Reigns is one of these weird choose your own adventure type of game mixed with some kingdom management on iOS with a little of a rogue-like flair where you make decisions by swiping a card left or right, affecting your kingdom in four categories, with the immediate goal of not having any meter go too high or too low. There is an overarching story that expends as you find new cards and unlock more characters, and while I haven't got there, I presume that there is an ending to reach at some point. I had some good time with it, but ultimately grew bored.
Even after about fifteen years in computer science, I'm not really sure what 'hacking' entails. Hollywood hacking is one thing, opening some file with an hex editor and changing values here and there is also a form of hacking, is Hacknet showing a form of hacking that exists? Are there port-scanning tools that you can run on remote IP addresses to break security and then get root access in remote computers? No matter, my curiosity aside, Hacknet is really neat, I'm not sure if it's 100% accurate, but it does use some unix shell commands, makes you do hacking missions with an interesting storyline and makes you feel really happy when you type that final command to finish a hack while looking at a timer counting down.
EDF 4.1 was released on PS3 a while back, but getting a smoothly running version with fast loading times made me quite happy. Playing it by myself on the PC isn't the best experience, but technically, it runs way better than any other versions. I was also pretty happy to see a 'real' EDF on PC after that last one they'd release that was strangely different. Is EDF a perfect game? Not at all, some of its issues turn into fun features and can be entertaining for the beginner, but the core of the game is a bit unbalanced and frustrating in parts, especially if you're playing alone.
The Firm is one of these very simple but tightly created game where the number of actions you're expected to do is very low, but the pressure builds up and you make mistakes and complexity ramps up progressively until you ultimately lose. I had a good deal of fun trying to unlock the various power-ups you could get, but getting the last one was a bit too much grinding, so I stopped. I'd still recommend it, tho! It's a neat timewaster. Sorry for the lack of screenshots, my work process ate them.
Space Marshall is a neat action RPG on iOS where you play a space cowboy that goes after various criminals using guns and explosives. It's not entirely perfect, but I had a good time with it, especially since the mix of twin stick controls and touch screens doesn't always work. I could see this game work on other platforms as well, but it doesn't detract from the experience; A nice shooter with unlockable gear and replayability - perhaps a bit too much.
Tree of Savior reminds me in many way of Ragnarok Online, some of the mechanics are updated from Korean MMOs of old, some of the control options are brought to today's standards - while still keeping some weirdness - but most systems feel a bit dated. Obtuse skill systems, stat systems that shouldn't be, grinding baked in my aspects of the game and some bugs impacted my experience, but overall I think this is a nice MMORPG that should satisfy anyone with a craving for these old-school experiences.
Miitomo is as good as the amount you care about your online friends and what they think about things. There's not much in it otherwise besides some light Mii customization and the only mini-game included is pretty terrible. It's more of a social app than a game, but I enjoy using it almost daily because, like I said opening this review, it's only entertaining and relevant if you care about that kind of stuff, and I do!
SquareSpace ate my Frontier Defense review.
It's a neat tower defense cross idle iOS game, the premium currency is fast to get and there's plenty of stuff to do, heroes and shooting units to upgrade and buttons to tap in order to attack and unleash special abilities. I had a fun time with it.
Path of Exile is still a 5/5 game in my book, but this expansion by itself isn't that great. I'm not a huge fan of precise trap-dodging in action RPGs, especially in ones where lag spikes are quite frequent on my end. Luckily, dodging stuff isn't the only new mechanic added in PoE:A, with subclasses to unlock, more gear to find and more ways to find it, this adds another layer on top of an already pretty great game while bringing a few more bits of new content.
The Witness is a first person puzzle game about solving puzzles on boards where you mostly draw a line from one point to another, following rules divided in themes - by physical location, mostly - that the game never explicitly tells you. You have to figure out from very simple puzzles what the logic behind it is and from that solve harder puzzles until you complete everything in an area and move on to the next mechanic. I had an interesting time with that game, it's not perfect and I'm unsure about the whole first person movement aspect of it, but it's a good puzzle experience that I would entirely recommend.
Hex is a pretty nifty CCG with a cool single-player component built like an RPG campaign; You build a character, collect cards and skill points to place in a tree, you complete quests - mostly by playing card games - and you explore dungeons, fight difficult tricky battles and improve your decks and its cards with gear and special abilities. I haven't touched the multiplayer of the game at all, only playing the single-player side of it, and I still had a great time with it, way better than I had with Heartstone back when I played it. If you're interested in an original spin on computer card games, Hex is one for you.
The Sequence is a neat little puzzle game on iOS where you have to bring dots from one circle to another using a sequence of mechanisms you lay down on a grid. Some of these pull or push, others will rotate things, some invert the action of mechanisms they target, others just shut them down. It's all a matter of following a proper sequence of action and figuring out where the pieces go in order to solve each puzzle. I had some frustrations with it, but overall it was a very good experience and a mighty fine puzzle game.
Dead Rising 3 felt way more arcade-y to me compared to what I remember from the second game; You had to die and restart from the beginning in order to improve your chances on your subsequent runs. Dead Rising 3 is nothing of the sort, I've managed to play a good chunk of the game without ever dying - although there were some tight spots here and there - and besides a few bosses that took way more punishment than regular zombie hordes, the game was pretty easily in general. I still had fun with it, going from objective to objective, building weird weapons and exploring around the streets of Los Perdidos.
I absolutely adored Hitman Go when it came out a while back, and now Square Enix Montréal did it again with the "GO" treatment over the Tomb Raider franchise. They did it quite well, keeping the spirit of exploration and puzzle solving alive and well while making the whole experience feel like a board game with very intricate pieces. Perhaps because of technical issues - due to old hardware? Hard to say - my experience wasn't as smooth as I would've preferred. Some small choices on the way puzzles were designed did frustrate me a little as well, but overall I really enjoyed this game.
Tomb of Tyrants is a weird mix, on one hand you have a puzzle game where matching four and more of a type of tiles produces resources for you to use in building and buying units and floors for your dungeon. On the other hand you have a dungeon building game where adventurers try to kill your tyrant and only your dungeon and creatures can stop them. I felt that both aspects of this game didn't work perfectly well together, although I had some fun with ToT. No matter how well the game worked, it was still a very interesting idea.
Defense 2 follows much in the footsteps of its predecessor in the tower defense genre to bring you a game about protecting cores from aliens by building towers on their paths - sometimes even making the paths themselves. I had a good time with it, even if I was perplexed by some of its systems and had to tone the difficulty down to Easy in order to enjoy it. The story also kept me interested, which is a nice thing for a tower defense game where characters are usually not a huge presence.
Ori And The Blind Forest is a neat little metroidvania with a really nice visual style. Some of its systems are quite interesting and I had a good time playing it, even if it ultimately ended in frustration towards the way this game checkpoints your progress. With RPG mechanics, exploration and some good skill-based platforming, this could have been an amazing game, but it sadly just came up short to that.
It is a bit sad when lack of greedy design choices in mobile games is enough to make me root for a title and enjoy it way more. Pac-Man 256 is pretty neat for many reasons, but the way it deals with microtransactions, free to play mechanics and the like is also very interesting and didn't impact my enjoyment of the game. While simple, it's pretty competent at what it set out to do and I had a good time with it.
The Long Siege is a neat tile-sliding game where you create soldiers, archers and mages in order to attack an opposing tower. You can also match resources to upgrade your own tower and your units as well and you defeat enemy after enemy while completing quests and encountering more difficult foes. I had an okay time with it, but I wasn't pulled into its mechanics very deeply; Instead I just matched tiles.
Castle In The Darkness is mighty tough and loves to make references to various NES games. It's a metroidvania where you play a knight going around variously difficult maps, killing enemies, getting gold and finding items. There are traps everywhere and the checkpoints are too few. If the game had allowed some kind of easier mode, I probably would've stuck with it until the very end, unfortunately the high difficulty combined with some frustration towards certain systems made me stop after a few days of playing.