Idling to Rule the Gods
A free browser idler from 2014 that outgrew Kongregate, landed on Steam in 2016, and has spent over a decade turning shadow clones and god fights into one of the genre's longest and most demanding progression ladders.
7 / 10
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Games released in 2016
48 games released in 2016 and reviewed here, best first.
Browse the reviews
48 reviews
Starbound
A ten-year-old space sandbox that still earns a Very Positive rating on the strength of its crafting-and-exploration loop and its modding scene — until you check the dates and find the developer has shipped one hotfix since 2019, then marked the tenth anniversary of its 1.0 launch with a vinyl record instead of an update, which is currently tanking the recent-review score in real time.
7 / 10
Stellaris
A decade-old 4X space strategy game beloved enough to produce reviewers with 2,000+ hours logged — and, since 2024, a wave of those exact same veteran players turning against Paradox over DLC pricing, a specific performance regression, and player-reported AI-generated content.
7 / 10
Tap Titans 2
Game Hive's decade-old idle RPG builds its whole second act around clans and scheduled tournaments — a structure that gives its artifact-and-relic progression somewhere real to point, but also turns a genre built for "check back later" into a calendar commitment with a very tall premium-currency ladder sitting next to it.
7 / 10
The Banner Saga 2
The trilogy's middle chapter, widely framed by reviewers as a "sophomore slump" that carries over the same combat-design critique this outlet found in the original game — plus a new complaint that its own attempt at a new mechanic (barricades) adds tedium rather than depth, and an ending several reviewers call less satisfying than the first game's.
7 / 10
Tyranny
Obsidian's "evil already won" isometric RPG opens with one of the most original premises in the genre — and then, according to a large share of its own fans, simply stops rather than ends, a truncation reviewers link directly to the sequel and expansions it never got.
7 / 10
Lifestream - A Haunting Text Adventure
A GUI-driven text adventure about a priest's disappearance and the son retracing his steps, running two timelines and two protagonists through 78,000 words of prose. Every one of its 23 Steam reviews is positive, and the achievement data backs up what reviewers say about the pacing — most players who start it see it through.
6.8 / 10
Bit Heroes
A ten-year-old pixel dungeon-crawler that never quite decided whether it wants you clicking through fights or leaving them to auto-battle, held together by a four-currency stamina economy that structures every session it doesn't quietly monetise.
6.5 / 10
Idle Miner Tycoon
Kolibri Games' decade-old mobile idle didn't just popularise the miner-elevator-warehouse loop, it more or less invented the template every mining incremental since has copied. Ten years and a Ubisoft acquisition later, the loop still works — the monetisation menu and the interface built on top of it are where the wear shows.
6.5 / 10
Shady Brook - A Dark Mystery Text Adventure
A budget-priced, GUI-driven text adventure about a writer and his blind father moving into a small town with a Twin Peaks-shaped secret — long on atmosphere and prose, short on how much your choices actually change.
6.5 / 10
Shakes and Fidget
The idle RPG's grandparent, still running seventeen years on and still launching new worlds every few weeks — with a comic-fantasy charm that holds up and an economy built entirely around the moment a fresh leaderboard makes spending feel urgent.
6.5 / 10
Tempest: Pirate Action RPG
HeroCraft's open-world pirate action RPG sets you loose across three continents of real-time sailing, ship-to-ship broadsides and kraken hunts. Nearly a decade after launch it's still a genuinely good naval combat sandbox wrapped around a shallow melee layer, patched through some real bugs, and increasingly interrupted by promotional pop-ups for HeroCraft's other games.
6.5 / 10
Hero Zero - Multiplayer RPG
A fourteen-year-old browser superhero RPG still running seasonal events every month in 2026 — beloved across most of Europe, and consistently rated Mixed by the English-speaking players who review it on Steam.
6 / 10
Idle Heroes
A decade-old idle gacha RPG whose real currency was never gold, it was your own heroes — and the star-fusion system that consumes them is both the smartest thing about the game and the reason its economy is so hard to defend.
6 / 10
Hero Wars: Alliance
The mobile half of a decade-old hero-collector empire, reviewed under the name it actually ships with today — a competent auto-battler with a genuinely flexible manual/auto combat switch, buried under the industry's most notorious ad campaign and a monetisation stack that never really lets up.
5.5 / 10
Tree of Savior
A decade-old free-to-play MMORPG with an extraordinarily dedicated hardcore playerbase — reviewers with 2,000, 3,000, even 4,000 hours logged — and a 2026 sentiment collapse tied to a specific new complaint: classes that used to be earned through play are now gated behind gacha.
5.5 / 10
Zombidle
Berzerk Studio's villain-side clicker put you in charge of a Necromancer razing a fantasy kingdom instead of the other way around, and its gross-out humour and monster art still land. What doesn't hold up in 2026 is everything else — the studio confirmed six years ago that Zombidle would never be updated again, and Google Play has since dropped it.
5.5 / 10
AdVenture Communist
Hyper Hippo's second idle game keeps the lemonade-stand loop from AdVenture Capitalist and welds two new systems onto it — a per-resource Rank ladder and a Capsule gacha full of collectible Researcher cards. One of those additions is real strategic texture. The other is a lootbox.
5 / 10
Hero Wars: Dominion Era
The browser half of the Hero Wars split — the same hero collector as the mobile app, but with more systems, an older audience, and a payment rail that hands nothing to Apple or Google. It is the most transparently commercial version of one of the most commercial games in the genre, and it is also, on the merits, the better-built one.
5 / 10
Insanity Clicker
PlayFlock's free asylum-horror clicker still has real atmosphere and a genuinely distinct art direction, but its own player base has spent a decade reporting the exact same progression wall around level 2000, and nobody at the studio has touched it since 2020.
5 / 10
Horror in the Asylum
A cheap first-person horror game with a couple of genuinely effective jump scares, sunk by a punishing, checkpoint-free trial-and-error structure and widely repeated accusations of being an asset-flip built from stock assets rather than an original production.
3.7 / 10
Ninja Stealth
A basic but originally decent Flash-style stealth puzzler, now overwhelmingly defined by the developer's later addition of roughly 5,000 near-meaningless achievements — a widely condemned "achievement spam" update that reviewers say buried the actual game underneath it.
3.6 / 10
Haunted Hotel
The rough, dated first entry in a long-running hidden-object franchise, with a genuinely interesting premise buried under low-resolution graphics, unremovable text, and repetitive puzzle design that reviewers consistently say hasn't aged well.
3.4 / 10
Shop Heroes
A free-to-play shop-management RPG that ran on Steam for six years, was Mostly Positive the whole time, and then simply stopped existing — servers shut down in 2022, delisted from sale, quietly replaced by a mobile sequel. There is no version of this game you can buy or play today.
3 / 10