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90 Automation games reviewed and scored, best first.
90 reviews
A DVD-logo corner-hit clicker that grows into a three-mode idle RPG — mining, farming and fishing all feed the same currency as the bouncing logo — but it is a windowed Steam game, not an actual screensaver, and its store page never claims to earn a cent while it isn't open.
7 / 10
A factory game with one iron deposit. Skyformer caps how fast you can extract anything, so you can't solve problems by building another mine — and then it makes the weather you terraformed into existence come back and destroy your factories. Half a gigabyte, genuinely novel, and rough where it counts.
7 / 10
The same demonstrate-it-once robot scripting that made Autonauts click, now defending a base against raiders with automated squads — a genuinely fun idea that never quite justifies asking for a second full-price purchase.
6.5 / 10
A minimalist factory-automation puzzle where the resource is arithmetic instead of raw materials — technically clean and genuinely charming for its first few hours, but its own review history and achievement curve agree it runs out of ideas well before the credits, and both fans and critics keep naming the same rival game as the reason why.
6.5 / 10
A submarine incremental where automated torpedoes, plasma and lightning chain across the screen while you mine the abyss for resources — a short, satisfying loop for most of its early reviewers, with one detailed complaint about a mid-run power-fantasy slump and an achievement curve that backs it up.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$5.11 incremental about optimising messy hard drives, whose Mixed Steam rating splits cleanly along a timeline rather than a taste — a rocky launch day the developer patched fast, and a slower, still-unresolved design gate that keeps a chunk of players stuck clicking long before the game lets them stop.
6.5 / 10
The gather-craft-expand loop that launched a hundred imitators, and one of the most effective opening hours in any game of its type. It's also been abandoned since 2020 with a promised multiplayer mode that never arrived — and it still sells at full price.
6.5 / 10
A guild-management idle RPG with FF12-style Tactics scripting and concurrent party automation, whose launch performance crisis was corroborated by players across four language communities — and whose developer's rapid, well-documented patching earned real goodwill from many of the same players who first reported it.
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 polished incremental about commanding elemental golems to strip-mine an endless dungeon, with the best chain-reaction visuals the genre has produced this year — and a finish line most players cross in a weekend, despite the name.
6.5 / 10
A Windows-98-styled incremental about building a weapons manufacturer from a single hand-cranked bullet press to a nuke, undone late by an achievement wave that broke 100% completion for a lot of the players who loved it most.
6.5 / 10
A tiny, charming desktop-companion fishing idler that sits in the corner of the screen while its owner does something else, unanimously well liked by the small handful of players who have reviewed it, with a few honest small-scale wishes and a year of update silence worth noting.
6.5 / 10
A satisfying first-island crafting loop that thins out badly afterwards — 93% positive lifetime, 80% across its last hundred reviews, and a free prologue that some players think is better designed than the paid game.
6.5 / 10
A free scratch-card incremental with 91% positive reviews, median playtimes near 100 hours — and an achievement called "Reviewed" that 40% of its owners have unlocked. The engagement is real. So is the asterisk on the score.
6.5 / 10
A co-op sky-island survival game that trades hunger bars and monsters for solar panels and delivery drones — charming and genuinely clever in its energy systems, but its progression runs out of new ideas long before the credits.
6.5 / 10
A survival game where you recruit tribespeople who keep working while you're logged out — a genuinely original idea, attached to a 1.0 launch so rough the developers published a public 90-day plan to fix it.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed space factory incremental with a five-hour campaign and a clean ending instead of an endless ladder. The idea is refreshing; the execution runs out of steam exactly when the prestige system should be taking over.
6.5 / 10
A factory-automation game that puts the camera underground and gives you a gun that deletes stone, so verticality and terrain destruction do real design work instead of being a setting. The idea is stronger than the execution — a convoluted tech tree, a frame rate that sags under a big base, and a developer that's gone quiet since the 1.0 launch hold it back.
6.5 / 10
A free text-based idle RPG with more than 3,000 branching story actions and a genuinely active five-year development history, buried behind one of the least welcoming first hours the genre has to offer.
6.5 / 10
A solo developer's Early Access debut that grafts an upgrade tree, phase gates and a purchasable "Idle Mode" onto a classic Breakout loop — except the game's own tooltip says flatly that idle mode does not earn points while the game is closed, four days into a launch that so far has three concurrent players and one review.
6 / 10
A NZ$3.83 debut-adjacent incremental from Shadow Games Software where you crank a hand generator, sell the joules you produce into a demand-driven market, and reinvest the money into wood and steel producers that build power plants across eight declared eras — real chain depth, but the marketing never actually promises the away-from-keyboard earnings the genre is built on.
6 / 10
A solo-developed factory-and-idle hybrid that grafts a miniature Factorio-style belt economy onto a prestige loop, released in July 2023 with roughly five stated hours of content and an open-source codebase.
6 / 10
A solo-developed, node-based automation game that scratches the Factorio itch without Factorio's build-everything-yourself demands, still in Early Access two and a half years in and still being actively rebalanced — most recently to remove the exact progression walls its players have been complaining about since launch.
6 / 10
A cheap idle dungeon-crawler with a genuinely fast-moving development cycle — five patches in its first eight days — whose Mixed rating comes less from the core loop than from a CPU-hungry launch build and a balance-nerf backlash that arrived just as its most-invested players were settling in.
6 / 10
