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513 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
513 reviews
A gridless medieval city-builder that spent six years in Early Access before reaching 1.0 in January 2025, whose organic, grid-free building system draws some of the most enthusiastic praise in its genre — undercut by a launch that a majority of this review's post-1.0 negative sample says still shipped with game-breaking bugs, and a specific, well-documented housing and population wall that stalls growing settlements.
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 UI-driven idle RPG blending Old School RuneScape-style skilling with Clash of Clans-style outpost building -- an Early Access release praised for its cosy pixel art and unusually responsive solo developer, undercut for some longtime players by a recent XP nerf that made progression feel punishingly slow.
7 / 10
A hand-drawn roguelite about drilling planet cores and ploughing the profits back into a growing mining corporation — a genuinely addictive loop wrapped around a confusing interface and a late game that never quite finds a second gear.
7 / 10
A cheap, IAP-free idle-meets-gacha garden decorator that four years of Steam reviews agree on in an unusual way -- the exact randomised-drop system that makes it distinctive is also the thing that eventually wears players down.
7 / 10
BitBorne Studio's co-op mining survival game sends up to four goblins into a destructible mine with laser drills, rail carts and a darkness-drains-your-sanity torch system. Two months after launch it's Very Positive on Steam for exactly the reason its own reviewers keep repeating — brilliant with friends, rough around nearly every edge.
7 / 10
A survival-crafting game that replaces its genre's usual menu-driven fiddling with a diegetic system — you inspect your own wounds, dig leeches out with your fingers and physically reach into your pack for a fire kit — built around a sanity mechanic that can hallucinate you to death. A separate, heavily narrative Story Mode sits alongside the open sandbox and has drawn specific, credible criticism for how it depicts the Amazon's indigenous Yabahuaca people.
7 / 10
Klei Entertainment's deck-building roguelite wraps card combat and card-based negotiation around real narrative choice — praised widely for its writing and world, while a consistent, thoughtful minority argue the cards underneath don't hold up to the genre's best.
7 / 10
A dark fantasy deckbuilding roguelike wrapped around a guild-management hub — recruit from ten heroes, send a three-person party into the abyss with permadeath on the line, and spend what they bring back on facilities that keep the next run alive.
7 / 10
A free roguelike RPG port of a long-running mobile game — with the microtransactions stripped out, a year of updates its own reviewers said would never come, and only 49 English reviews to judge it by.
7 / 10
Orna's class-and-gear rulebook, unplugged from GPS and pinned to a handcrafted continent instead. The systems survive the transplant; the thing that made its sibling famous doesn't.
7 / 10
A tactical tower defense from solo developer Tearevo built around one flying fortress under siege from every direction — a hex-grid network of turrets, resource collectors and support modules, split between grounded sieges and scrolling air battles, with a roguelite boost draw and a between-mission tech tree layered on top.
7 / 10
A free browser and Steam idler that swaps cookie-clicker simplicity for Path of Exile-style affix hunting, guild-like Syndicates and a marketplace — then leaves its own community to sell the experience as much as the systems do.
7 / 10
A solo-developed Early Access idler about clicking your way from dirt and sticks to iron tools and beyond, sold with a self-aware "brutal grinder" pitch that mostly delivers -- but comes with a rough spreadsheet-style interface and a save wipe waiting at the 1.0 finish line.
7 / 10
Tech Tree Games' 2019 space-mining idle has outlasted most of its mobile peers by giving the genre's usual ore-and-upgrade loop a manager layer, a reset-friendly prestige system and weekly ranked tournaments — then undercutting some of that goodwill with a loot-box-flagged IAP menu and a persistent offline-tracking bug.
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 zombie-apocalypse colony builder with a genuinely singular hook — using real-world map data to let you fortify your own actual neighbourhood — that's spent more than two years in Early Access with the same recurring complaints, about squad micromanagement and interruption pop-ups, still surfacing in this week's reviews.
7 / 10
A five-day-old fantasy idle RPG that has yet to receive a single negative Steam review. This review reads all fourteen of them, alongside a queue system and companion mechanics several reviewers rate above Melvor Idle, the genre's most-cited reference point.
7 / 10
A NZ$7.39 mining incremental that sold 100,000 copies in seventeen days, is finished by three quarters of the people who buy it, and spends its second half padding a two-hour game past the refund window. Its own reviewers name the trick.
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
A plant shop sim so pleasant that almost nobody has a bad word for it — and so short that the people praising it keep mentioning they finished everything in four hours. Lovely, cheap, and about three systems away from being something you'd still be playing next month.
7 / 10
A free-to-play sci-fi idle RPG built around a genuine, developer-stated no-pay-to-win promise, an active in-game chat community, and an engaged solo developer — praised by a striking number of very-high-playtime reviewers, with real friction over gear durability and one serious, unverified allegation about how the launch event tracked activity.
7 / 10
A genuinely excellent tactical card-battler from the XCOM team, buried at launch under a season pass and paid cosmetics stacked on top of a full-price single-player game, forced launcher software that broke performance, and — years later — a Terms of Service change reviewers describe in the harshest possible terms.
7 / 10
A first-person survival sandbox about hunting, farming and building a village that eventually runs itself, wrapped around the promise of a multi-generational dynasty that almost nobody who owns it ever actually reaches — a Very Positive, 42,000-plus-review Steam favourite that has spent the last two years answering "what's missing" with paid cosmetics instead of the content its own late-game silence keeps calling for.
7 / 10
