Rayman Fiesta Run is a little running game where you jump, punch and glide across levels, trying to collect everything. I liked it quite a lot, even if some of its systems attempt to change the dynamic of the game - and fail at it - and the very shallow nature of the upgrades you get along the way disappointed me.
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started playing Gunpoint, but it surely wasn't a puzzle game. I thought it was going to be a neat little 2d shooter with some platforming spliced in and an interesting story. I realized pretty quickly that it was a mix of stealth and puzzle more than anything. Great stealth and puzzles.
Devil's Attorney is a nice little turn-based RPG for iOS. You play Max McMann, a shady defense attorney that'll defend anyone. You go to cases, fight with the skills you have unlocked, and then gain money to buy items and furniture that allow you to unlock more skills. The writing is very funny and even if the randomness breaks the game a little, I've enjoyed it so much that I beat it in a few days.
While I already wrote some words on Path of Exile a while ago, its recent re-release on Steam had me curious and I went back and tried it. I was supposed to write about Risk of Rain, but I spent most of this week and last week playing PoE. They've added some things, fixed others, and left most of it like it was before. My issue number one with the game - how floaty and unresponsive it felt - isn't a problem anymore...
I have never played the original typing of the dead - weird twist on the arcade zombie shooter genre where FBI agents armed with keyboards hooked up to Dreamcast backpacks hunt zombies and other monsters by typing up words instead of aiming and shooting. There are no keyboards in this game, but it's still the same concept.
I hadn't played FF14 when it came out originally, but trying it out after the whole remake thing was quite a good experience. I was impressed overall by some clever mechanics here and there that - I thought - would make me want to play the game past its free month. That being said, some disappointments here and there had me change my mind a few days before my trial was over. This article might be more a series of points than my usual ones because there is much to say about this game.
Ironclad Tactics is a card-based strategy game, you build a deck of twenty cards from two factions, featuring a mix of Ironclads (strong robots that can equip parts), tactics, parts and infantry (lighter units that are useful on their own), you then take this deck through a multiple of scenarios where the goal is mostly to get your ironclads to the end of the screen to score Victory Points, some missions require you to kill a boss or survive, but most of the time you'll use multiple ways to gather VPs and win. You get AP every turn to use your cards and some maps include ways to make AP faster. I've felt disappointed by IT, but I loved it.
Even with its buggy programming and weird tutorial decisions, Marvel Puzzle Quest is great. This iOS/Android free to play puzzle game offers a variety of characters, levels, upgrades and gameplay systems that made me play it a ton. The free to play hooks aren't too bad and don't remove from a good experience matching gems and being the hawkeye.
Shadowrun Returns isn't perfect, but it's pretty amazing. I describe it as a 'new-old' Role Playing Game, like the games I used to play when I was younger with some modern trappings here and there, but still a core that was enjoyable for the duration of it's short campaign. Oh and you can't save whenever you want, what's up with that?
Swords and Potions 2 is a bit like Recettear, Sim City and a facebook game. You play a shop owner, running his business of making and selling things to adventurers, sending them on quests and upgrading your city. Being a flash game and free to play, premium currencies and timers are rampant, but I still think there's an addictive and interesting side to this little manager game.
League of legends is an interesting twist on the LOMA genre, the base of the game is still as it was invented in the Warcraft 3 days with creep waves and towers and heroes and all that stuff that new players might find intimidating. League of Legends has no denying, you don't lose gold when you die and there are some elements of persistence here and there to hook you in some kind of meta-game much alike achievements do in other genres. It's a nice LOMA, but after playing it for a while, the community is still what makes it a little hard to get in.
Rymdkapsel is a weird real time strategy game where you control a bunch of little white rectangles. You basically don't control them, you only assign what you want them to do (and you can select rooms you'd prefer they build first) but then they do their own thing, leaving you with less to do than watch. Always on a timer of imminent attack with three resource types to jungle, I thought it was an interesting, but not deep enough, little game.
Tomb Raider is a third person shooter/exploration game with intensely constructed set pieces that bear no impact or gravitas on actual gameplay. A reboot of the playstation hit where you played wisecracking Lara Croft, shooting tigers and raiding tombs, you now play a much somber character that needs to save her friends and escape an island by mowing down a bunch of guys and raiding a tomb here and there. I've never played Uncharted, but I feel that while the gameplay might be similar, the tone isn't.
Joe Danger on iOS is really great, it's a combo-based score attack game with plenty of objectives, unlockables and mostly good controls. I've never played the console version and I bet it's really similar, but it works on other devices just as well. The new daily challenges they've added might also give players a good reason to play the game everyday and you can enjoy all of its content without buying any IAP.
Rogue Legacy is a roguelike platformer with plenty of very interesting mechanics. The way your new characters come to life when your old ones die, the exploration of the castle, the options you have to customize your characters, everything is almost flawless. I've found some issues here and there that I would maybe tweak a little for the way I like to play games but otherwise it's a blast.
Quadropus Rampage is a mix of roguelike and hack-and-slash systems with some deep customization options, upgrade paths, random loot and good replay value that ultimately is held down by some unwieldy controls and a few spots of confusion here and there.
Healer: A Light In The Darkness said it was going to make me the healer in a World of Warcraft-like raid. One guy, using multiple purchasable skills and different tiers of talents, helping a team of tanks and DPS characters to fight enemies. That sounded like fun! So I went and tried it.
I have never played a game in the Call of Juarez franchise; For me they all seemed like bad first person shooters about drugs, or something like that. I've heard and read good things about this one and I decided to give it a go. I'm pretty happy that I did, it's a pretty good game and the 15$ price tag makes it even better.
Diablo 3 came with great fanfare, Torchlight 2 had some good marketting, I've read about Path of Exile here and there and the same goes with Grim Dawn, now in alpha. Why am I starting with this? Because I never knew that The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was an Action RPG. I never knew it was coming out on steam and I looked at it the day it came out only to see what kind of game it was. I didn't think it was going to be incredible, as the title suggests.
I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of huge fantasy RPGS like the witcher, skyrim, kingdoms of Amalure, and the like. They have huge towns and even bigger maps where tons of people offer you tons of quests and tracking everything is a pain. You have a bunch of items that you pickup everywhere, some you could sell (but hold on to), some that might be used to craft something sometime in the future, you get a couple of skills and powers, some of which help you, some of which aren't enough to have you manage to defeat very strong enemies (that you can go fight right away because the world is so big and some foes are bound to be stronger than you) and you learn through trial and quick-saving what you can and can't do.