Risk of Rain has great core gameplay mechanics. It's a platformer/roguelike where you pick a character then need to find teleporters to get back to your ship without dying. There are tons of items you can randomly find during your journey, each class has different abilities, there are tons of unlockables / challenges, the game is pretty difficult but rewarding and I really love its style. It has, however, a fatal design flaw.
Devil's Attorney is a nice little turn-based RPG for iOS. You play Max McMann, a shady defense attorney that'll defend anyone. You go to cases, fight with the skills you have unlocked, and then gain money to buy items and furniture that allow you to unlock more skills. The writing is very funny and even if the randomness breaks the game a little, I've enjoyed it so much that I beat it in a few days.
While I already wrote some words on Path of Exile a while ago, its recent re-release on Steam had me curious and I went back and tried it. I was supposed to write about Risk of Rain, but I spent most of this week and last week playing PoE. They've added some things, fixed others, and left most of it like it was before. My issue number one with the game - how floaty and unresponsive it felt - isn't a problem anymore...
Device-6 is a puzzle game that prefers style over substance; While it is very interesting visually to have some kind of novel where the orientation of the words change and you scroll through the story like you were a character moving in a book, actually playing it never felt 'fun' for me, the puzzles were more alike to busywork than brain teasers. Also, even if it has no impact on the gameplay argument, I didn't find the story particularity interesting, therefore that failed to grab me and prevented me from deleting it.
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.
Far from me to remind people of the review I wrote of the original PC version of Cook, Serve, Delicious but CSD was one of the contestants from my game of the year last year, it was a fun, fast paced wario-ware in spirit game where you made foods and accomplished chores in a restaurant in a micro-game fashion. I was pleased to try the iPad version - maybe it would've fixed the few things I didn't like about the original - oh, how wrong was I.
I hadn't played FF14 when it came out originally, but trying it out after the whole remake thing was quite a good experience. I was impressed overall by some clever mechanics here and there that - I thought - would make me want to play the game past its free month. That being said, some disappointments here and there had me change my mind a few days before my trial was over. This article might be more a series of points than my usual ones because there is much to say about this game.
Not unlike Gun Runner - some game I've made - Escape From Doom is an endless runner with first person shooter elements, however, poor controls ruin the whole experience and no amount of little perks and unlockables will make me want to play any more of it.
Hearthstone : Heroes of Warcraft is a card game where you need to lower the opponent's life to 0. To do so, you have a deck of cards (split between class cards from one of the nine World of Warcraft classes (wait, nine?) and creature cards) and a special hero power unique to each class. The game will be free to play and is currently in beta, but as the core mechanics probably won't change, I feel like it's fair to give it a look right now.
Steampunk Tower is a perfectly competent tower defense game. Instead of building towers, you place turrets into a big tower standing in the middle of the battlefield. Enemies attack you from left and right and you can move turrets around to upgrade them or to reload ammo. Enemies are weak against some type of turrets but strong against other, forcing you to build a wide array of defenses, you can upgrade them between fights, using oh-so-precious dollars. It wasn't the best tower defense game I've played, but I enjoyed it.
It is very difficult to talk about The Stanley Parable without spoiling any single little thing, but I'll do my best here. TSP is a first person experience. You walk around with WASD and can interact with things using the E button. There's a narrator that talks over the things you do and the things you should be doing. Then you win (?)
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.
Ironclad Tactics is a card-based strategy game, you build a deck of twenty cards from two factions, featuring a mix of Ironclads (strong robots that can equip parts), tactics, parts and infantry (lighter units that are useful on their own), you then take this deck through a multiple of scenarios where the goal is mostly to get your ironclads to the end of the screen to score Victory Points, some missions require you to kill a boss or survive, but most of the time you'll use multiple ways to gather VPs and win. You get AP every turn to use your cards and some maps include ways to make AP faster. I've felt disappointed by IT, but I loved it.
Gunner Z is a sad state of affairs. The core gameplay (on-rails shooter) could be fine on its own, but it's bogged down by so much microtransactions and hooks to try and make you spend money that everything in this game is terrible. I had some fun with it, but it wasn't worth my time.
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.