This is a text-based browser game based on the Dragon Age universe where you have one week to gather resources before an event occurs for which you must be prepared. To do so, you draw cards from a deck and make decisions. Sometimes you'll get different decks (when you're working towards precise objectives) but otherwise, you govern your city as you want, hearing citizens and solving issues. It's a fairly decent game and I enjoyed my time with it.
Super Glyph Quest is one of the best iOS games I've played in a long time, it's not perfect, but it's simply a game. It's not a marketplace, it's not an opportunity, it's not a best deal, it's a game. You match glyphs on a grid to cast spells on your enemies, you get experience, materials and items to allow yourself to survive tougher challenges. Rinse and repeat for a good chunk of time. With glyphs to mix and match to create various spells and a bunch of enemies, it's a really cool little game.
I'm not too sure why I played Hatoful Boyfriend, I'm not a big fan of visual novels and dating-themed ones aren't my cup of tea either. It must have been something about the pigeons, I thought. There was something weird about this game - dating sim where your peers are all birds - and it lead me to think that there would be more than meets the eye. Sadly for me, I couldn't dig deep enough within the game to ever find out if there was more than that.
The Bot Squad is half a puzzle game, half a black hole for your money, it's gameplay mechanics well thought in order to minimize your enjoyment of the game if you're not ready to annoy someone on facebook or to give them cash. It's something that looks like a puzzle game but quickly turns into something else, a primordial paste of energy timers, premium currencies, best values and robots.
Civilization 5 was a masterpiece of sorts and Beyond Earth iterates upon the concepts brought to Civ5, adding a few things that are quite interesting and still creating the perfect 'one more turn' experience. You have more control on the direction your civilization is taking with some more customization features that impact gameplay in semi-significant ways and you have about half a dozen ways to victory. It's one of the rare games where I just started playing and emerged from a 8 hour session, only after victory was within my grasp. This was on very easy, but oh well.
This is a match-three game where you have to spend money in order to get anywhere. A few good ideas here and there, but I grow bored of these things. It's also very frustrating in the maps where you can't do anything and the only way to save yourself is to spend some money on items to break tiles or resurrect your troops.
LLTQ is a choose-your-own-adventure kind of game. It's framed as a princess simulator - where you play a 14 year old kid that is going to become queen after a year passes - and each week you make a few choices to raise certain stats, manage your mood and try to evade dangers that could result in a game over - there are few second chances in this game - but it does certain things right in a way that makes it fun instead of frustrating.
Skullduggery is a fast-paced puzzle game using the advantages of iOS games to help itself rather than work against it. You play it by stretching the brain of a skull in order to propel it around. Think how you stretch the catapult in angry birds, but with more squishy flesh instead. You do so to collect money and defeat enemies, navigate labyrinths while a wall moves to crush you and collect power-ups in order to defeat bosses and get all the objectives in a level.
Borderlands:The Pre-Sequel is a game I'm going to play for another 200 hours, I'm quite sure of that. Like Borderlands 2, the depth of character customization - with the promise of new characters coming as DLC - and the choice of weaponry and defensive apparatuses you can mix and match from combined with shooter RPG grind-and-loot action set against a humorous backdrop of interesting characters will keep me at it for a long while. That being said, B:TPS still has the issues of the second game and some other issues of its own.
Compared to Magic 2015 I looked at a few weeks ago, PTCGO is way better. I had a few technical issues here and there with the game but otherwise it feels like you can do pretty much anything you could do in a real game of the actual card game. Some might argue that the Pokemon cards are simpler - there is no 'instant' in PTCG, everything is played during your turn - but that's just the nature of the rules of one game versus another. It had been a while since I had looked at this and was surprised to see that there are now the equivalent of enchantments - such as giving +30 max HP to a pokemon.
What do you get if you mix Batman, Assassin's Creed and Lord of the Rings? You get ME:SoM. It is incredibly reductive to call it only a by-product of these three things, but since one of the first thing you do is eagle-dive down a tower and then activate your bat/ghost vision to see the bad guys and then you are fighting the uruks from the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien, it's hard not to compare ME:SoM to the sum of its parts. That being said, there are a few very interesting systems in there, notably the nemesis system.
Puzzle Bandits, simply put, is a Puzzle&Dragons clone. You match things to make combos and then you attack your enemies or heal and after a fixed number of turns, your enemies attack you. You can fuse heroes together to raise their levels, you can buy random heroes for real money and they are really strong. While P&D had me going for at least an hour before I stopped, PB didnt last more than ten minutes because of some extreme difficulty
TMQFEL is a free to play action rpg with asynchronous multiplayer tower defense and base building mechanics. Although the tone of the game - trying to be humorous - is grating for no reason, I really enjoyed my time with it and would recommend it if you enjoy both base building and loot-driven action rpg dungeon delving.
What is the main goal of a digital version of a card game? The goal of adding metagaming around the core experience, being either with a story, with cards to collect, achievements to get or quests to complete, is of course the main draw to these remakes of games such as MtG. That being said, the main goal of a digital TCG is to portray as closely as possible the original game and to follow its rules the best it can. MtG2015 is terrible in many ways at doing so, especially since I've been playing MtG for the past 15 years and I was at least expecting basic moves to work.
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.