Heroes of the Storm isn't live yet, it's currently in a technical alpha and you can play with all heroes for free and some game modes aren't really locked down, but I like it. It's a strange twist on the LOMA genre made popular by DOTA and League of Legends, but it takes some stuff away, adds new ideas with a cast of characters many will recognize, each with their unique playstyles and a fun talent system to boot.
SpyMaster is an okay iOS game, it's a few things away from being a great iOS game, but it falls into the same traps and issues that I have with most games on that platform. SM is a board game where you move agents in Europe to establish spy rings, collect intel, raid factory and evade Gestapo Inspektors. Each action takes a number of turns and your agents get tired after a while and need to rest, it's a nice balance of risks and rewards. Sadly, there is a premium currency used for most practical things and timers in most places too.
I helped Grim Dawn back when I was at university, that was a few years ago, then I gave some more money to their kickstarter, because why not. I know the version I'm playing right now isn't final, but there are still a few issues I would like to address in what's playable. These things might be fixed by the time the game goes gold and I still plan to take another look at it when that'll happen, but right now, GD bores me, playing Grim Dawn made me install Titan Quest and play that instead.
Gemini Strike is a top-down arcade style bullet hell shooter with RPG elements that is way too hard for its own good. Almost everything can only be bought with premium currency that you accumulate too slowly and the options you have with the regular currency are pretty limited. But the spikes of terrible difficulty near the very beginning of the game are what turned me off it and I was sad not to be able to see more of its contents.
Royal Quest makes me nostalgic for another age, when I was in high school, when MMOs were a bit different than what they are now, when microtransactions didn't really exist - but then again, at that age, I didn't have much money to pay monthly bills for MMOs. In any case, RQ makes me nostalgic for Ragnarok Online in particular, it's not a huge coincidence since it's a complete rip-off of the old game. Even the main capital looks the same, player shops littering the way to enter town and all.
Tiny Dice Dungeon isn't as bad as last week's game, but I found it an annoying game to play. No matter the fatigue system, it's one of the core mechanics that just turned me off the game. I know that the main theme here is risk versus reward, but the risk is too sharp, the potential reward is not worth the consequences except if you are extremely lucky.
Runers is a rogue like twin stick shooter of sorts where you play some kind of spellcaster armed with runes that you can combine to make more powerful spells, it's a bit difficult for my tastes but I feel like it's a pretty good game, even though I've just scratched the surface. There are a few things here and there that could be made to make it easier but otherwise the arcade feel and the enemy variety combined with a great deal of information about your own abilities made me lose a few hours in this fun title.
Spellfall makes me angry as a designer. It's a neat game, you match things to attack with elements, you get powerful tiles if you match more than three, you equip stuff, you charge up to cast magic. Spellfall is also everything that is wrong with mobile gaming nowadays, a cheap experience that seems fine for a while but quickly becomes impossible to bear.
Blackguards is a dense RPG, perhaps too much for it's own good. I love turn-based strategy games such as the Fire Emblems of the world, but I feel that these games work because your characters are already well defined and most of the time each character represents an archetype that can be used in a very limited number of ways on the battlefield. Quite the contrary here with a game that goes all over the place with too much mechanics and little that is done in order for the player to know what he should do.
Rules! is a good representation of what the best iOS games are; clearly made for the medium, simple core mechanics and controls that fit perfectly with the platform and no extra charges for dubious artificial gameplay boosts. Of course, the quick, almost minigame genre isn't the only thing you can do on iOS devices, but Rules! pulls it off quite well and is an interesting little game.
Path of Exile is always being updated with new stuff but the Forsaken Masters update had me try it again and more content always makes for a better game. I hadn't seen the Vaal Gems - corrupted gems that require enemy kills before you can use them - yet nor the randomly placed random dungeons, so there's a lot of stuff in there to digest for me. That being said, I'm having a blast by playing it again.
Rusted Emeth is a very average RPG with a few weird control issues and some things that could be explained better. I love the style of games where you have both a pilot and a mech, it's a bit weird when they both can deal and/or take almost the same amount of punishment, but I was curious about the game so I let it slide. A bit on the incomprehensible stats side with an uncertainty in game progression, RE didn't grab me at all.
It's very hard to find a flaw in The Swapper because what it does, it does very well. It does very little, in some sense, but as a puzzle-platformer, I loved it. It felt like one of those games where you could add enemies and a health bar and you would have a full-on metroidvania but instead you have nice puzzles playing around with creating clones and warping to them with an interesting story and simple controls.
What if Nintendo went free-to-play with Pokémon? How would they sell it? Would they still put the same production values into the game? Would the game feel fair and balanced or would it feel like you need to pay money in order to have even odds? I'm not sure where Micromon fits in this whole picture, but it smells both of Pokémon rip-off and of pay-to-win systems implemented together in a bland game that I won't play anymore.
Divinity Original Sin is a pretty interesting game, although it is mired with a few annoyances and badly implemented ideas that make the experience less than ideal. It is, as they advertised, an old kind of game; turn based RPGs aren't that common anymore and the bulk of its mechanic feel like they have been designed a while ago. That being said, the combat system salvaged it for me after a while, otherwise I would have been ready to write this game off.
Like most iOS games, there is something sad about Rhythm Thief. Born from a 3DS game about the aforementioned thief, this is a music game where you complete various mini-games in order to progress in a unimportant story comprised of three blocks of dialogue that almost have no impact on anything, something that probably was more akin to cutscenes in the original version. Why have story at all? To do so, you equip allies and fuse items and request friends like in other iOS games like Puzzle and Dragons, you collect premium currencies, hold auditions to spin the wheel on random gifts and other things of the sort that just distract you from the actual music games that are actually okay.
H:SA might be full of Halo story and characters, it might have a few good ideas here and there, but it's not a good game. I've had a frustrating experience with bad mission design, innapropriate gameplay systems and weird AI that made me stop playing way before the end of the game. I love twin stick shooters, but certain kind of challenges are left to other genres of videogames.
S&PA is a sad game, it's sad because the core concept of fighting with poker hands is interesting, but it's sad because of timers, premium currencies and 99.99$ best values. It's sad because of facebook requests, it's sad because of things you could buy to make the game too easy. At least it's sad and I'm not saying it doesn't have merit at all.
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.