Browse by year
250 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
250 reviews
A one-person tactical boxing sim where fighters age, get hurt and can genuinely die — built by a boxer, for boxing fans, with a real perk system underneath a genuinely rough interface and a review sample so small that this covers all eleven of it.
6.5 / 10
A solo/small-team deckbuilding roguelite auto-battler built around a deliberately minimalist "1+4" card system, Very Positive across 225 English reviews for genuinely addictive run-to-run strategy and a year-plus of monthly content updates -- while carrying an unusually loud and well-corroborated controversy over AI-generated art and music that the developers disclose openly on the store page rather than deny.
6.5 / 10
A card-based Cultist Simulator-inspired alchemy sim that genre fans on both sides of the aggregate respect, undercut by a real mid-game grind wall, real save-corruption bugs, and offset by unusually active, near-weekly developer patching since launch.
6.5 / 10
A gorgeous Edo-period fantasy action RPG with three distinct heroes and fluid combat, whose shallow run variation draws real roguelite complaints -- and whose launch was upended a week in when its publisher abandoned the project, not the small developer some angry reviews initially blamed.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed PS1-era survival horror throwback with genuine retro charm, undercut by a slow opening act, real launch-day bugs, and a short 1-2 hour runtime — offset by unusually fast, sustained developer patching that this review verified independently.
6.3 / 10
A free isometric shoot-'em-up roguelite about gunning down "long forgotten employees" through procedurally generated caves — a tiny, likeable proof of concept with real chaos-shooter charm, undercut by thin content and at least one run-ending bug.
6.3 / 10
A free, solo-developed medieval action game with a genuinely creative post-apocalyptic twist and a small but enthusiastic fanbase, held back by two basic missing options — no mouse invert and no in-game sound volume control — that this tiny sample's negative reviews cite directly.
6.2 / 10
A perfectly decent Anno wrapped in one of the least generous packages of 2025 — a NZ$99.95 base game, a Year 1 Pass that doesn't cover all of year one's DLC, Denuvo, a required Ubisoft account, and a disclosed use of AI tools for in-game assets.
6 / 10
Nineteen months into Early Access, the driving model is superb and the game around it has been getting smaller — the career economy was removed in February 2026, and the open world people bought it for still isn't here.
6 / 10
A gorgeously drawn, lofi-scored panda laundromat that plays almost nothing like a conventional idle game and everything like a desktop focus timer with decorations, which delights the audience that wants exactly that and frustrates the sizeable share who bought it expecting real systems underneath the art.
6 / 10
A looter-shooter with genuinely well-regarded gunplay, undercut by severe, persistent PC performance problems and a real, extensively documented public-relations crisis in which Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford spent days publicly dismissing player complaints — telling PC gamers to "code your own engine" and that "premium games are made for premium gamers" — turning a technical problem into what press outlets have called "the great Pitchford Twitter crashout of 2025."
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 free-to-play dungeon crawler built from a mobile game's bones, with real depth in its character creation and guild skill trees but a menu system that never stopped assuming you're holding a phone.
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 three-player co-op shooter set in Remedy's Control universe that launched thin on content at a premium price, improved substantially through a real year of post-launch updates, and was wound down in March 2026 anyway — a commercial disappointment whose timing coincided with the resignation of Remedy's CEO of nine years.
6 / 10
A cute, physics-driven toy-figure auto-battler with a genuinely fair, no-microtransaction take on blind-box collecting, undercut by thin content, real early bugs, a fading online population, and a specific asset-similarity allegation this review could not independently verify.
6 / 10
A free browser idle-skilling MMO that openly plays the RuneScape/Melvor Idle songbook with a shared world bolted on -- competent, fair to free players, and over a year into development by the time its Steam Early Access page makes it look brand new.
6 / 10
An Early Access idle RPG built around planning automated action lists rather than a prestige loop, genuinely deep enough to hold dedicated fans for thousands of hours, but hobbled by a grind curve many reviewers say collapses into sluggish stagnation, real crash reports, and disclosed AI-assisted art that a meaningful share of players specifically dock points for.
6 / 10
A free civilization-building idle game with real depth and a small, genuinely devoted fanbase, undercut by heavy "clone" accusations aimed at bigger browser incrementals, a design that repeatedly punishes the player for progressing, and a studio that appears to have closed down over a year before this review, with no update since.
6 / 10
A solo-developed, RuneScape-style idle RPG that undercuts almost everything else in the genre on price and asks nothing back in return, but whose content stopped growing five weeks after launch and whose own small review base can't agree on whether that's a problem yet.
6 / 10
A dense, genuinely deep idle RPG from solo Japanese developer Hapiwaku that gives six heroes real class and skill decisions, then buries a chunk of its quality-of-life behind a premium coin store steep enough to have turned a chunk of its own audience against it.
6 / 10
A NZ$7.39 solo-built idle hack-and-slash whose loot ladder hollows out around the mythical and divine tiers — verified by the developer's own promotional screenshot of a veteran save file — and whose lead developer announced in January 2026 that the game will never be updated again.
6 / 10
A satisfying, tightly made active-incremental about a giant hand smashing geometric shapes, whose most inventive idea — changing the game's mechanics with every prestige — is also its most divisive, with a real share of players describing later prestiges as actively worse than what came before rather than a genre-typical power climb.
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
