The Outer Worlds 2
Obsidian's satirical space RPG grows a genuinely excellent build system and a slow-motion gunfight worth building around, then hands the writing and the companions less attention than either deserved.
8.5 / 10
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Action reviews
14 Action games reviewed and scored, best first.
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14 reviews
The Binding of Isaac
Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl's 2011 Flash roguelike sold itself for $4.99 on Steam rather than living free on a portal, and turned a three-month game jam project into the game most credited with dragging the roguelike out of niche obscurity — years before Flash's own limitations forced McMillen to rebuild it from scratch as Rebirth.
8 / 10
Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call
Seven people spent twelve years building a handcrafted fantasy RPG where you are nobody special, and it shows in the best and worst ways — superb exploration and a classless build system, wrapped in a technical layer that isn't finished.
7.5 / 10
Lunarium
A nine-person Shanghai debut builds a hand-drawn action RPG around a parry that can't be spammed, and mostly wins the argument — undone by a text layer that clearly needed another month.
7.5 / 10
Amorphous+
A one-man Flash arena brawler about hitting blobs with an oversized sword, saved from disposability by a 110-medal award system that turns every fight into a checklist worth chasing — and still running today, cleanly, in Ruffle.
7 / 10
Dad 'n Me
A ten-screen father-and-son beat 'em up that Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin uploaded free to Newgrounds in July 2005, won the Independent Games Festival's Best Web Browser Game award for it, and never followed up — a tighter, better-built game than the two-guys-prototype label usually implies, and still a short one underneath the rage meter and the charm.
7 / 10
Titan Quest II
A genuinely promising return for a cult-favourite action RPG series, currently sold at full future price for a slice of content that doesn't yet match the ambition of its class system.
7 / 10
Castle Crashing the Beard
A two-phase Newgrounds boss fight built as an in-joke about Tom Fulp's vow not to shave until The Behemoth finished Castle Crashers — a fan tribute by BoMToons, not a Fulp production, that turned out tight enough to be voted Newgrounds' game of the month anyway.
6.5 / 10
Effing Worms
A 2010 eat-and-grow arcade game about a fast-swelling underground worm devouring stick figures — the deliberate middle link between Death Worm and the mobile "Worm Game Wars" of that same summer, built on a hunger bar, a two-choice upgrade menu every stage, and a control scheme roughly half its audience never made peace with.
6.5 / 10
Electric Man 2
Damien Clarke's solo-built stick-figure tournament fighter added a regenerating slow-motion meter to the mid-2000s Xiao Xiao lineage, spread across every major portal without a single-site lock, and survives today only as a documented Ruffle patient — its own primary modern host currently lists it as unavailable.
6.5 / 10
Madness Interactive
A 2003 Newgrounds fan game that turned Krinkels' ultraviolent Madness Combat cartoons into a scrappy side-view shooter, then quietly became more famous for its sandbox mode than its campaign — 15.8 million Newgrounds views and a modding scene that outlived the original authors' involvement.
6.5 / 10
Mario Combat
A three-minute Newgrounds combo brawler from November 2008 that swaps Mario's jump-stomps for a fighting-game input scheme, wins on the strength of that one idea, and has nothing else to offer once the novelty of hitting Bowser wears off.
6 / 10
Sift Heads World: Act 1
The Canadian studio Pyrozen's March 2010 relaunch of its long-running assassin saga drops three playable bounty hunters into a Chicago-to-Palermo mob war with almost no recap for anyone who hasn't already played five previous games — a point-and-click shooting gallery bolted onto a gun-shop economy that the series had already run once before.
6 / 10
Pico's School
A 1999 point-and-click shooter built in Flash 3, before Newgrounds even had a Portal to host it on — historically the single game most credited with turning Newgrounds into a platform, and mechanically a very thin one even by the standards of its own year.
5.5 / 10