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481 games released in 2026 and reviewed here, best first.
481 reviews
An ambitious Early Access idle RPG from a studio literally named Idle Gamers -- four classes and twelve subclasses, co-op world bosses, a 24-hour offline cap and no microtransactions -- that a large and often deeply invested review base calls one of the best idle RPGs of the year, set against a genuinely loud minority calling its AI-generated art and UI "AI slop" and its daily balance patches disruptive to builds players had already committed to.
7 / 10
A tactical turn-based roguelite that fuses combat with rhythm-game input timing, where debuffs literally complicate your button presses — a genuinely novel hook reviewers praise strongly, wrapped around a progression and balance layer several of the same reviewers find shallower than the concept deserves.
7 / 10
A Kickstarter-backed, pro-player-built sci-fi RTS that arrives in Early Access as the most credible StarCraft successor in years, welded to a commander RPG layer that mostly earns its place — if you're still willing to relearn macro from scratch.
7 / 10
A hand-drawn, elemental-bending fighter with a genuinely novel combat system, released three weeks ago into the exact kind of rushed, feature-incomplete launch its own Steam reviews keep warning newcomers about.
6.8 / 10
A short, cheap, genuinely atmospheric PS1-VHS horror game that launched with real killer-AI and logic bugs — and a developer who shipped six patches in three weeks that visibly won back reviewers who'd initially soured on it.
6.7 / 10
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A solo-developed guild management idle RPG with eleven classes, eleven tiered professions and hour-long raids, sold once for NZ$7.39 with no ads and nothing else to buy — an ambitious system let down at launch by dungeons and raids that don't repeat on their own, which is a strange gap in a game built around leaving it alone.
6.5 / 10
A free-to-play idle RPG built around a wizard guild where every skill quietly multiplies every other skill — a genuinely clever synergy system undercut by a one-worker-at-a-time bottleneck and a VIP purchase ladder players have to climb tier by tier.
6.5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder that fuses Scrabble with Balatro, from GoldenEye and TimeSplitters veterans — genuinely praised for its core idea, and shadowed by an AI-art controversy the developers walked back after launch-week backlash.
6.5 / 10
A dark fantasy roguelite dungeon crawler with a distinctive old-school RuneScape look and a genuine risk-everything extraction structure — reviewed on its complete 15-review sample, which reads as a small solo-developer project fighting real launch-week bugs rather than a broken game.
6.5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder where placement matters more than the cards themselves — draft one of three each day, stack it onto a shrinking farm grid, and chase chain-reaction synergy before rising taxes end the run — with a launch-week freeze bug the developer has already patched and a genuine split over how hard the game actually is.
6.5 / 10
A first-person co-op roguelite where up to four cats sneak past dogs to rescue kittens, spend break-in cash on crossbows and grenades between runs, and try to outlast an escalating house — priced at $2.99 and one day old, with a single user review and no achievement list yet to check its own claims against.
6.5 / 10
A Chinese-developed xianxia tactics RPG with a genuinely good grid on it, sold at a fair price with 19 chapters already in the box — and a cultivation ladder that turns out to be the thinnest system in the game.
6.5 / 10
A one-time-purchase idle RPG that borrows every visual and structural trick of gacha hero collectors — six rarities, duplicate fusion, a 70-champion banner — and then declines to sell any of it, which makes it one of the more interesting monetisation experiments the genre has produced this year.
6.5 / 10
Relic's standalone wave-defence spin-off is the rare Mixed rating where both sides agree the game is fun. The fight on its review page is entirely about the price tag — a full-expansion ask for five maps, four factions and a perk tree.
6.5 / 10
Devsisters folds its 300-million-player Cookie Run cast into an idle auto-battler with genuinely tactical positioning, then hangs the whole thing on the same gacha currencies that turned Cookie Run: Kingdom into a case study in monetisation backlash.
6.5 / 10
A two-person team's 2D Metroidvania with Souls-like combat, launched into Early Access on 5 August 2026 with a full campaign already playable, an equipment-driven build system, and a planned 6-to-12-month road to 1.0.
6.5 / 10
A roguelike pinball deckbuilder -- flip, nudge and smash through cursed tables while stacking 100+ upgrades into game-breaking builds -- praised by real pinball fans for genuinely scratching the itch, and criticised by a detailed, dev-engaged review corpus for repetitive early tables, snowballing balance, and game-breaking bugs uncommon for a full 1.0 release.
6.5 / 10
A short, stylish drift-racing game about a bomb-strapped monkey mail truck, loved by fans who call its unforgiving handling a fair skill curve and criticized just as forcefully by players who call the same physics broken — with a verified, punishing completion curve and three and a half months of developer silence underneath the debate.
6.5 / 10
A cheap, honestly-scoped mining incremental about drilling a low-poly planet layer by layer for roughly two hours — well liked by its first handful of reviewers, with one detailed bug report worth taking seriously before you buy.
6.5 / 10
A submarine incremental where automated torpedoes, plasma and lightning chain across the screen while you mine the abyss for resources — a short, satisfying loop for most of its early reviewers, with one detailed complaint about a mid-run power-fantasy slump and an achievement curve that backs it up.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$5.11 incremental about optimising messy hard drives, whose Mixed Steam rating splits cleanly along a timeline rather than a taste — a rocky launch day the developer patched fast, and a slower, still-unresolved design gate that keeps a chunk of players stuck clicking long before the game lets them stop.
6.5 / 10
A two-day-old racing game that makes you both the bettor and the horse — buy a Trifecta ticket on a track girl, then run the race yourself to try to cash it in. Thirteen Steam reviews exist so far, all of them Japanese, all of them positive, and most of them call it Uma Musume at home.
6.5 / 10
A free, chaotic co-op dig-and-defend game where up to four friends mine for loot by day and fend off zombies by night — reviewed on its complete English review sample, which reads as a genuinely fun prototype whose launch-week bugs a solo developer has been patching almost daily.
6.5 / 10
A short, charming incremental about a young mole drilling into a meteor crater — genuinely distinctive for giving its dig-upgrade-repeat loop an actual story, but held back by spiky progression pacing and a back half that plays itself.
6.5 / 10
