The Wanderer reading room
Idle RPGs, MMOs, browser games and mobile RPGs, taken apart properly. Every review carries a score out of 10, what the game does well, what it does badly, and the kind of player it is actually for.
A solo developer in Edinburgh shipped a complete, story-driven survival-crafting game straight to 1.0 with no Early Access period — a genuine feat that's earned near-universal respect, complicated only by a real and recurring complaint that the store page sells it as something more open-ended than the tightly linear campaign it actually is.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed, short, deliberately silly incremental about worshipping a mysterious orb and recruiting cultists to do the clicking for you — charming enough to earn 95% positive reviews, and refreshingly willing to end rather than pad itself out with an unnecessary prestige loop.
7.5 / 10
Ubisoft Blue Byte's Industrial Revolution city-builder remains Very Positive across more than 32,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's most visually accomplished and addictive entries — undercut by a real, remarkably severe and still-current complaint about Ubisoft Connect, the mandatory third-party launcher that multiple independent reviewers describe locking them out of a game they purchased entirely, in incidents dated as recently as June 2026.
6.5 / 10
Campaign for votes by day, fight the incumbent's gangs by night, and steal each boss's supernatural power when you beat them. A genuinely novel roguelike from the Anomaly Agent studio — one day old, visibly unfinished, and carrying a 97% score that needs reading carefully.
7 / 10
Ubisoft rebuilt Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag from the ground up on the current Anvil engine rather than simply upscaling it, and the parts that made the 2013 original a fan favourite — Edward Kenway, the Jackdaw, the whole rotten, beautiful Caribbean — survive the trip largely intact. What doesn't survive as cleanly is some of the combat identity Ubisoft chose to strip out along the way.
7.5 / 10
The most beautiful open world Ubisoft has built, and the clearest case study in gaming of a cash shop reaching backwards into a game's design. Eight years on it costs NZ$19.99 and holds 89% — but the level gates it built around its XP boosters are still exactly where they were.
7.5 / 10
Ubisoft's feudal Japan entry delivers genuinely beautiful visuals and a widely loved shinobi protagonist, undercut by a real, consistently repeated "formula fatigue" complaint — towers, icons, repetition — a verified gap between Ubisoft's public promise of full offline play and what reviewers report experiencing in practice, and a heavily monetised in-game store layered on top of a full NZ$109.95 purchase.
6.5 / 10
Hazelight Studios' prison-break co-op predecessor to It Takes Two and Split Fiction remains Very Positive across more than 102,000 Steam reviews for its inventive, purely two-player design — but this review can confirm a real, still-current complaint It Takes Two eventually resolved: A Way Out's mandatory EA App launcher continues to cause connection failures, crashes and Steam-invite friction in reviews dated as recently as August 2025, with no fix announcement found anywhere in the developer's own Steam communications.
6.5 / 10
A brick-breaker, base-builder and roguelite mashed together into something genuinely novel — and, by a large and coherent share of its own fans, something that runs out of ideas within its first ten hours and never quite finds a reason to justify the dozens more it invites.
8 / 10
You hire desperate men, name them, watch them die, and hire more. Nine years on it's still the best mercenary-company RPG ever made — and still arguing with its own players about whether a 75% hit chance that misses four times running is good design.
8 / 10
EA's biggest Battlefield launch in franchise history — 20 million units sold, record concurrent players, genuinely praised gunplay and an unusually stable launch — undercut by a widely repeated "bait and switch" narrative in which an acclaimed beta gave way to aggressive post-launch monetisation, and shadowed by a real, independently verified wave of layoffs across the studios that built it just months after that record-breaking success.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely bizarre, endlessly quotable first-person incremental game about growing berries and sacrificing them to a sentient hole — Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 8,000 reviews and driven to virality by a streamer discovery, with an honest, consistent minority complaint that its horror-tinged mystery and mid-game unlock tree don't live up to the strength of its opening hook.
7.5 / 10
A charming, wildly inventive indie 3D platformer from a small team, its tongue-swinging, free-climbing movement earning direct, specific comparisons to Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time — undercut by real, honestly documented technical rough edges, including soft-locks and physics inconsistencies, that an exceptionally responsive developer has spent months patching at a near-daily cadence since launch.
7.5 / 10
A desktop-postcard idle game about attracting and photographing over 130 real bird species, charming enough to convert players who weren't birdwatchers or idle-game fans going in — held back at launch by a genuinely rough technical start that the developer has spent the months since steadily patching away.
7.5 / 10
An ambitious single-world MMO crafting sandbox from the studio behind SpacetimeDB, built around a genuinely deep, RuneScape-inspired grind that its own biggest fans openly embrace — undercut by a real tension between its "idle-friendly" marketing and punishing stamina systems, rampant player-on-player griefing the developers are criticised for under-policing, and a disclosed but under-communicated plan to wipe progress and convert to free-to-play after Early Access.
6.5 / 10
A well-loved anime school RPG going through a gacha revolt in real time. Nine of its last hundred English reviews are positive — and the change they're protesting isn't in the version most Steam players are running yet. Reviewed 4 August 2026, mid-storm.
6.5 / 10
A genre-defying puzzle roguelike-lite set in a mysterious manor whose floor plan you draft anew each in-game day, celebrated with a 92 Metascore and widely called one of the most creative puzzle games in years — beloved specifically by players willing to take pages of physical notes, and marked by a real, still-unresolved design tension between its puzzle-solving brain and its randomised, roguelike-lite execution.
8 / 10
A cel-shaded, kingdom-building idle RPG that looks better than most of the genre and runs a genuinely competent hero-collection loop underneath — until its 0.2% top-tier gacha rate turns "collect dozens of heroes" into the game's actual monetisation engine.
5 / 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 gorgeous, genuinely soothing pixel-art fishing game that lets you fish actively or let an idle mode do it for you — beloved enough to have gotten real players off the couch and back onto real lakes with their own families, undercut at launch by a real, consistently documented complaint that idling outperforms actually playing, and that there simply wasn't much game underneath the vibe.
7 / 10
Colossal Order's sequel to the beloved city-builder launched into one of the genre's most severe, well-documented disasters — severe performance failures, a "fake" simulation several reviewers describe finding through direct testing, and a real CEO controversy over blaming the community for backlash. This review can confirm, via the developer's own communications, that Colossal Order and publisher Paradox split entirely in November 2025, with a new studio, Iceflake Studios, now credited by a real, growing share of reviewers with a genuine turnaround since taking over development in 2026.
6 / 10
A nearly decade-old mobile idle RPG that still gets one thing right that most of its modern competitors don't even try — a completely fair, no-IAP, no-gacha monetisation model — and undercuts it with technical rough edges that have apparently never been fully sanded down.
7 / 10
A peaceful, no-combat 17th-century settlement builder with a genuinely distinctive premise, whose 1.0 launch was undermined by severe save-game bugs and a real, developer-confirmed months-long gap in updates — followed by an official "we are returning" announcement and a fresh wave of patches that's already visibly improving sentiment in the most recent reviews.
5.5 / 10
A voxel colony-building strategy game crossing Minecraft's block-by-block construction with genuine tower-defense stakes, still in Early Access more than nine years after its 2017 debut — sustained by an unusually transparent weekly developer blog and a loyal Very Positive fanbase, with a persistent, still-current complaint that its mid-to-late game never quite matches the promise of its opening hours.
7 / 10
