Dawn Of Crafting is an interesting game where you craft your way through a tech tree by using various tools and combining elements to create different recipes. You need energy to do pretty much everything, so you have to gather food and craft it into better food items. It's a neat little game that I would've played way more than I did if it had been a full paid product and not a free to play game with hooks to make you spend money into figuring out what you need to do to progress through the main quest. It's a bit grindy but otherwise it was really fun!
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is an okay version of Animal Crossing for mobile devices. It's not great, but it's not catastrophically bad either. I fell off it pretty quickly because what was there didn't catch me enough to keep me away from my 3DS and Vita, it's a campground simulation game where you collect fruits, bugs and fishes to give to animals in order to level up their friendship and get more stuff to decorate your camp with. The interactions are minimal and even if the whole package is well presented and isn't THAT different from mainline Animal Crossing games, the differences were enough to leave me uninterested.
Tap Smiths is just boring; It's a game where you make items by tapping alternatively left and right on your screen and then after a while your day is over and you go sell these items and make some money with which you buy upgrades for your hammer, anvil and other tools. Then you rinse and repeat, with no apparent changes in the things you are making, how much you are making, and how much money you get at the end. That's why I've found Tap Smiths boring, there's no challenge, no progression and no real goal.
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!
Angry Birds 2 follows the pattern of many sequels to popular games by once well-meaning studios; Plants versus Zombies 2, the more recent Peggle games and all these iOS sequels of non-mobile games. It takes a cool core idea, adds free to play mechanics and other useless busywork and hopes to bank on some nostalgia here and there. There's also something a bit silly in calling a game "2" when you have made about 30 of them, but that's another story entirely. Angry Birds 2 gets a 2/5, because it's pretty bad.
Production values won't save your flawed product; That's the lesson Fallout Shelter keeps on teaching us. Okay, it might be making tons of money - the fallout name and setting will bring users in, for sure, even if they had never played one of these free to play timesink money grabbing schemes yet - and it might look and feel better than most of these shameless Skinner boxes, but I'll have nothing to do with it. This is farmville in a post-apocalyptic setting.
One More Dash is a pretty simple iOS game, but it's completely okay for what it tries to do. You tap on the screen so your marker dashes from one circle to another, scoring points, completing missions and buying new color schemes for a few things in the game by dodging spikes, bouncing on walls and picking up special currency dots. Not much to say about that!
Century City is an okay idle game where you build a city and spend time by tapping in a mine to get more money to build you city. It's not the worst idle game I've played ever, but it's a bit boring. There isn't much to do besides tapping inside the mine - and sometimes playing some very simple mini-games - so it didn't grab my attention for super long. The isometric style is kinda cool, however.
Much like the iOS game I've reviewed a while back - and much like Cookie Clicker and Anti-Idle in a sense - Clicker Heroes is an Idle game where you mostly click a few times and then let the game run for a while before clicking a few other times and waiting. Most of these games have some kind of progression where at some point you reset your game in order to get bonuses for the next run that will allow you to go even farther. There are not real goals in such games, but they're nice time wasters - and are much more appropriate on PC than on mobile devices. Clicker Heroes is pretty neat, although since games like this live and die by how frequently they're updated, I can't say that it has my attention as much as it once did.
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here, but SimCity BuildIt is literal garbage, it takes a thing you like, crushes it under the overwhelming machine that free to play casual microtransaction money-stealing barely-games time-wasting represents in today's gaming world and then tries to make you believe that it's a video game where you can do things and that it's worth your time. Preying on nostalgia and presenting production values that at least look like a decent game but otherwise a terrible tragedy for this week.
Click Titans is almost a direct clone of Clicker Heroes, a web game where you buy heroes to kill enemies to make money to buy more heroes to kill more enemies to reset your game with more money in the next one (in order to kill more enemies). I like Clicker Heroes, but CT is just a way worse version. Mired with pop-ups for ads and opportunities to watch videos or pay in exchange for quicker game progression. Since the only point of "idle" game is the progression, it's a bit silly to expect people to pay for it.
I like Peggle, it's a fun little franchise where you shoot balls on pegs to clear levels. You get power-ups to help you beat the levels and the characters are quite funny (I'm looking at you, Pharaoh Cat). Take everything good with Peggle, replace it with terrible odds skewed in favor of the game, add micro-transactions to every single thing you could, slap an energy system on it and give it for "free" on the app store, you got Peggle Blast.
I thought that Farm For Your Life would be more than what it actually is. It's a bit of harvest moon with a bit of tower defense and some fruit ninja and one of these kitchen games thrown in for good measure. It's not a terribly bad game but it lacks direction for what is supposedly a story mode and the weird barter system didn't draw me in at all, instead making me feel like it's taking forever to unlock stuff.
Dwarven Den is barely a puzzle game; while the earlier levels might seem clever and lure players in with a slow difficulty curve, the game becomes quite difficult past a certain point which left me wondering about what 'puzzles' are when maps are randomly generated, resources are scarce and of course, sold for real money.
Colosatron is a weird thing. I'm almost tempted to say that it's barely a game because of the limited input you have on it. You don't control the main character - a giant robot dragon rampaging around cities - but you rather work to improve it by adding weapons on it and by sometimes using one of two skills you can unlock after destroying the first capital. I've had some fun with it, altough it was mostly mindless and I never felt challenged at all by any of it.
Bad Piggies is a physics-based game similar but not identical to Angry Birds. In this game, you build vehicles and try to get at the end of multiple stages by completing optional objectives to win stars that will allow you to play harder levels and unlock more things to play with in sandbox mode. This game is pretty silly and I enjoyed it a bunch.
Nimble Quest is similar to the 'snake' game, you need to move a line that grows longer without touching anything, nor the walls, nor the other parts of your snake. In this case, you have a line of heroes that walk alongside arena-style maps where you have to defeat enough enemies before you can proceed to the next level. You start with one hero from a list of fifteen heroes or so (albeit they are but all locked at the beginning) each with their attack types and armor values and then you acquire more heroes by finding them randomly in the levels.
Pixel People is as casual as they go in term of iOS games, you have two resources, one of them can be paid for with real money and is used to save you the most time, the other grows slowly over time. The visual style is pretty neat and there one some very interesting game mechanics in there that made me bite the bullet and play tons of it, ultimately tho, it fails a bit short of what I wanted from it.