Although the South Park brand of humor might not be your cup of tea - and I have to admit that it's not mine either - the game inside SPTSOT is quite solid. Against a backdrop of high fantasy only existing in the character's minds - and everyone plays along - you control a normal kid going around South Park, doing quests, fighting enemies and collecting loot, all of that done in an ocean of poop jokes and pop culture references. I had a ton of fun with it and I would recommend it to most turn-based RPG fans.
Switch&Drop starts by asking you to agree to a EULA, this is always a good sign. Otherwise you just can't play the game. S&D is a game where you drop blocks by sliding lines of colored puzzle pieces and the goal is to match three or more to break them and activate special bonuses. It would probably be fine if it didn't have in-app purchases, energy timers and best values. This might sound a bit reductionist - I'll admit I haven't played that game for very long - but putting your worst foot forward isn't a way to make me care.
I have nothing against ports of ports of games, but GameBoy Advance-area platformers are weird things to port on PC. SRRDC is one of those games, added more or less as-is to the world of personal computers. It's okay for what it is, but I didn't spend more time on it than I had to. Some weird art choices, some weird systems here and there and precise platforming using the keyboard don't collide well in this weird belly-dancing metroidvania.
Although this game has some RPG elements, Zombieville USA 2 has clunky controls and a weird sense of uncertainty added to mechanics as simple as buying new weapons. It's a game where you kill zombies using guns in order to get money to buy better guns and perks that will help you defeat more tougher zombies. The game controls with a virtual joystick that mostly works and I had some fun with it before being frustrated with certain systems and uninstalling it.
Wasteland 2 is a masterpiece, it's one of the best RPGs I've played recently, and while I wasn't aware of Wasteland 1, nor haven't I played the old Fallouts extensively, the setting and characters were something interesting vis-a-vis the fantasy settings of old. I might not have built the best team for the job - and I might be stubborn on some things, I might have some complaints about the way the game works in some spots, but overall if you enjoy turn based roleplaying games you owe it to yourself to try W2.
Mujo is a matching game where you match 3 tiles in order to do stuff - mostly damage to enemies, but you can also use them to level your heroes and collect treasures as well - and you can also 'combine' matched tiles in order for them to do even more effects. Tiles aren't destroyed automatically if 3 touch and breaking them brings the stack down. You can also raise the stack of tiles if you don't have any moves. An interesting fact about Mujo is the lact of 'lose' condition, you can play most levels forever and never lose. A fact that is rendered pretty moot by the battles that take forever and render the game boring to play after a short number of levels.
While I gave a 4/5 to Hotline Miami and enjoyed the puzzle-esque ultra-violent psycho trip, the second game didn't catch my attention as much and I found it much more difficult and frustrating than the first one. It is still the same shooter/puzzle, pitting you against horde of enemies and you always need to kill them all to proceed. With a weird story and a large cast of character this game could've been pretty amazing and I really tried to like it, but it just didn't compare.
Area 777 is a slot machine 'rpg' where you fight aliens by spinning reels to match symbols and attack them. You're also trying to get more cash to continue playing and to get experience to level up and unlock new type of reels, new machines and new power-ups. I didn't have a terrible time with the game but the huge full-screen ads that popped out all the time, combined with unrefined RPG mechanics and the unpredictability of chance games made me uninstall it after I had seen one too many advertisement for some product I didn't care at all about.
Although for me, gameplay is king and systems will trump over the story and graphics of a game, LISA is a case that reminds me how I play games to escape reality and its brutal problems. I'm not a big fan of games that relate the sorrows and tribulations of people in our modern society - or in a realistic past. Games that deal with heavier subjects are things that I don't tend to consume, no matter what genre they belong in. LISA was no exception, presented as an earthbound-inspired RPG with a ton of party members and systems like using russian roulette to power-up your character, I didn't get very far in it and didn't enjoy my time with the game overall.
Hero Emblems is one of the best iOS games I've played in a long time. There are no IAPs and the game feels like a complete package with tons of content to go through, fun core mechanics and enough challenge and character customization to not feel bored of it. You play a party of four characters - mage, healer, paladin and fighter - and you match emblems to attack, defend or heal yourself. It's a classic formula turned into an amazing little game.
I'm not too sure if it's accurate to say that WoW is videogame crack, or maybe the analogy would be better made with junk food, it's cheap, filling, tastes okay, but after a while you get bored of it. I'm not saying that WoW is empty calories - and even if it were, I'm not saying that's a bad thing - and since I've spent 60 days playing it three hours+ per day I can't say that it's devoid of interest, but WoW is a treadmill that I feel broke down for me in the recent expansions. It's also a bit too dense in some ways - maybe ways that only affect me - but here, let me tell you the story of my characters.
Combo Quest is the first paragraph in a design document for another game; CQ is the core mechanic that should be embedded into something much bigger than it is, while actually being all there is. CQ could have been a pretty neat RPG for touch devices, but it's barely a tech demo with some inappropriate in-app purchases. I didn't enjoy my time with Combo Quest for various reasons.
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.
Shadowmatic is a neat concept - you rotate objects in order to cast specific shadows that aren't obvious at first but should become more apparent as you move stuff around. To increase the difficulty after a while, the game throws multiple pieces and now you have to move them relative to each other as well. In practice I find that fumbling around rotating pieces of weird shapes in order to arrive at an unknown goal is quite frustrating and the hint system should be more straightforward.
Fearless Fantasy is a neat concept - a turn-based RPG with some novel way to attack/defend, but poor execution, low amount of content and weird mechanics quickly turned me off from the game. It's not that the ideas are bad, but they're poorly explained, alongside the relatively low potential for character customization - something that I always look for in role playing games.
I don't have any bad thing to say about Evolve:Hunter Quest. I feel it's the right kind of free to play match three game with sufficiently deep gameplay systems, enough variety to make the player want to continue playing and most importantly, no energy system. This might sound silly, but if this game had an energy system (where attempting maps was throttled by such) the experience would have been completely different. As it is, it feels fair and balanced and losing a level isn't a terrible thing - because you would've lost energy for no gain - and I have no real opinion on it's tie-in with the Evolve shooter on PC. Besides setting, it doesn't provide much to this game.
Space Run is a tower defense game where enemies go to you as you're flying a spaceship trying to deliver thing under time constraints. It's a fun game where the tower defense gameplay loop of having a list of things you can build allows you to complete maps not perfectly, but well enough to buy better things later on in order to go back and finish stuff you couldn't do before. It's also very interesting with the way it deals in tower construction and enemy waves.
Puzzle Forge 2 is a pretty neat little puzzle game where the goal is to make gear for customers going to your forge. To do so, you place rocks on a grid and then you place molds next to two rocks to craft parts that you need to combine to create weapons, armors and more. Combining rocks makes better materials and the game adds a bit of complexity with gems (and the combining thereof) and magic that you use to power-up the gear you're making. You lose the game when you can't complete customer requests too many times or when the board fills up - the latter happens more often than the former.
Volgarr the Viking reminds me of Ghouls And Ghosts, it reminds me of old platforming games with brutal difficulty, few options for the player and very precise mechanics. I'm giving it a 3/5 mainly because it's not for me; It's too difficult and the lack of difficulty options - that might have diluted the game's core essence - made it impossible for me to get anywhere past the second 'stage' of the game. It's well made and I'm certain there is an audience that wants exactly that kind of game, but that audience isn't me.
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.