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513 Crafting & Building games reviewed and scored, best first.
513 reviews
Moon Studios spent over two years turning a thin, contentious Early Access launch into a nearly complete game — hand-painted world, precision souls-like combat, a real town to build up, and co-op that only actually arrived in January 2026 — with the full 1.0 release now dated for October 2026.
7.5 / 10
Barrel Smash Studios' two-person Early Access debut drowns the world and asks you to build a colony on whatever's still floating — rafts, sinking islands, shark attacks and a corporate conspiracy buried in scavenged bunkers, all wrapped around a Rimworld-flavoured survivor sim.
7.5 / 10
A co-op mining sim where the underground has no fixed layout, bolted onto a genuine factory-automation game — dig your own tunnels with a squad of up to four, then turn what you find into a production line with conveyor belts, robots, and delivery contracts.
7.5 / 10
Six years in Early Access, and the 1.0 landed this week. You play a broke shipbreaker with a loan and a flying coffin, building a ship out of salvage one bolt at a time. Nothing else does what it does — and its own most devoted players think it needed another year.
7.5 / 10
A haunting, atmospheric car-survival roguelike whose single biggest obstacle to a wider audience isn't its horror or its driving physics — it's a save system that a large, consistent share of reviewers say makes the game genuinely incompatible with an interrupted life.
7.5 / 10
A dark-fantasy roguelike where you spend an hour designing a character and about eight minutes watching them win — 98% positive, and its critics and its store page agree on exactly what it is.
7.5 / 10
A Lovecraftian idle RPG that spent months as a well-loved free demo before its 12 August 2026 launch -- an auto-battling, town-building, gear-crafting incremental that early buyers call one of the deepest idle games in years, with a real complaint underneath the praise about a stat and customisation system that gets overwhelming fast.
7.5 / 10
You brew potions by physically dragging a pestle across a map of alchemical effects, and it's one of the best crafting mechanics anyone has invented. The argument isn't whether it's good — it's whether a brilliant idea that stopped being developed is worth twenty-nine dollars.
7.5 / 10
A witch-run potion shop, a card-based haggling minigame that critics singled out as genuinely clever, and a debt-clock structure so demanding that fewer than one in five players who own it have ever actually paid it off -- an IGF audience-award winner whose charm and its exhausting pace turn out to be the same design decision.
7.5 / 10
A decade-long Early Access project finally becomes a finished game, and it's still the only MMORPG where getting cursed into a cow is a legitimate build.
7.5 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded tactics/deckbuilding roguelike that launched to a small, entirely non-English review sample — this review translated and read all fourteen of them in full to find a genuinely praised elemental-tactics system with one sharp, specific complaint about shop RNG.
7.5 / 10
A fresh, simplified take on the farming-fantasy-action RPG series that plays well for newcomers and won an enormous, healthy Steam audience, but whose own review base — dominated by reviewers who've played every prior entry — argues repeatedly that the series' deeper systems were stripped out rather than modernised.
7.5 / 10
Jagex takes twenty-five years of RuneScape skill icons and welds them onto a Valheim-shaped survival loop. Fifteen months into Early Access, with a 1.0 date now on the calendar, the question is whether the skilling actually survived the move or just changed clothes.
7.5 / 10
The 2020 game that started the shape-cutting automation genre, built by stripping Factorio down to logistics alone — no combat, no scarcity, no enemies. Cheap, historically important, and rougher than the sequel it spawned.
7.5 / 10
A dark fantasy RPG that replaces turns and mana with a shared deck and a countdown clock — every card you play buys time against the enemy's next move, and every hero draws from the same pool of cards.
7.5 / 10
A city builder that abandons the colonist as its unit of decision and manages a population instead — tens of thousands of citizens, an empire beyond the walls, and an interface that makes you earn every bit of that scale.
7.5 / 10
Endnight's sequel to The Forest is the best-looking survival-horror island you can build a base on, and its rockiest reviews — mostly written in the first weeks after launch — argued a beautiful map was hiding surprisingly little to actually do. Recent sentiment suggests the gap between the two has narrowed since.
7.5 / 10
A village builder where everything — villagers, berries, houses, monsters — is a card on a table, and you craft by dragging one onto another. Twelve dollars, 96% positive, genuinely inventive. Then your table fills up and there is no way to automate anything.
7.5 / 10
An auto-battler where you never touch the character directly, animated entirely in ASCII art, and built around Stonescript — a real scripting language for programming your own companion's combat behaviour instead of just watching it fight.
7.5 / 10
A co-op dwarven mine-by-day, defend-by-night roguelite that arrived in Early Access with 100,000 wishlists behind it and immediately delivered on the hype — reviewers keep shouting Rock and Stone, and the one real complaint is that a single class is currently doing all the digging.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely excellent, atmospheric successor to one of survival gaming's most beloved titles, selling two million copies in twelve hours — whose launch was immediately overshadowed by a well-documented controversy over an unusually restrictive EULA from publisher Krafton, set against a pre-existing, publicly reported dispute over developer bonuses that the community rallied around in real time.
7.5 / 10
A pixel-art roguelike duel game that fuses card-based deckbuilding with auto-battler positioning around a single risky idea — every summon draws against an energy cap, and overshooting it triggers backlash against you rather than your opponent.
7.5 / 10
A cozy pixel-art gathering and crafting game about rebuilding a village, sold on a shelf full of idle games and repeatedly mistaken for one. It isn't. It's a thirty-hour hand-managed crafting loop with a warm story attached, and at six dollars it's one of the easiest recommendations of the summer — for the right player.
7.5 / 10
Twelve years and eight chapters after launch, The Elder Scrolls Online still lets you start anywhere and stay relevant everywhere. Level scaling bought that freedom; the trade-off is a levelling arc with no real stakes and a monetisation model dense enough to need a spreadsheet. Reviewed with Season One: Return of the Thieves Guild live.
7.5 / 10
