Wormarium bums me out. It's a neat little concept, it controls fairly well and there are no in-app purchases and dubious balance decisions. There's plenty of things to unlock and a whole bunch of levels as well, unfortunately, it's way too difficult for me. I've banged my head on the same level over and over and simply couldn't finish it! What a sad way to finish playing a game, uninstalling it only because I can't progress any more.
Space Galaga International Edition is bogged down by weird controls and superfluous mechanics that overall just burden it with useless padding. The core game could be interesting - a galaga-like arcade shooter where you acquire new gear and upgrade it, with stats and pilots and a progression, but instead making you collect currency to buy and fuse stuff while you spend more time opening space chests and messing around menus trying to figure out what's useful and what's not. I thought I might have an okay time with this game, but in the end, I didn't.
Magic Touch: Wizard For Hire is a game about drawing symbols on your iOS device in order to burst balloons. It's a pretty fun game! Although the core mechanics are very enjoyable, I didn't play it for too long because of a lack of clear progression, luck-based difficulty spikes and the abusive usage of full screen video ads in a free game - an eternal debate I'm having between myself and the iOS game space.
Tadpole Tap is a simple little game where you're a tadpole, and you tap on things to stick your tongue out and grab them. By doing so, you accumulate flies that can be used to unlock new upgrades and different tadpoles. It's an okay game, I suppose, but it didn't grab my attention at all. After playing for about an hour, completing a number of runs during that time, I put it down and moved on to something else.
EDF is it’s own thing. It’s an arcade shooter where you mow down waves of bugs, spiders and other robots while collecting silly weapons and slowly becoming stronger as you go through a bunch of maps with little objectives besides killing everything. Lousy technical performances and limited couch co-op, however, are limiting my ability to enjoy the new PS3/Xbox 360 one. How does the PC version of the last one fares?
Blowfish meets meteor is unfortunate. On one hand, it has a terrible control scheme for a breakout type game where taping left and right is imprecise and unpractical, on the other hand, the early level design felt so boring that I just turned it off.
I was a bit skeptical when I saw trials on the iOS store, after all, games ported from consoles are either barely resembling their counterparts or control really badly when developers try to figure out a way to make the game work at all. Trials Frontier avoids these two things, but falls down in the free to play hole pretty quickly. It’s still a fun experience for a while, controlling well and adapted to touch controls. I even thought the systems it added (leveling, loot, upgrading your bike) were better than the bare-bones progression of the PC/Console game.
Yet another port of a console game, Trials works pretty well on the PC. It’s a bit awkward at first to use a random key as the thrust button and then use the arrow keys to tilt the bike, but after a while I got as good with it than I did with the console version.It still has the same issues, but it’s still a blast if you like that almost puzzle-ish arcade feel.
Guacamelee is an interesting metroidvania with a world-switching mechanic and a large swath of memes sprinkled around. I quite enjoyed it, even if it continued (with Vadis Story last week) a trend of PC games almost requiring controllers to play ‘properly’. After progressing through almost all the game, I was stopped by one fight that frustrated me to no end.
Starborn Anarkist is a little dual-stick shooter where you complete challenges and defeat tons of enemies/bosses to unlock new gear to make your ship designs stronger to keep doing the same thing. You upgrade temporarily your offence/defence/speed during play sessions in some weird way.
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.
Giant Boulder of Death suffers from the 'too free' game problem; It's free, but it's also full of pop-out ads and suspicious redirection to the facebook app. It's too bad, because the game itself is fun, you roll a boulder down a hill, crushing everything, doing so, you accomplish missions, get gold and gems (premium currency, check!) and upgrade your boulder in some capacity.
PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+ isn't a remake of the old arcade classic; In some ways it's true that it's a score attack game with simple mechanics, but at its core, I would rather say that PMCEDX+ is a puzzle game. With very few randomness in some instances, there's an 'ideal' path to beat many stages of this psychedelic frenzied game. Even with randomness and some weird issues here and there's it's a really good time.
Dig! is a bad remake of Qix. There's some slightly interesting stuff around the main game (upgrades, hats, collectibles, museum upgrades and things like that) but while you're moving around trying to dodge things and get treasures, the game feels too busy and most of the things you're against are unexplained.
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.
I used to play a game in high school called Motherload. You had a little ship with a drill and you could drill down the earth to find treasures, but it was dangerous. You had to be careful about bumping into the walls and floor, you were overheating constantly and running out of oil was a death sentence.
I don't have much of an opinion on golf games in general but I've heard good things about Super Stickman Golf 2, so I gave it a shot. It's a very quirky golf game where the stages are setup to make you use your powerups carefully to get good scores. The stuff around the core game - level up system, equipment, challenges - is also pretty neat and difficult and getting everything is taking quite some time.
Shufflepuck Cantina is a weird game, on one hand you have an interesting air hockey game with power-ups, special moves, and prizes to be won, on the other hand you have a deep achievement system, shops, different NPCs with stories and moves to master, quests and some gambling here and there.