Idle Industries
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
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Crafting & Building reviews
513 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
513 reviews
Idle Stellar
A five-dollar space idler about mining, salvaging and shooting your way across eight planets — polished, fair-priced and almost entirely spent by the time the credits should be rolling.
6 / 10
Keep on Mining! - Worlds
A bigger sequel to a well-liked incremental that fell twelve points in the ratings — because it doubled the length without fixing the thing that made the first game's back half a chore.
6 / 10
King's Bounty II
A long-awaited revival of a beloved 1990s-2000s fantasy tactics franchise that traded its signature systems for a 3D open world and split its fanbase on arrival -- then ended on a cliffhanger promising story DLC that never came, after its studio was swept up in the corporate fallout of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
6 / 10
MarZ: Tactical Base Defense
A Cold War-flavoured tower defense about zombies on Mars, where the tension comes from physically running crew between turrets — and where the loudest, most consistent complaint in its review history is that every mission has exactly one correct build order.
6 / 10
Meet Your Maker
A trap-dungeon builder-versus-raider game whose own fans and critics converge on the same diagnosis — a reward structure that pays only for kills, not fun, flooded the community with unbeatable "killbox" levels — and whose support appears to have wound down roughly a year ago after a real, multi-season run.
6 / 10
Monster Hunting: Incremental Grind Forever
A genuinely deep idle RPG that hooks its most dedicated fans for hundreds of hours on a thoughtful 72-hour offline time bank, undercut by an overwhelming pile of half-explained systems and a corroborated, apparently still-unpatched bug that stops the final boss cold.
6 / 10
Mystery Digger: Definitive Edition
A small, calm mining sim about drilling deeper for a couple of evenings — pleasant while it lasts, and honest about how little it's asking of your time.
6 / 10
Nearly Dead - Live and Let Die
A cheap, small-scale Korean co-op roguelite about scavenging zombie-overrun regions by day and defending a hideout by night -- Mostly Positive from a modest audience, genuinely fun with friends according to most who tried it, but held back by real, repeated multiplayer bugs and no public matchmaking to find them with.
6 / 10
Necrosmith
A fantasy necromancer-builder where you assemble undead minions from mismatched body parts and send them to defend your tower -- a genuinely inventive Very Positive hit at NZ$4.49, undercut by minion AI reviewers call frustratingly dumb and a publisher that moved on to a sequel while this one's bugs stayed open.
6 / 10
Neophyte Protocol
A third-person sci-fi horde shooter that pairs Vampire Survivors-scale enemy counts with build-your-own ARPG crafting, launched into Early Access with a specific roadmap, an honest price and zero independent track record to check any of it against.
6 / 10
New World: Aeternum
Amazon's classless action MMORPG still has the best weapon-swap combat and the most convincing large-scale siege war it has ever shipped. None of that is why this review exists — New World: Aeternum was delisted from every storefront on 15 January 2026 and the servers go dark for good on 31 January 2027. Reviewed with the extended Nighthaven season live.
6 / 10
Old School
MDickie's 3D remake of his own School Days recycles the Wrestling Empire combat engine into a chaotic school-life sandbox -- genuinely funny for the built-in fanbase, but saddled with camera and control complaints that have gone unfixed since launch, and a recent trust problem over undisclosed AI-generated content.
6 / 10
One Military Camp
A charming, Evil Genius-styled boot camp management sim whose base-building and art direction win consistent praise, dogged from launch through three years of updates by the same complaint — reviewers keep calling it a "waiting simulator" with too little strategy underneath.
6 / 10
Pax Dei
A social sandbox MMO with no vendors, no quest-givers and no safety net — genuinely distinctive when it comes to player-built villages and a player-run economy, but its land ownership system asks for real, recurring money in a way a lot of its own players resent.
6 / 10
Potion Permit
A gorgeous, cosy alchemist life-sim whose own review base repeats the same verdict with striking consistency — beautiful and charming on the surface, thinner than its genre neighbours underneath, and sold alongside more than thirty individually priced decoration DLC packs that together cost nearly as much as the base game.
6 / 10
Reborn: An Idle Roguelike RPG
A free, solo-developed idle roguelike that spent a full year in Early Access before its 9 May 2025 1.0 exit — Mixed at 64% lifetime across a small but genuinely long-playing corpus, whose own most-invested critics (one at over 4,700 hours) describe a game whose systems, especially crafting, arrive far too slowly for how much waiting it asks of you.
6 / 10
Seraph's Last Stand
A dollar-priced homage to the Flash-era shoot-'em-up Heli Attack, where picking wands and hats to "break the game" is genuinely fun for a few hours before the reviews agree, in striking numbers and across four years, that the meta-progression grinding it down into.
6 / 10
Settlement Survival
An ambitious, Banished-inspired survival city-builder with genuinely deep production chains, weighed down by persistent balance problems, a currently game-breaking macOS bug, and rumours of developer abandonment the studio has publicly and directly denied.
6 / 10
Sineus Arena Survivors
A Megabonk-adjacent bullet-heaven with genuine base-building ambitions, launched as a full 1.0 in a state so rough that a majority of its own buyers said it should have shipped as Early Access — since substantially patched on the technical side, while a broken, too-generous progression economy remains an open complaint as recently as this week.
6 / 10
Smalland: Survive the Wilds
A tiny-scale survival-crafting game about insect-sized humans fending off giant bugs, frequently compared to Grounded — with a persistent, three-year-long complaint that even its official 1.0 release still plays like unfinished Early Access.
6 / 10
SpelunKing: The Mine Match
A match-3 board dressed up as a mine shaft, where clearing gems drags the camera deeper underground. The exploration hook is genuinely clever; the grind wrapped around it is not.
6 / 10
SpiritVale
An unabashed Ragnarok Online homage with seven classes, thirty maps and a community that loves it. Its Early Access launch also spent a fortnight with the servers falling over and player trading switched off entirely after dupers took the marketplace.
6 / 10
Starsand Island
A genuinely pretty, systems-rich cozy farming life-sim whose Early Access launch was overshadowed by a real corporate-backing revelation, a suspected fake-review campaign, and a broken promise about paid content — a case where the discourse around the game may matter as much to a buyer as the game itself.
6 / 10