Cityglitch is a neat little puzzle game where you move around small grids of tiles in order to light up special panels while avoiding to lock yourself out of the puzzle or to be defeated by various enemies and bosses. It's pretty cool even if some of the later ones are quite fiendish and I couldn't finish the game. It's got style and its easy to control, so I'd recommend it to puzzle enthusiasts!
TIS-100 is a game where you program a fake computer using some kind of assembly language made of simple commands like MOV (to move things around), ADD (to add values to an accumulator), JMP (to jump to a label) and conditionals like JGZ (to jump to a label if the accumulator is greater than zero, for instance). The special thing about this TIS-100 computer is that you have a bunch of nodes physically located around each other and while they have a small space for you to write code, you can move values around and create complex programs. I had a really good time with it, even if I feel the game doesn't do enough to help non-programmers.
It was a weird surprise to see a new version of Titan Quest rise from the ashes of the series after all this time and the announcement of a new expansion sure was even more of a surprise to me. Titan Quest: Ragnarok continues the main story into the Nordic lands, adds a new class and probably reworks balance for a great number of skills and items. Is it the expansion I've been waiting for? Probably not. Is it a great reason to go back into Titan Quest? Absolutely.
Chroma Squad is a neat little strategy RPG where you move your characters on a grid to fight enemies, like Fire Emblem, Disgaea or Final Fantasy Tactics. Inspired strongly by the Power Rangers, it follows a team of actors as they progress doing their own show, growing their studio and equipment from nothing to having a ton of fans, great gear and even a giant robot they can fight with. I enjoyed the core gameplay of the game although I feel that there is too much stuff on the edges that ultimately prevented me from having a great time.
Squarespace doesn't auto-save and it ate my review of Blyss. Here is the short version; Blyss is a game where you draw lines over tiles to remove dots on them and you need to get rid of all tiles without creating a situation where you don't have any more room to draw 3 or 4-tiles lines. It's a neat game with very little mechanics so it didn't grab my attention too much, but it's still a solid puzzle game.
Euclidean Lands is a small puzzle game for iOS where yo move your character around while trying to defeat enemies in a set number of turns, the interesting hook comes from the fact that you can rotate and turn around all parts of the map and that action is happening in all dimensions. I enjoyed it, but completing all levels with a perfect rating was a bit too much for me, and I kind of wish that they had an undo function, since sometimes it's easy to mistakenly move somewhere.
I've always enjoyed my time with Path Of Exile, but I also always felt that it's a game better played in your mind; Figuring out builds, trying to create good characters using the skill tree planner, looking at gems on the wiki and thinking about what would work to get you to the end, and then some. Sometimes, you can also look at Builds Of The Week on their forum as well to get inspiration. In reality tho, I get bored kinda quickly, either my characters die all the time, or they can't do anything, or they're just not fun to play. Fall Of Oriath adds loads of content on top of the original PoE experience, but I couldn't see it more than once.
Crashlands is a neat little game almost in the vein of something like Don't Starve combined with Minecraft or Terraria. It's not entirely a survival game, it's not entirely a crafting/decoration game, but it has elements of both and it pits you against a large world where you must accomplish missions, mine resources, craft better gear, rinse, repeat. It's a fun and interesting idea, but I'm not sure it works 100% well on iOS, both because of control issues, and also because when I have hours to spend doing nothing but tight loops of crafting and fighting, it's rarely on my iPad.
Sonny was a game I had played on my browser ages ago; it was a turn-based RPG with a lot of depth, a good amount of skill effects and difficult challenges. When I saw it on the app store, I wondered if it was going to be the same as I once played. It's almost that, but not quite. Sonny on iOS is a cool RPG with enough customization and difficulty to keep you engaged. It does mostly one thing - fighting enemies - and it does it well. I didn't manage to get through it, but I've played enough to know that I liked it.
Super Star Path is an interesting arcade-like space shooter with a twist; Enemies you kill chain together with nearby same-colored enemies, and other enemies at the extremities of these chains get turned into indestructible crystallized versions of themselves. By defeating certain enemies on each level, you get power-ups and collectible to upgrade your ships and you constantly get gold to purchase new ones. At the end of each stage there are bosses that mix up the gameplay a bit by having you rapid-fire them down before they deplete your health. I loved Super Star Path enough to complete the game but I didn't think it was perfect.
Blueprint Tychoon is a simulation game, a bit of a factory management mixed with light sim city touches that focuses on you constructing buildings in order to produce resources, move them around, build things with them, sell these things and/or build more complex things while managing the needs of your worker, pollution and supply routes. I enjoyed it quite a bit, although even after hours of play, some core concepts were still opaque to me and I never got into the eponymous "Blueprint" part of the title.
Starward Rogue is a bullet hell action RPG roguelike where you move in procedurally generated levels, fighting enemies, gathering keys, power-ups, money and items all in service of getting to the final boss, defeating complex foes with hellish projectile patterns, and get stronger in the process. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I feel like the roguelike elements have been wasted for a game that feels completed when you finish it for the first time.
Make More! is an idle game where you manage five factories where a grid of 3x3 workers make items for you to sell. You use that money, alongside a premium currency, to improve your factories and your workers in various ways. After maxing all of your factories and leveling them to the maximum, you restart the cycle anew from scratch, with a few bonuses - daily cash and boosts for the characters you have already acquired in a previous run. It's a neat little idle game and it does the thing I kinda like with free-to-play games; Letting the player watch ads instead of paying for some 'premium' boosts.
I know it's a bit weird to review a game that's over fifteen years old, but I never had the chance to try and sink my teeth properly into FFX-2 and this steam re-release gave me ample time and opportunity. I think that it's a nice entry in the Final Fantasy series - although I had problems with its seemingly wildly varying difficulty spikes - and that the remaster features they added are nice inclusions, if you're into making games easier after the fact in order to see the story and content.
Fire Emblem Heroes is the second foray from Nintendo into the mobile game space, and while a free-to-play product usually interests me less than paid endeavors I had to give it a try being a big Fire Emblem fan. The end product is an interesting game that doesn't abuse its premium currency while being a fun light version of the original thing. I think that you still need a certain mindset before diving in - particularly because of the randomness of unit 'pulls' but it's still a neat strategy game.
Hocus is a very simple puzzle game in nature where you swipe around to move a cube on a bizzare shape, usually involving many layers of optical illusions. That's the only mechanic of the game and it's used pretty well. Moving your cube around, you get on other sides of the shape in a way that sometimes feels a bit difficult to predict and therefore can also get a bit frustrating. I didn't completely finish the game, but that's because the later levels are user-submitted, and I thought I had quite enough of it yet.
DOOM is a really interesting game, a product of a gone area brought back into this century with a flurry of new mechanics, systems and updates over the original arena-based single player first person shooters. I was looking forward to playing it and while I'm not the biggest FPS fan in the world, it didn't disappoint me. I'm really happy that DOOM exists and it does exactly what some other games - Serious Sam, Bulletstorm - have tried to do in recent years, but better. I feel that this game is going to be on everyone's mind for a good while.
Hexcell is a puzzle game where you have a big grid of hexagonal shapes with numbers in them telling you how many adjacent pieces are part of the solution. You then need - in a minesweeper fashion - to discover every right and wrong cell of the map in order to win. As the levels go on, they add new mechanics and I didn't really enjoy them, since it tries to turn the game into a weird picross, but then again I've beaten the whole game since it's fairly good and I love puzzlers.
Plantera is a neat, although simple idle game where there is much less automation than in other games of that genre. You plant different kind of fruits and vegetables, wait a bit, then collect them to get money, which is used to plant more stuff, expand your garden, buy animals and upgrades and repeat, seemingly forever. I had some fun with it, even if the UI was a bit difficult to use at times and if ultimately I lost interest when I had unlocked all kinds of things you could buy and figured out it would be value upgrades from now on. Unlocking new mechanics and doodads in idle games is a fun thing and slapping a new game + system is always a good way to have the player go through the whole thing a few more times, but Plantera didn't have any of that.
Grim Dawn was released a little while ago, but before it came Titan Quest, an action RPG that I've spent countless hours playing, both the normal game and expansion that came after that. In some ways, it was better than other ARPGs, some ways that even stand true today, regardless of the progress in the genre. I was delighted to hear that some bizarre version of THQ was re-releasing it, with updates. Engine changes, of course, but balance changes on items, skills and enemies as well! TQAE definitely feels like the old game that it is, but I would rather play it than many other available ARPGs.