A weird mix of Real Time Strategy, light turn-based strategy elements, 3rd person shooter and political management story driven game, Divinity: Dragon Commander excels at some parts of it. The talking about storytelling are excellent and you really want to know what's coming next, but the other parts of gameplay felt lacking for me.
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.
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.
A bit like King Cashing, Tower of Fortune is a game based on slot machines. You explore maps by spinning slots, you fight enemies that way, you collect loot, forge items and interact with the tavern by pressing a 'SPIN' button. The comparison stops there, though. While King Cashing was a fun RPG, this game is a brutal roguelike and dying means having to start all over (except if you bought a thing that saves your equipment when you die) and the game kinda feels unfair at times.
It's in Early Access, it's in Beta, call it what you will. The version of Mercenary Kings you can play right now is still loads of fun and seems feature complete enough for me to relate what I've experienced during my playtime with it. At it's core, MK is a mash-up of Borderlands, Metal Slug and Monster Hunter. The shooting is of the 2d sidescrolling variety, you have a ton of gun parts to customize your weapon with and you can capture enemies and killed monsters drop materials. It's not perfect, but it's not officially out yet.
Infinity Blade is pretty much a medieval/sci-fi version of Punch-Out. Depending of your equipped weapon, you have different options of blocking, dodging or parrying. Between fights, you gather materials, gold bags and other items, you get experience and can level up, gaining skill points to place between health, shields, attack and magic, your gear also gains experience until it levels up and grants you more skill points. You can slot gems in certain equipment pieces, you can brew potions, upgrade your mastered gear, and much more. Even with all that, there's plenty I don't like in this game.
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?
Puzzle and Dragons is insanely successful, it seems. I've decided to try it out as soon as it went live on the Canadian app store, and my god, it is a load of nonsense. The core mechanic of the game (moving gems on a board) manages to be mostly luck-based and somehow less refined than old match-3 games and/or Tetris Attack and/or puzzle quest managed to do years ago. The monster collection part is also completely nonsensical and random but at the same time, vital to progress through the game.
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.
I didn't "get" 868-Hack, a popular videogame where you datajack into the cell cubes to decrypt pointfiles while cyberdodging viruses and shooting them with your datagun. This feels like a roguelike, this feels like a small thing with no rhyme or reason. I can't say I've enjoyed 868-Hack much because I've failed miserably to progress past the first few screens and some mechanics are still incomprehensible to me.
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.
Saints Row IV is a delight, while I find that on one hand, it pulls too much from its predecessor, it goes in new, crazy directions both on the story and gameplay side. Some of its systems are so amazing and useful that they make others feel obsolete and perhaps, unnecessary. The end result is still fun and refreshing and pulled me to try and get every single thing complete between the story missions.
SolForge is a trading card game that would be tough to make in real life. A bit like Scrolls, it uses counters (you increase and decrease stats permanently quite often in this game, compared to Magic: The Gathering where creatures don't keep their life totals dynamic every turn) and a grid-like playing field. There's an interesting level-up system where cards you play can come back as leveled-up versions of themselves after a few turn, making you pick the cards you want to evolve over the ones that are useful right then. Ultimately, I find it light in content and without reasons to play it before future updates.
Hammerwatch has many flaws, it gets boring and repetitive after a while, it's brutally difficult and worse of all, it's not randomly generated. I thought this was going to be a roguelike, based loosely on Gauntlet with deeper RPG elements. I was wrong on the roguelike part, this is more of a hack-and-slash with a tendency for traps and ridiculously high number of enemies.
Here is a nice paragraph. Plants vs Zombies 2 is an incredibly polished, well-made game that builds upon its predecessor with new zombies, new plants, new level types, a map-based progression system that allows you to unlock upgrades in the order you want, power-ups and boosts to help you defeat difficult challenges, endless maps to try and tackle and the same addictive gameplay that made PvZ so good. All of this, and more, if you're willing to stomach tons of f2p Junk.
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.
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.
The Secret World is a MMORPG that does somethings differently from the usual model and while overall I feel like it's intriguing and I want to see more of what there is to see in there, some basic parts of the content are frustrating, too difficult, badly designed and seem purposeless. Avoiding these parts of the game is possible, but the overall experience remains diminished.
CastleStorm is a weird mix of Angry Birds and strategy RPG elements. The goal of most levels is the same; to destroy the enemy's castle. To do so, you fire projectiles, spawn units, use magic and try to complete special objectives to gain more money and more stars. The game has some fine ideas but it's a bit unsure of what it wants to be and so it doesn't do anything particularly well.