let down by a user interface that splits into too many screens as it grows and a back stretch several reviewers say outstays its welcome.
7.5 / 10
A RuneScape-inspired idle RPG that spent nearly two years in Early Access before its 1.0 launch in June 2026. It nails the AFK-grinding feeling its whole design is built around, but a capped offline system and a new Challenges layer added at launch have split even its most devoted players over whether it's still the idle game they signed up for.
7 / 10
A free Android incremental with more content than most paid ones, wrapped in a chest-and-rewarded-video economy that sells you relief from its own busywork. The genre's most argued-about game, and both sides have a point.
7 / 10
A second-monitor idle game about building a spacefaring trade fleet, launched thin enough that its loudest early reviewers called it a demo with a price tag — and then patched hard enough, with a dedicated endless mode and monthly content drops since, that the complaint driving most of its negative reviews is now largely out of date.
7 / 10
A factory-and-colony sim where the automation isn't belts or menus of orders but a real node-based programming language you wire up yourself, one behavior graph per unit. The most technically ambitious game in its genre, and honest proof of how much that ambition costs at the door.
7 / 10
A calm, good-looking voxel factory game about building robots to sell them — a genre full of hostile worlds and existential stakes, this one just wants you to optimize a conveyor line in peace. Two years into Early Access, that's both its appeal and its ceiling.
7 / 10
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 minimalist incremental where every life is a countdown to a death that actually matters — the queue you plan, the story chapter you're on, and the instincts you've earned all carry forward, right up until the game itself stopped moving forward three years ago.
7 / 10
The first release from Coincidence, the studio Zach Barth founded after closing Zachtronics, and a genuinely good factory-automation puzzler by any independent measure — that its own most enthusiastic reviewers still rank as the weakest entry in its creator's catalogue, a verdict this review's near-unanimous negative sample backs up in specific, comparative detail.
7 / 10
A factory-automation puzzle game where you cut, stamp, and paint your own voxel building parts, then squeeze the whole production line onto a sky island with a real, paid ceiling on space. Polished and distinctive, but priced like the genre giants it can't yet match in scale.
7 / 10
A three-day-old Early Access idle RPG that runs thirteen separate skill trackers off one RuneScape-flavoured template, lets you train two of them at once, and caps its offline catch-up at a clearly documented 24 hours — for a one-time NZ$4.31 with no reviews, no achievements curve worth reading, and a developer FAQ that admits the balance still needs work.
7 / 10
A pixel-art automation game that grafts Factorio-style conveyor belts onto a Forager-style hand-gathering loop. The first ten hours are genuinely charming; the back half turns into a long wait for timers to finish, and a cluster of recent reviews accuse it of bundling data collection players can't fully switch off.
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 free incremental built around filling concentric, spinning colour rings instead of the usual bar chart of numbers — genuinely huge in scope, openly derivative in structure, and popular enough to have accumulated over seven thousand English Steam reviews doing it.
7 / 10
