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409 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
409 reviews
An Unreal Engine 5 tactical shooter built around a genuinely distinctive body-camera perspective, whose reputation was badly damaged by a November 2024 update that stripped out hard-earned cosmetic progress and replaced it with a cash shop — the single highest-voted review this library has found on any game, at nearly 4,000 votes.
6 / 10
Colossal Order's sequel to the beloved city-builder launched into one of the genre's most severe, well-documented disasters — severe performance failures, a "fake" simulation several reviewers describe finding through direct testing, and a real CEO controversy over blaming the community for backlash. This review can confirm, via the developer's own communications, that Colossal Order and publisher Paradox split entirely in November 2025, with a new studio, Iceflake Studios, now credited by a real, growing share of reviewers with a genuine turnaround since taking over development in 2026.
6 / 10
An Early Access idle shop sim built to be ignored — it lives in the corner of your monitor, restocks its own shelves and asks for a glance every twenty minutes. Charming, three dollars, and currently carrying a save bug that can wipe a 76-hour store.
6 / 10
A NZ$10.49 cosy pixel-art crafting sim from solo Turkish developer Musa Gungor, Mostly Positive across 56 reviews on the strength of genuinely attractive art and atmosphere, but with a real gap between the two audiences reading it — Turkish reviewers who already follow the developer's other games score it far higher than English-language newcomers, several of whom call it an overpriced, oversold idle clicker that most buyers, per Steam's own achievement data, never actually finish.
6 / 10
A one-developer desktop pet that evolves from a slime into a dark sorceress and is allowed to shake your windows and flash your taskbar along the way — reviewed on its Early Access launch day, with zero user reviews yet to check it against and an achievement sample so small it can be read as a raw account count.
6 / 10
A small, genuinely charming idle game about running vending machines that supply adventurers deep in a dungeon, hurt by thin content and rough number-tuning that even its own fans point out, from a solo developer who fixed the game's biggest early complaint fast and then went quiet.
6 / 10
A visually stunning UE5 adaptation of Bernard Werber's classic novel that nearly every reviewer agrees looks incredible and just as consistently says isn't the ant colony simulation its premise promised — reviewed here alongside a genuinely substantial free content update that answers some, if not all, of that disappointment.
6 / 10
The raid loop it invented is still the best in the genre, and the company around it is the problem. NZ$85.99 to buy, another NZ$51.99 if you want the PvE mode, and a Steam launch so broken that 58 of the most-upvoted negative reviews were written in a single month.
6 / 10
A cozy magical farming sim that survived its own near-death experience — two rounds of studio layoffs, an announced shutdown of its online features, and a last-minute rescue by a new publisher just days before the servers were due to go dark.
6 / 10
A cheap, good-looking incremental about feeding a black hole until it either swallows a leaderboard spot or collapses on you, undercut by a threadbare research tree and a wave of recent reviews accusing the whole project of being thrown together with AI.
6 / 10
A small, solo-developed idle RPG built on a genuinely distinctive hook — permadeath and souls-like difficulty grafted onto an auto-battler — that rewards deeply invested fans with hundreds of hours while leaving newcomers to discover its harshest rules the hard way.
6 / 10
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
A turn-based idle grinder built around hiring the monsters you've just killed, with a genuinely clever risk-versus-reward twist buried under a spreadsheet-dense interface and a release so quiet that Steam has barely registered it exists.
6 / 10
A free-to-play incremental about growing a one-person garage venture into a tech empire, with a genuinely honest monetisation model let down by a midgame economy that stops making sense and a content well that runs dry fast.
6 / 10
A solo-developed, node-based automation game that scratches the Factorio itch without Factorio's build-everything-yourself demands, still in Early Access two and a half years in and still being actively rebalanced — most recently to remove the exact progression walls its players have been complaining about since launch.
6 / 10
A cheap, charming procedural-generation island builder whose own title promises more than the finished game delivers — a short, one-sitting civilisation puzzle rather than the ongoing incremental system a meaningful share of its own reviewers say they expected.
6 / 10
A ground-up Unreal Engine 5 remake bundling both original Layers of Fear games, their DLC and new connective content into one package — whose own returning fans keep saying the same thing, backed by a real, measurable gap: the 2016 original still holds Very Positive 88.4% on Steam against this remake's Mostly Positive 79.0%.
6 / 10
A retro-desktop incremental where you grow a Brooklyn bodega into a global chain through loans, tax bills and an IPO prestige loop. The 90s operating-system framing is doing more work than the economy underneath it, and five days of Steam achievement data already shows where players stop.
6 / 10
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
A desktop pet, not a game in any conventional sense — Wukong or Amei sit on your screen, react to your typing and clicking, and let you draw their outfits by hand. Reviewed two days after launch, with almost no review corpus yet to judge it by.
6 / 10
A genuinely excellent basketball simulator wrapped in an economy where one season's pass costs more than the whole discounted game — and where the sequel went on pre-order while those passes were still being sold.
6 / 10
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
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
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
