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513 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
513 reviews
A promising winter entry in the Card Survival genre with a genuinely tense core loop and an unusually communicative solo-scale developer, held back by save-corrupting crashes reported across its entire Early Access life and a current content stretch several players finish in a single-digit number of hours.
5.5 / 10
A zombie-survivors auto-shooter that bolts a permadeath mercenary camp onto the Vampire Survivors formula, then largely stopped receiving new content the year after it left Early Access. The base-building risk-reward loop is genuinely distinct; the 330-achievement grind underneath it is not.
5.5 / 10
A gorgeous, comic-book-styled pirate tactical RPG whose dice-and-deckbuilding combat system splits opinion sharply along one measurable line — reviewers who bailed within the first hour call it an unexplained mess, while those who stuck it out and actually read the in-game instructions largely came around, on top of a genuinely short, linear campaign with no ship battles.
5.5 / 10
An idle incremental RPG wrapped around a genuinely creepy generational-horror premise — die, pass your DNA to the next generation, grow stronger, discover who's really benefiting — undercut by a specific, well-corroborated complaint from two independent reviewers that the core power fantasy runs backwards.
5.5 / 10
Cold Hours' free pixel-art clicker nails a charming opening few hours, then buries its own idle promise under an offline-time cap, an autoclicker-favouring economy and a premium currency that gates full completion.
5.5 / 10
A free grid-placement idle game about squeezing adjacency bonuses out of factories, power plants and research labs — a genuinely interesting core idea let down by CPU-hungry building animations, a map you can't scroll, and content that most players clear in an afternoon.
5.5 / 10
A cheap, colourful space-mining idler that launched thin and slow in mid-2024, drew serious unverified complaints from its own playtesters about how feedback was handled, then went quiet for over a year before a genuinely substantial 2025 content update.
5.5 / 10
A pixel-art village-builder that wants to be an idle game and a management sim at once, and spends its first year of updates finding out how hard it is to be both without either side suffering.
5.5 / 10
A digital card game that pioneered simultaneous turns in 2012 and never got copied properly — still free, still patched, and still almost nobody is left to play it against.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$17.49 semi-AFK tavern sim whose own reviewers keep naming the same superior rival, Tavern Master, unprompted — and whose staff AI several report collapsing once a tavern grows past a few dozen employees, with no update in the nine months since it left Early Access.
5.5 / 10
A gather-upgrade-fight resource loop with real short-term appeal that grows repetitive and punishing over a longer Early Access life, whose advertised co-op turns out to be shared-camera split-screen rather than independent multiplayer.
5.5 / 10
The game built to match its own fake advertisement, and one of the highest-grossing mobile titles on earth. Rated 4.7 by nearly half a million people, mocked everywhere else as a bait-and- switch — and both of those are accurate descriptions of what happens after you install it.
5.5 / 10
A co-op sky-sailing survival sandbox from Bossa Studios -- spiritual successor to their abandoned MMO Worlds Adrift -- that pairs a genuinely loved grapple-and-shipbuilding core with a rushed five-month Early Access run, a save-corrupting bug streak that outlived the 1.0 launch, and a development pace that stalled for the better part of a year before recent fixes started landing.
5.5 / 10
A charming wand-crafting survivors-like about magic chickens fighting an anti-magic toad army, whose developers patched intensely for its first month before support tapered off and eventually pivoted to announcing a sequel rather than fixing the bugs still reported years later.
5.5 / 10
A gorgeous Gaslamp Fantasy survival-crafting game with a passionately invested fanbase, currently caught between real studio turmoil — confirmed layoffs and a Tencent acquisition — and a content-direction reversal that alienated some of its most dedicated long-time players.
5.5 / 10
Veslo Games' web-of-relays base defence owes an open debt to the Kongregate flash classic The Space Game, and for a handful of missions that inheritance is a genuine strength. Fifty-two achievements and a leaderboard have sat broken since the developer went quiet in 2018, and the sixteen-mission campaign runs out of new ideas well before it runs out of missions.
5.5 / 10
A decade-old mobile mining clicker arrives on Steam mostly unchanged — a genuinely sticky biome-hopping loop wrapped in a shop that never stops interrupting it.
5.5 / 10
You pilot a walking mech fortress across a desert, scavenging wrecks and extracting with the loot. Three hundred thousand people bought it in a fortnight. Its recent reviews are running at 41% positive, and the reasons are structural rather than cosmetic.
5.5 / 10
A beautiful feudal-Japan village-builder that both its critics and its own defenders keep measuring against Medieval Dynasty — and finding wanting, with clunky combat, broken enemy AI and a grind so pronounced that building a single house can demand its own sub-loop of crafting.
5.5 / 10
A roguelite tactics-autobattler hybrid set in the Legend of the Five Rings universe that launched to real praise for its lore fidelity and build variety, but whose more recent reviews have swung sharply negative around one specific, damning complaint — the developer has stopped updating it.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developed extraction RPG whose "Mixed" score understates a real design problem with its combat, and whose review section contains an unusual, specific pattern worth reporting plainly — at least two detailed reviews that read as substantively critical while marking the game recommended, explicitly out of sympathy for the developer.
5.5 / 10
A hamster-cage colony sim where you build both across and up through a planet's crust, then cap every map off with a physics-based rocket launch — a genuinely novel structure let down by AI-generated portraits, math bugs in its own production formulas, and a patch history that goes almost silent the week after full release.
5.5 / 10
Medieval survivors defend a magic stone from monsters dropped by an alien ship, sever limbs, fit prosthetics and forge weapons out of what they cut off. A genuinely strange five-dollar idea from two developers — and about four hours of Early Access with the AI still half-working.
5.5 / 10
A years-in-the-making, Kickstarter-backed open-world farming sim that finally hit Early Access — and immediately ran into the one thing its audience cared most about. The co-op isn't the shared-farm co-op people bought it for, and the Mixed rating is mostly that discovery happening 392 times.
5.5 / 10
