No Time For Reviews notimereviews. home
Subscribe on YouTube (opens in new tab)

Best RPGs we reviewed

Dungeon crawlers, squad tactics and mobile action RPGs, grouped by whether to install them rather than what to call them.

What RPG games are

RPG covers any game where your character grows: levels, gear, skills, a party that gets stronger as you go. That includes dungeon crawlers where every floor is a risk, turn-based tactics where a squad fights on a grid, and mobile action RPGs where you tap to attack and loot drops in a stream.

On PC the genre is deep and we mostly cover demos and indie releases. On mobile the look is often borrowed from Diablo and the game underneath is an idle loop with a shop. The verdicts here separate the two.

Our top 5

  1. HellSlave II: Judgment of the Archon

    A brutal, hand-drawn dungeon crawler that starts confusing and ends up eating your whole weekend - genre fans should pick it up.

    PC · Play it

  2. Deified

    A really challenging tactical roguelite where every choice can change the course of a run, and the same relics that carry you to a win can just as quickly end 40 minutes of progress.

    PC · Play it

  3. Menace

    A brutal turn-based tactics game where you command whole squads and armed vehicles instead of single soldiers, and any squad you leave in the open at the end of a turn can be wiped out before it moves again.

    PC · Play it

  4. Dig-Dig Rush

    Chaos disguised as a mining game, and it works: generous, addictive and completely overloaded, as long as calm is not what you came for.

    Android · iOS · Play it

  5. Heroll

    Without the forced ads this would be an easy play recommendation, but nobody can tell you in advance whether you will get them.

    Android · iOS · Maybe

How we judge RPG games

RPG covers a lot on this page: a hand-drawn dungeon crawler that eats a weekend, turn-based squad tactics, dice roguelikes, and the mobile action RPGs whose ads promise Diablo and deliver a tap-to-attack button. We have grouped them by verdict rather than by subgenre, because the question a reader has is whether to install it, not what to call it.

The PC entries are Play it almost across the board. Hellslave II, Deified and Menace are demanding games that respect the time they ask for. The mobile ones are where the verdicts split, and the split is nearly always about ads and AFK meters, which each review spells out before the verdict.

What we check

  • The game respects the time it asks for
  • Ads and AFK meters are spelled out before the verdict
  • Combat has choices beyond tap to attack

Worth playing

4

Worth a look

3

Roundups and Indie Pulse