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83 games released in 2021 and reviewed here, best first.
83 reviews
A NZ$10.29 fusion of time-loop adventure and idle incremental that has held a Very Positive Steam rating across four and a half years — not by avoiding friction, but by turning the loop's reset into the exact mechanism that makes idle progression permanent, while never fixing the one interface complaint players have repeated since launch week.
7 / 10
A visual-novel-first tactical RPG that opens a respected trilogy, where reviewers overwhelmingly praise the emotional storytelling and world-building and just as consistently admit the tactical battles are the least interesting part of the package.
7 / 10
A genuinely charming licensed VR game with the anime's real voice cast and a flying feel reviewers call exhilarating, undercut by rough, Quest-first visual polish that never received a proper PC pass, and a persistent, specific request for real versus multiplayer that never arrived.
6.8 / 10
A solo Roman-themed deckbuilder that plays less like an evolving campaign and more like ten separate puzzles built from the same box of cards — with a Cats reskin thrown in for a second look at the same missions.
6.8 / 10
A tiny, no-combat runner/metroidvania about a cat who can't fight and can only sprint past danger — a nearly five-year-old Early Access project the developer just released for free after its funding fell through, reviewed on its complete review sample old and new.
6.5 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded, GBA-era Fire Emblem homage that launched buggy and unbalanced in 2021, drew backlash for a bolted-on ad launcher and a swimsuit DLC, and has spent four years of patches earning enough goodwill to justify a 2025 sequel.
6.5 / 10
A turn-based zombie survival RPG that splits its time between running a camp and sending a squad out to fight — genuinely deep for the first stretch, but Steam's own review text and achievement curve agree it wears thin well before the credits.
6.5 / 10
Arkane's stylish time-loop shooter won Game of the Year honours from multiple outlets in 2021, but sits Mostly Positive across more than 30,000 Steam reviews — a notably wider gap between critical acclaim and player reception than sibling title Dishonored 2, driven by a real, detailed "undershoots Dishonored and Prey" complaint from longtime Arkane fans, and by a persistent Denuvo DRM and mandatory-online requirement this review can confirm, unlike Dishonored 2's, has not been removed even five years after launch.
6.5 / 10
A brutally tense, atmospheric co-op horror shooter built entirely around four-player coordination — undercut for years by the one thing it never properly solved: no server browser or real matchmaking, leaving solo players locked out unless they already have a premade squad.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely distinctive, hardcore 100-player WWII shooter built around resource-based meta-strategy and a dynamically shifting front line, still Very Positive across nearly 150,000 Steam reviews five years on — undercut by a real, sustained, multi-year complaint that Team17's 2023 acquisition of the game brought a persistent decline in update quality, and a genuine, currently active cheating problem several reviewers describe as severe enough to have driven entire dedicated communities away.
6.5 / 10
A sprawling free-to-play idle RPG that spent 4.5 years in Early Access building one of the genre's biggest, most devoted communities -- and, by its own veteran players' account, spent the last two of those years testing exactly how much monetisation that community would tolerate.
6.5 / 10
A sci-fi looter-shooter RPG that launched in April 2021 to a genuinely disastrous technical rollout, kept a real fanbase playing anyway on the strength of its gunplay, drew fresh backlash over a paid 2022 expansion, and ended with its own sequel cancelled after Square Enix and developer People Can Fly's relationship broke down entirely.
6.5 / 10
One of the most beautiful cyberpunk worlds ever built, wrapped around bugs that delete your save — reported in 2021, still reported in 2026, with an announcement feed containing five years of sales and no patch notes.
6.5 / 10
A free text-based idle RPG with more than 3,000 branching story actions and a genuinely active five-year development history, buried behind one of the least welcoming first hours the genre has to offer.
6.5 / 10
An open-world "kung-fu fable" RPG about a mutant animal saving a post-apocalyptic world, announced in 2017 and delayed for years while its hype grew far ahead of what shipped -- Mixed on Steam, with a review pattern that's remarkably consistent about exactly where it falls apart.
6 / 10
A Fallout-inspired isometric RPG with a genuinely excellent opening act — original setting, meaningful choices, sharp writing — that a remarkably consistent share of its own reviewers say collapses in quality once that first act ends.
6 / 10
A genuinely well-designed session-based survival game from DayZ creator Dean Hall, buried under eighteen separate paid DLC packs that together cost more than six times the base game itself — and it's the single loudest complaint in the game's entire review history.
6 / 10
A long-awaited revival of a beloved 1990s-2000s fantasy tactics franchise that traded its signature systems for a 3D open world and split its fanbase on arrival -- then ended on a cliffhanger promising story DLC that never came, after its studio was swept up in the corporate fallout of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
6 / 10
A gorgeously art-directed Warhammer 40,000 underhive shooter whose environments draw consistent praise even from critical reviewers, held back by the single most-mentioned complaint this outlet has found in any game reviewed this session — enemy AI reviewers describe as janky and frustrating — spread consistently across every year since a 2021 launch that never fully resolved it.
6 / 10
The factory-building sequel to NGU Idle swaps rebirth layering for conveyor belts and work orders, builds a genuinely interesting system out of it in its first six weeks, and then stops. It has been Early Access, unfinished, since April 2021.
6 / 10
A genuinely striking noir art style and story wrapped around two half-realized game systems — a business sim too simple to satisfy and a detective clue-connecting mechanic several reviewers call arbitrary enough to feel like a coin flip.
5.9 / 10
A genuinely deep double-prestige incremental wearing a crypto-mining skin, undone by a UI that assumes you'll join the Discord to understand it and a leaderboard economy built on premium currency that decays before you can spend it.
5.8 / 10
A solo-developer escape-room-style puzzle adventure through a mysterious woodland — logically satisfying puzzles wrapped in almost no story, a missing settings menu and a runtime most reviewers clock at under an hour.
5.5 / 10
SoftCowGames' free tower-defense idler has a real early hook — upgrade a castle, unlock weapon tiers, farm bosses for legendary loot — but years of player reviews describe the same save-corruption bugs, a 10%-only offline rate and shop pricing that turns "just cosmetic" into a running joke.
5.2 / 10
