Critics review a game once, in a week, before most people have played it. The people who bought it keep scoring it for months, and they do it separately on every store. This is 2026 so far read through both, with each game described the way its own developer describes it. Where we have not played a game, we do not tell you how it feels.
The short answer
The best received game of 2026 so far, by the people who paid for it, is PRAGMATA at 97% positive across 51,333 Steam reviews, from a game critics placed at 88. The most revealing entry is MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, which scores 4.42 out of 5 on the PlayStation Store and 49% positive on Steam. Same game, same month, two verdicts. That is why this list is arranged by store.
Steam
What we used. Each game’s all time review record on its own Steam page, all languages and all purchase types, read on 13 August 2026. Filter Steam to your own language and you will see a slightly different number, usually a few points higher. This figure is the share of buyers who gave a thumbs up. It is not a score out of a hundred and should not be read as one. Critic scores in this section are the PC scores, so both numbers on a line describe the same version.
1. PRAGMATA
Capcom. PS5, PC, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2. 17 April.
Players 97% positive, 51,333 reviews. Critics 88 on PC, from 45 reviews, every one of them positive.
A lunar research facility overrun by rogue AI, and two characters you control at once: Hugh, an astronaut, and Diana, an android. The pairing is the whole design. Hugh shoots. Diana makes things vulnerable through a grid based hacking layer you work at the same time, so every fight asks you to solve and fire in the same moment. That duo, rather than the shooting, is what Capcom puts first when describing its own game.
It is also the most unanimously reviewed game in this piece. Forty five PC critics, forty five positive verdicts, nothing mixed and nothing negative. An 88 that no reviewer dissented from is a different thing from an 88 averaged out of disagreement.
2. Resident Evil Requiem
Capcom. PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Switch 2. 27 February.
Players 96% positive, 181,687 reviews. Critics 92 on PC.
The most reviewed game on this list by a wide margin. It splits between FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft and Leon S. Kennedy, and the two have deliberately separate gameplay styles rather than a shared one, survival horror on one side and action on the other. The setting is a return to Raccoon City. Reviewers argued about whether the alternating structure holds its pacing. 181,687 buyers were less troubled.
3. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
Warner Bros. Games. PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC. 22 May.
Players 96% positive, 13,151 reviews. Critics 84 on PC, from 23 reviews, every one of them positive.
From TT Games, who made LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, and built as a narrative led action adventure rather than a toybox, which is a change of emphasis for the series. It runs from Bruce Wayne training with the League of Shadows to a Gotham where he has assembled Jim Gordon, Catwoman, Robin, Nightwing and Batgirl around him. Building that group out over the campaign is the structure, and it is the part players single out.
4. Mewgenics
Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel. PC. 10 February.
Players 90% positive, 52,574 reviews. Critics 88 on PC.
From the makers of The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy, and blunt about what it is: a turn based tactics roguelite about breeding cats and sending them on expeditions. Two systems running into each other, a breeding line you cultivate across runs and the tactical layer where those cats have to survive. The legacy element is the hook, since what you breed persists after what you lose.
5. MECCHA CHAMELEON
lemorion_1224. PC. 9 June.
Players 87% positive, 83,178 reviews. Critics: three reviews on PC, Game8 86, PC Gamer 82, IGN Benelux 80.
The commercial story of the year on PC, and one almost nobody saw coming. Made by two developers in Japan, priced at 5.99 dollars, and reported by PC Gamer to have passed ten million copies sold. An industry analyst quoted by the same outlet put its June revenue on PC second only to Fortnite.
The design is plain enough to explain in a line. Two teams, seekers and hiders, a time limit. What makes it different is that hiding means painting your own featureless body to match the stage behind you, so the skill on test is observation and a steady hand rather than stealth. Steam Workshop support means the community keeps supplying maps to hide in.
Its critic scores rest on three reviews, so we show all three rather than an average. Reviewers were consistent about the split: the concept is excellent and the software around it is rough, with server browsing, moderation and stability all called out.
6. Crimson Desert
Pearl Abyss. PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, macOS. 19 March.
Players 84% positive, 166,533 reviews. Critics 77 on PC, from 120 reviews: 84 positive, 35 mixed, 1 negative.
Pearl Abyss opens on the continent of Pywel, where a mercenary company called the Greymanes is broken by an ambush and their leader Kliff sets out to gather what is left. The commercial gap is the story here. Critics were lukewarm, Pearl Abyss’s share price fell sharply on the reception, and 166,533 buyers scored it Very Positive regardless.
It is also the most divided critical reception on this list. Of 120 PC reviews, 35 were mixed. Nothing else here comes close to that spread, and it is the shape you would expect from a game players and press disagree about.
PlayStation
What we used. The PlayStation Store star rating out of five and its rating count, read on 13 August 2026. This is a different measure from Steam’s percentage and the two are not directly comparable, which is the point of separating them.
7. 007 First Light
IO Interactive. PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2, PC. 27 May.
Players 4.62 out of 5 from 28K PlayStation ratings, and 92% positive from 43,759 Steam reviews. Critics 87 on PS5, 84 on PC.
The rare entry where every source agrees. A young James Bond recruited into a revived Double 0 programme, an origin story rather than an adaptation, with a Bond written as resourceful and sometimes reckless rather than finished. Both stores put it near the top of their scales and critics agreed.
8. SAROS
Sony Interactive Entertainment. PS5. 30 April.
Players 4.56 out of 5 from 9.8K PlayStation ratings. Critics 87 on PS5.
Housemarque’s follow up to Returnal, and the phrase attached to it is bullet ballet: projectile focused combat with a neon look, built around boss fights. Rahul Kohli plays Arjun Devraj, an enforcer pursuing answers on a shape shifting world called Carcosa. The shape shifting is not just flavour, it is the justification for a run based structure where the ground changes under you.
9. MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls
PlayStation Publishing, developed by Arc System Works with Marvel Games. PS5, PC. 6 August.
Players 4.42 out of 5 from 5.1K PlayStation ratings, and 49% positive from 5,162 Steam reviews. Critics 85 on PS5. PC has no critic score, only two reviews logged.
The most instructive entry on the list. It is a 4v4 tag team fighter with a roster of twenty at launch, and on PlayStation it is doing what its critic score suggests it should. On PC it is not. Reviewers flagged the PC port at launch, and the two store scores have separated accordingly. A single blended number would have hidden this entirely, and any reader deciding which version to buy needs exactly this.
Worth noting that critics reviewed the PlayStation version and essentially nobody professionally reviewed the PC one, which is the version players are unhappy with.
Xbox
What we used. The Xbox Store star rating out of five, read on 13 August 2026. Xbox does not publish a rating count, so we cannot show sample size here the way we can on Steam and PlayStation. Treat it as the softest figure in the piece.
10. Forza Horizon 6
Xbox Game Studios. PC, Xbox Series X|S. 19 May.
Players 3.8 out of 5 on the Xbox Store, and 83% positive from 93,350 Steam reviews. Critics 90 on Xbox Series X, and 90 on PC.
The best reviewed game on this list and the coolest player reception relative to it. The Horizon Festival moves to Japan with over 550 cars, and Playground Games calls its Tokyo the largest city the series has built. Around it sit the Valley Estate and customisable garages, EventLab and Horizon CoLab for player made events. Critics loved the setting. Both player scores are good rather than great, and on Xbox it is the weakest player number in this piece.
What we did not include, and why
Nintendo games are absent. Nintendo publishes no player rating on its stores and none of its 2026 exclusives are on Steam, so Splatoon Raiders, Pokemon Pokopia, Star Fox, Mario Tennis Fever, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Pokemon Champions cannot be scored by players anywhere we can source. They are in our full 2026 release record instead.
Ports, remakes and early access are out, on the same rule as the record.
Games with no critical reception are out, because there is nothing to read the player score against. That removes TBH: Task Bar Hero, a taskbar idle game with 44,164 Steam reviews and no substantive reviews from anyone.
Method
Player scores are read fresh each month and carry the date they were read. Critic scores are the aggregate at time of reading, and we name the platform each one belongs to, because most of these games score differently on different machines. Where an aggregate rests on only a handful of reviews we show the individual scores instead of averaging them.
These are three different measurements and we do not average them. A critic aggregate is a curated average out of a hundred. A Steam figure is the share of buyers who clicked thumbs up. A store star is a mean out of five. They are shown side by side because the disagreement between them is the information, not because they share a scale.
Gameplay descriptions come from the developer’s and publisher’s own material. What is still to come this year is on our release calendar.