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409 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
409 reviews
A deep, spreadsheet-and-tactics management sim built around Counter-Strike esports — fictional teams and a genuinely detailed match engine, launched a month after a licensed rival and priced above it, with a four-review Steam page too thin to confirm much yet.
7 / 10
Weather Factory's card-driven cosmic horror sim deliberately refuses to explain itself -- a design choice its own creators later softened for its 2023 successor after eight years of Steam reviews split almost exactly along the line between players who find that opacity thrilling and those who find it simply punishing.
7 / 10
A free high-school rom-com visual novel that lets you play the romance or play the matchmaker, fully voiced in three languages, with nothing behind a paywall — the third clean release in a row from a studio that has quietly earned the right to be trusted on that point.
7 / 10
A second-monitor idle game about building a spacefaring trade fleet, launched thin enough that its loudest early reviewers called it a demo with a price tag — and then patched hard enough, with a dedicated endless mode and monthly content drops since, that the complaint driving most of its negative reviews is now largely out of date.
7 / 10
A factory-and-colony sim where the automation isn't belts or menus of orders but a real node-based programming language you wire up yourself, one behavior graph per unit. The most technically ambitious game in its genre, and honest proof of how much that ambition costs at the door.
7 / 10
Eidos-Montreal's cyberpunk immersive sim remains Mostly Positive across more than 42,000 Steam reviews for its genuinely excellent stealth gameplay and world-building — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent complaint that its story ends abruptly mid-arc, a flaw this review can confirm the game's own writer has since publicly acknowledged, tied to a since-cancelled sequel that would have resolved it, and to real, dateable studio layoffs still affecting Eidos-Montreal as recently as March 2026.
7 / 10
An Australian-outback survival life-sim that earned four years of goodwill in Early Access, then spent most of it in six weeks when its solo developer sold publishing rights to KRAFTON and the resulting EULA sparked one of Steam's more pointed 2025 backlashes.
7 / 10
A charming, deeply likeable Disney life-sim whose 2022 Early Access promise of an eventual free-to-play release was formally scrapped in 2023 — a well-documented reversal that still shapes how existing players talk about the game more than two years later.
7 / 10
A post-apocalyptic trucking-and-trading RPG that earns comparisons to Kenshi, RimWorld and Mad Max for its depth, undercut by a genuinely confusing interface and a rushed exit from a four-month Early Access that left visible "coming soon" placeholders in the shipped 1.0.
7 / 10
A beloved, deeply engaging cozy-fantasy RPG sequel that a genuinely enormous share of its own players finish and keep playing — sitting alongside the single most consistent, most heavily-upvoted complaint this review has documented all year, that its marketed co-op is severely restricted, undersold by its own promotional videos, and takes hours just to unlock.
7 / 10
The franchise's current entry brings a genuinely better-looking, better-sounding engine and three new regions, but a large share of its own veteran audience says content was cut rather than added relative to Farming Simulator 22 — and the DLC structure has grown to two full season passes plus a dozen standalone equipment packs.
7 / 10
A NZ$5.99 idle RPG that dresses an 11-skill crafting-and-progression system up as a joke about spinning a fidget spinner impossibly fast, from a solo developer who patched constantly through Early Access and then went almost completely silent after the September 2023 1.0 launch.
7 / 10
A text-based football world generator where you don't pick a lineup or call a tactic — you only approve or reject the transfers clubs propose, then watch decades of invented history unfold. A genuinely different angle on football management, launched with a five-review Steam page and some sharp early complaints about its own core promise.
7 / 10
Playground Games' open-world racer remains Very Positive across nearly 279,000 Steam reviews nearly five years after release, still receiving weekly content updates today — undercut by a real, specific, dateable complaint that Playground introduced paid car-pack microtransactions roughly two years after launch despite Premium and Ultimate edition buyers having already paid for a "car pass" that was marketed as covering exactly this content.
7 / 10
A racing sim whose lifetime Mixed badge is largely a launch fossil — six years of development produced physics and handling reviewers call the best in series history, wrapped around a thin, buggy content package at launch that two-plus years of sustained weekly updates have genuinely turned around, with recent sentiment running well ahead of the storefront number.
7 / 10
A gridless medieval city-builder that spent six years in Early Access before reaching 1.0 in January 2025, whose organic, grid-free building system draws some of the most enthusiastic praise in its genre — undercut by a launch that a majority of this review's post-1.0 negative sample says still shipped with game-breaking bugs, and a specific, well-documented housing and population wall that stalls growing settlements.
7 / 10
A calm, good-looking voxel factory game about building robots to sell them — a genre full of hostile worlds and existential stakes, this one just wants you to optimize a conveyor line in peace. Two years into Early Access, that's both its appeal and its ceiling.
7 / 10
11 bit studios' sequel trades the original Frostpunk's intimate, one-building-at-a-time survival for a zoomed-out, district-based political simulation set 30 years later — a deliberate redesign that draws Mostly Positive reception on its own terms, but recurs across a remarkably consistent share of longtime fans as having lost the emotional, personal intimacy that made the original a genre-defining classic.
7 / 10
A goblin who robs dungeons by night and haggles over the loot by day, split between a genuinely good pixel-art Metroidvania and a shopkeeper sim that keeps overriding it — the game is at its best exactly when it lets you forget the rent is due again in three days.
7 / 10
A solo-developed roguelike from Istanbul that turns career survival into a weekly trading floor — clear your student debt or get walked out, across three branching story threads and nine endings, for a one-time NZ$9.99.
7 / 10
A survival-crafting game that replaces its genre's usual menu-driven fiddling with a diegetic system — you inspect your own wounds, dig leeches out with your fingers and physically reach into your pack for a fire kit — built around a sanity mechanic that can hallucinate you to death. A separate, heavily narrative Story Mode sits alongside the open sandbox and has drawn specific, credible criticism for how it depicts the Amazon's indigenous Yabahuaca people.
7 / 10
A hacking game that uses the real tool names — nmap, hydra, nslookup — attached to a linear, guided mission structure. If you've never opened a terminal it's an excellent doorway. If you work in security, it's a puzzle game wearing your job as a costume.
7 / 10
hololive's first official mobile game pairs a genuinely solid rhythm engine and a surprisingly deep theme-park builder with a fair, transparent gacha economy — then ships a Steam port with kernel-level anti-cheat and keyboard controls that never should have left the touchscreen.
7 / 10
Tech Tree Games' 2019 space-mining idle has outlasted most of its mobile peers by giving the genre's usual ore-and-upgrade loop a manager layer, a reset-friendly prestige system and weekly ranked tournaments — then undercutting some of that goodwill with a loot-box-flagged IAP menu and a persistent offline-tracking bug.
7 / 10
