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513 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
513 reviews
Devsisters folds its 300-million-player Cookie Run cast into an idle auto-battler with genuinely tactical positioning, then hangs the whole thing on the same gacha currencies that turned Cookie Run: Kingdom into a case study in monetisation backlash.
6.5 / 10
A free idle RPG with the genuine article — true 1:1 offline progression — attached to a retention design that keeps demanding you come back and play minigames by hand.
6.5 / 10
The game that arguably invented the modern survival genre from an ARMA 2 mod is still running, still brutal, and still dividing its own reviews between people who lived through its infamous five-year alpha and people just discovering how unforgiving it remains today.
6.5 / 10
A cheap, honestly-scoped mining incremental about drilling a low-poly planet layer by layer for roughly two hours — well liked by its first handful of reviewers, with one detailed bug report worth taking seriously before you buy.
6.5 / 10
The best-feeling shooter ever made, attached to the most punishing content model in mainstream gaming. Its harshest reviews come from players with two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand hours logged — and the phrase they keep reaching for is "the best game I can't recommend".
6.5 / 10
A short, charming incremental about a young mole drilling into a meteor crater — genuinely distinctive for giving its dig-upgrade-repeat loop an actual story, but held back by spiky progression pacing and a back half that plays itself.
6.5 / 10
A 3v3 auto-battle collector RPG about assembling a squad from 100 possible Dmon, each with a three-stat build, a four-part skill kit and its own leveled equipment — you draft the team, then watch it fight on its own across a hex-tile map.
6.5 / 10
The 1999 Bullfrog classic that put you on the evil side of a fantasy dungeon, reissued on Steam in 2024 as a straight port of the GOG build. The dungeon-management design still holds up completely. Whether the executable does depends entirely on your PC.
6.5 / 10
A co-op fantasy action-RPG that opened Early Access to a rare thing in this library — a completely unanimous English review sample. Every review so far is short, enthusiastic, and upfront that it's judging a promise more than a finished game.
6.5 / 10
A dwarf-themed idle mining sim that spent the better part of two years in Early Access before its July 2024 1.0 launch, built around floor management, cloneable dwarves and a slow climb toward daylight.
6.5 / 10
A spellcrafting action-RPG roguelite from Borealys Games, spun off from their 2019 action-adventure Mages of Mystralia -- gorgeous, ambitious, and Very Positive on Steam, but carrying a large, detailed, high-vote-count minority of reviews describing brutal early balance that undercuts its own centrepiece spell-crafting system.
6.5 / 10
A charming, town-building prequel built to bridge Suikoden fans to the crowdfunded Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes -- loved for its characters and world, but honest with itself about being, structurally, a fetch-quest and material-farming loop dressed up as an action RPG.
6.5 / 10
A mining-and-combat idle RPG, the follow-up to the popular browser game Haste-Miner 2, still running fresh monthly contests more than three years after launch — despite a prestige system some 2023-2024 reviewers say breaks the entire economy the moment you use it.
6.5 / 10
Twenty-two years old, twenty-two expansions deep, and still shipping a full expansion every December — EverQuest II is one of the most content-dense MMOs ever built, sold through a free-to-play shell that takes away the auction house, the chat channels and the top half of your spellbook until you subscribe.
6.5 / 10
A free-to-play, IdleOn-flavoured AFK RPG that gets the offline-progression fundamentals right and stays refreshingly uncomplicated early on, but ships an MMO label its actual single-player design doesn't earn and sharpens its monetisation considerably once the early Acts are behind you.
6.5 / 10
A top-down sci-fi survival-crafting game built around two protagonists who trade places at dusk — one built for exploration and building, one built for the enemies that only come out at night — five months into an Early Access build that is still visibly finding its footing.
6.5 / 10
A solo-built voxel colony sim where every species of tree and vein of ore keeps its own look all the way into the furniture you craft from it, three and a half years out of Early Access at NZ$38.49 with no user reviews yet against the 1.0 build.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed space-colony sim that spent a year in Early Access fixing the exact problems its first reviewers complained about, then launched to a small but genuinely engaged audience most readers have never heard of.
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
An active clicker where pickaxes are forbidden and bombs do all the digging, chaining explosive ore reactions across a cute 8x8 pixel mine — well liked by a genuinely international audience, with two specific complaints, an achievement bug and a rough endgame mode, showing up independently across different languages.
6.5 / 10
A small, unanimously well-liked decorating sandbox where birds bring seeds and gifts to slowly fill an island with plants and decorations, backed by a genuinely sustained run of seasonal content updates and a warm, consistent English review record.
6.5 / 10
A relaxing pixel-art building game about fulfilling customer blueprint orders as a young garlic apprentice, praised as a "hidden gem" comparable to Coloring Pixels for players who enjoy Minecraft-style creative pixel art, with real complaints about window sizing bugs and how little the core loop actually asks of the player.
6.5 / 10
A medieval cemetery sim with a tech tree the size of a small factory game and a sense of humour about corpse disposal. Also the only game I've reviewed where a player says they finished it out of hatred — and where the community's fix is a mod list that removes the walking.
6.5 / 10
The Dealer returns, and this time he's dealing cards over a bullet heaven. The card layer is the most interesting thing in the genre right now; the horde layer underneath it hasn't worked out how to make you feel powerful yet — and the deckbuilding in its own tagline is still on the roadmap.
6.5 / 10
