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Crafting & Building reviews

513 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.

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513 reviews

MISERY

A chaotic, genuinely addictive co-op survival game set in a STALKER-flavoured nuclear exclusion zone, praised by players for its dark comedy and bunker-crawling tension even as a substantial share of the same review sample argues its "1.0" label is misleading for content this thin — and whose launch was briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented DMCA dispute with STALKER 2 developer GSC Game World and an admitted offensive Discord incident from a member of the small development team.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Monotony Idle

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

Reviewed

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My Time at Portia

A charming, Ghibli-inspired post-apocalyptic crafting and farming life-sim that's built a genuinely devoted, cross-generational fanbase over six years — while a long, consistent thread of its own reviews keeps arguing the developers never quite finished fixing it.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Nova Lands

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

Reviewed

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Once Human

A genuinely strange free survival MMO whose defining flaw — seasonal servers that wiped everything you built — has quietly been fixed, while its veterans have moved on to a different argument entirely.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Paralives

The indie life sim that spent seven years being the great Sims alternative, now 91% positive and a million copies sold — with a build mode people adore and a live mode its own supporters say isn't finished.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Pax Autocratica

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

Reviewed

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Planetbase

A decade-old space colony sim with a specific, detailed design complaint at the heart of its negative reviews — one terrain quirk that some players call a fatal flaw and others, including a 900-hour veteran, call simple mismanagement.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Skyformer

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

Reviewed

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Slay the Spire 2

Mega Crit's sequel to one of the most acclaimed deckbuilders ever made adds co-op, two new classes and a rebuilt Ascension ladder, then spends its first five months in Early Access getting hammered by its own veteran players over balance whiplash, a boss nobody could agree on, and a genuine RNG bug a fan had to prove existed.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Space Rock Breaker

A NZ$4.79 incremental about shooting asteroids and dropping the ore into a Plinko machine. Its achievement curve is the flattest this library has measured — almost everyone who buys it finishes it — and its prestige system is the one part that doesn't work.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Spiritstead

A hand-drawn cozy city builder from debut studio Turbo Dog Games, where growing a village is only half the loop — the other half is coaxing hidden spirits out of hiding by experimenting with weather, timing and item placement, delivered as a four-to-seven-hour campaign priced at €8.54 two days after launch.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Starbound

A ten-year-old space sandbox that still earns a Very Positive rating on the strength of its crafting-and-exploration loop and its modding scene — until you check the dates and find the developer has shipped one hotfix since 2019, then marked the tenth anniversary of its 1.0 launch with a vinyl record instead of an update, which is currently tanking the recent-review score in real time.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Stellaris

A decade-old 4X space strategy game beloved enough to produce reviewers with 2,000+ hours logged — and, since 2024, a wave of those exact same veteran players turning against Paradox over DLC pricing, a specific performance regression, and player-reported AI-generated content.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Talespinner

A Japanese-mythology roguelike deckbuilder that lets you dial your own difficulty and reward up or down mid-run through a "narration" choice — reviewed on launch day, when its own review corpus is still zero and the only real evidence is a year-old public demo.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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The Alters

A genuinely inventive sci-fi survival game about a stranded scientist cloning alternate versions of himself from different life choices, whose acclaimed writing and design were overshadowed at launch by a confirmed, publisher-acknowledged failure to disclose generative-AI content — including leftover AI prompt text found in shipped translations — that this review independently verified through press coverage rather than relying on review-corpus allegations alone.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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The Last Caretaker

A genuinely beloved Early Access survival-crafting game about a lone robot scavenging a drowned Earth to save the last of humanity, Very Positive across more than 12,000 reviews for a premise and atmosphere reviewers describe with real passion — undercut by severe, well-documented performance problems, a persistent unresolved crash bug, and a motion-sickness accessibility gap that several devoted fans describe as painful to keep flagging.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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