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513 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
513 reviews
Nineteen years old and still the only MMO that treats Tolkien's geography and timeline as a design constraint rather than a skin. Reviewed with Kingdoms of Harad current, asking what that licence discipline actually buys a player in 2026 — and what a new one genuinely has to pay to see it.
7 / 10
A charming university-management sim that both its harshest critics and its single most-played fan (over 700 hours) describe using the same word -- a reskin of Two Point Hospital -- disagreeing only on whether that's a compliment.
7 / 10
A brand-new semi-idle browser-style MMORPG that wears its RuneScape and Melvor Idle influences openly — guilds, a tabbed skill list, a world map gated by level bands — two days into Early Access and already patching multiple times a day.
7 / 10
An ambitious Early Access idle RPG from a studio literally named Idle Gamers -- four classes and twelve subclasses, co-op world bosses, a 24-hour offline cap and no microtransactions -- that a large and often deeply invested review base calls one of the best idle RPGs of the year, set against a genuinely loud minority calling its AI-generated art and UI "AI slop" and its daily balance patches disruptive to builds players had already committed to.
7 / 10
A solo developer's nearly two-year passion project, a procedurally-generated first-person voxel mining and exploration game with light AI-uprising narrative, released for NZ$1.49 in June 2023 with a perfect, if very small, positive review record.
7 / 10
A solo-developer chatroom-fishing game that turned into one of 2024's biggest indie surprises, sitting Overwhelmingly Positive across 70,000+ reviews — but a full read of its negative sample and Steam's own announcement feed shows a game whose developer has gone quiet since January 2025, leaving a well-documented lobby-security problem unresolved.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental built for a 2025 game jam, about hauling a strange substance up out of a mining town's collapsing depths — deliberately short, unusually confident about its Lovecraftian ending, and patched several times since launch to fix the rough edges that shipped with it.
7 / 10
A Kickstarter-backed, pro-player-built sci-fi RTS that arrives in Early Access as the most credible StarCraft successor in years, welded to a commander RPG layer that mostly earns its place — if you're still willing to relearn macro from scratch.
7 / 10
A solo Roman-themed deckbuilder that plays less like an evolving campaign and more like ten separate puzzles built from the same box of cards — with a Cats reskin thrown in for a second look at the same missions.
6.8 / 10
A genuinely charming, actively supported Sanrio cozy-life-sim that became a real viral phenomenon, undercut by real mobile-port friction on price and time-gating, and a documented monetisation reversal that a meaningful share of its own most dedicated players say broke trust.
6.7 / 10
A solo-developed guild management idle RPG with eleven classes, eleven tiered professions and hour-long raids, sold once for NZ$7.39 with no ads and nothing else to buy — an ambitious system let down at launch by dungeons and raids that don't repeat on their own, which is a strange gap in a game built around leaving it alone.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely novel deckbuilding RPG that fuses poker hands with fantasy ability cards, wrapped in lush, fully-voiced presentation -- Very Positive on Steam, but close to half of its negative reviews single out the same confusing interface, and a quarter raise the poker system's luck swings as a real fairness complaint rather than a taste issue.
6.5 / 10
A four-player co-op deckbuilder that solves the genre's most obvious gap — playing Slay the Spire-style card combat as an actual shared party instead of a shared seed — and then spends the years after its Paradox acquisition undermining that achievement with DLC pricing its own community calls predatory.
6.5 / 10
A two-person studio's fantasy shopkeeping sim, where you never swing a sword yourself — you stock the shelves, level the crafting benches and choose which quests your Heroes are actually equipped to survive. Two years in Early Access built a genuinely deep crafting web; it also left a slow midgame and a fiddly building tool that Steam reviewers still bring up.
6.5 / 10
A cozy co-op survival-crafting sandbox about restoring flying islands, actively developed by Funcom's Astrolabe Interactive for a year and a half of Early Access, whose own reviewers document a consistent mid-game slump once the flying-island novelty wears off, alongside real, still-present performance issues and one especially prominent motion-sickness complaint.
6.5 / 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 physics-driven pachinko roguelike that calls itself the first "autobonker" — a genuinely satisfying opening few hours undone, by its own players' account, when the item pool keeps growing without any way to reliably draw the pieces that combo together, punishing the very meta-progression the game is built around.
6.5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder that fuses Scrabble with Balatro, from GoldenEye and TimeSplitters veterans — genuinely praised for its core idea, and shadowed by an AI-art controversy the developers walked back after launch-week backlash.
6.5 / 10
An ambitious single-world MMO crafting sandbox from the studio behind SpacetimeDB, built around a genuinely deep, RuneScape-inspired grind that its own biggest fans openly embrace — undercut by a real tension between its "idle-friendly" marketing and punishing stamina systems, rampant player-on-player griefing the developers are criticised for under-policing, and a disclosed but under-communicated plan to wipe progress and convert to free-to-play after Early Access.
6.5 / 10
A ten-year-old pixel dungeon-crawler that never quite decided whether it wants you clicking through fights or leaving them to auto-battle, held together by a four-currency stamina economy that structures every session it doesn't quietly monetise.
6.5 / 10
A Chinese-developed xianxia tactics RPG with a genuinely good grid on it, sold at a fair price with 19 chapters already in the box — and a cultivation ladder that turns out to be the thinnest system in the game.
6.5 / 10
A one-time-purchase idle RPG that borrows every visual and structural trick of gacha hero collectors — six rarities, duplicate fusion, a 70-champion banner — and then declines to sell any of it, which makes it one of the more interesting monetisation experiments the genre has produced this year.
6.5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder that swaps dungeon crawling for an NBA-style season, from Big Ambitions developer Bigosaur -- a genuinely novel mashup that a fifth of its reviewers say plays itself once the deck-building decisions run out.
6.5 / 10
A brutal, deeply detailed survival sandbox set in Robert E. Howard's Hyboria that's held a genuinely devoted following since 2018, now carrying real, current frustrations over monetisation additions and mandatory online requirements introduced since Funcom's acquisition by Tencent.
6.5 / 10
