Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic has the potential to be a 5/5 in my book because of it's neat systems, focus on buffs/debuffs/status effects, a wide range of unlockable rewards and other challenges and a large number of skills and items to use. Sadly, poor balancing in many spots, lack of information to focus player choice and other oddities made me stop playing after finishing the first campaign and rolling a new party. It's still pretty fun, and good!
Devious Dungeon 2 is okay as an iOS platformer with RPG mechanics. It's fairly balanced, the difficulty curve goes up in a manageable way and although coins are sold, you don't really need to buy anything with real money. That's probably one of my biggest issue with the game, in a weird way, there isn't much to spend your money on in order to get an easier time with the game. But that put aside, it's a pretty fun one.
Hero Siege reminds me of a 2d top-down version of Diablo where all you do is fight wave after wave of monsters. It's a pretty enjoyable game with a few weird design decisions and a few annoying bugs here and there. I had a pretty good time with it, so if killing stuff forever to get loot to kill more stuff sounds like something appealing to you, it's probably a safe bet. Not entirely twin-stick shooter and not entirely rogue-like, there's a bit for everyone in HS.
Kingdom Rush Origins is an okay follow up to all the other KR games and it's entertaining enough as a tower defense title, albeit not saved by different towers, enemies and heroes. I suppose that's the main issue with these games; How do you keep making them and keep making them feel fresh and new? There are some things they could do, like add more tiers of tower upgrades, or tweak the hero system, or change the powers you can use, but it doesn't mean that KRO isn't fun to play. It just doesn't feel very new.
There isn't a simple recipe for idle games, but they have to follow some basic rules in order to be fun. You need to be able to go almost infinitely and it needs to scale. The things you do manually in them are often more powerful than simply idling and it needs to keep your interest so you don't stop letting it run because you're bored of it. Tap Heroes doesn't do most of these things, and it's a weird idle game that couldn't keep my interest.
Dragon Hills is an 'endless runner' type of game where you go through some hills with the titular dragon, collect cash doing so and use that cash in order to unlock upgrades that will help you do better the next time around. Clunky controls and uninteresting upgrades made this game something I didn't want to spend more time on than I had to. It's not terrible but it's also not very fun, so you can pass this one.
Characterizing itself as a RPG, I think that Desktop Dungeons is more of a puzzle game than something else. The core concept of the game is fighting through a ton of dungeons, each time with new characters of various races and classes by killing enemies, finding gear and potions, using skills and unlocking thing for your city which will help you in the following runs. In practice, most of my runs were trainwrecks, I had few options I could actually use and the game felt like a puzzle that couldn't be won except by dumb luck.
Twisty Hollow is a delightful little puzzle game, I have close to nothing bad things to say about it and I'd recommend to all iOS owners that also are puzzle fans. The goal is quite simple, you rotate three circles (one representing workers, another representing tools and the third one representing materials) in order to fulfill requests from people. For instance, someone wanting bacon will require you to match a pig, a knife, and a butcher, but as the game goes and more complex recipes come into play you might have to match a fishing rod with the bait to get fish, then the knife, fish and chef to get sushi. The game keeps on adding new mechanics so it's fun to go through the motions.
Outland is a really cool idea and a really good game as well. It's a puzzle platformer where you can switch between red and blue, while you're red, you can jump on red platforms and blue bullets can hurt you, when you're blue, you can interact with blue objects and red bullets hurt you. You also can only damage enemies of the opposite color. These simple ideas, added to a metroidvania shell with a very neat artstyle combine to form such a thing as a 'bullet hell platformer' that plays well and should be tried.
For some reason, this interesting strategy game on iOS didn't display ads properly at first, when I got it. The IAP to get rid of them was there, but I never saw any. Maybe if I had, it would've gotten a 3/5, depending on how frequent they would have been. But I still say it's an interesting game because grid-based strategy products aren't that abundant on iOS - even if the platform should suit them well - and the team building with new units you unlock after completing certain missions is a pretty good drive to keep playing.
Disregarding the risk to repeat the beginning of my TIAVH2 review, let me state that the first Van Helsing game was a pleasant surprise that came out of nowhere, a different Action RPG that had a few cool systems and all-around solid gameplay in general. Let me also state that the second game wasn't as good, bogged down with weird ideas - separate classes, almost identical systems, a dumb cliffhanger, but that I still enjoyed it when it almost came out of nowhere. I had forgotten that there would be a third one, and I wish they hadn't made it - at least, not like that. It's bad, really bad.
Bloons is a bit weird in the tower defense genre. You don't go through a specific set of maps, instead you can attempt any of them at any difficulties you've unlocked. You unlock better towers with a global level - and then you buy them during maps with cash you get from popping balloons. Some of the maps are weird and there are so many towers that it feels a bit like diluting the overall use of each types. I still had a fun time with it, but the lack of a clear progression made me stop after a while.
TERA is another free to play MMORPG like many others. There isn't much separating it from the rest of them and it feels a bit bland and boring in many ways. I've spent some time with it and didn't completely hate my time, but I also wasn't chomping at the proverbial bits to play more of it and switched to another game when the opportunity presented itself.
Leaving behind my fears of moving from opinions to hyperbole, I have to say that FFRK represents one pillar of mobile gaming that is turning this side of my review section into a runaway train of 1/5s and 2/5s. Around the Final Fantasy nostalgia core, around the microtransactions, the energy timers, the roulettes to buy stuff, the fusion and the weird impenetrable systems designed to make money might have been an okay game only if the designers hadn't chosen to make this game excessively reliant on online.
Far from me wanting to launch uPlay in order to run a steam game - and get performance issues for my trouble - Child of Light is a really good RPG that reminds me of Grandia and other games of that style - one with a time bar where you act after a certain point and can get knocked back and do the same to your enemies - mixed with a stylish 2d adventure where you fly around collecting items and solving puzzles. I'm not a big fan of poetry as the base for video game writing, but the actual game is pretty fun to play.
SwapQuest is quite interesting with it's core systems and the ways you can upgrade your character and improve it, but ultimately the act of playing it is boring, mostly because of the main idea that you walk along a path made out of tiles and you have to switch them around in order to progress forward; a needed progress because of the wall of darkness that follows you. Doing so, you fight monsters and pick up chests and things like that.
Much like Ragnarok Online of last week, DFO is a mess from another era, a Korean MMO that got brought back more or less into the future that I've played for quite a while. Unlike RO though, DFO is fun to play and while it's quite obtuse with it's mechanics and systems, the core beat-them-up merged with RPG and the straightforwardness of most quests made it a fun - albeit mindless - experience that I would recommend if you have some time to burn away.
TouchTone has a much interesting framing device than the actual gameplay most of the time and the relative boredom I had while moving move rows and columns of lines in order to reflect beams on targets outbalanced my desire to see the story through. Which is a shame since it seemed at least interesting and novel, setting you as this spy going through communications in order to assess whether someone is relevant to national security or not. I'm a bit disappointed by it.
When I was in high school, Ragnarok Online was one of the games I almost played religiously. All MMOs of that time were typically weird, in the pre-world of warcraft days, mostly coming from non-english speaking countries and featuring endless grinds, obtuse mechanics, sometimes harsh death penalties, a low potential for custom characters and the level of interaction you needed to have with other players was more or less random depending on the game. RO was fine for it's time, since I didn't know anything better. Seeing as it was on Steam, I decided to give it another shot. This is a situation where I grew up and the game didn't.
When I think of 'mining' games, much like the Motherload of old, I think about digging down to find valuables that you sell for various upgrades in order to be able to dig deeper for more valuables that can be sold for more upgrades, ad infinitum. If you're telling me that your game is a 'mining' game but with multiple levels and you need to get to the bottom of each mines in order to continue, I might find that a bit weird, but the potential is still there for a fun game. Obviously, the more you'd progress, the tougher the levels would be, so you would need upgrades. Pocket Mine 2 takes a tiny sliver of that idea and fills the rest with nonsense.