Time Clickers is an idle game where you have to shoot at cubes to destroy them. Doing so nets you money, which you use to upgrade your pistol and to buy other guns that auto-shoot at cubes to destroy them. Doing so nets you more money, which you use to upgrade all of that stuff until you get to a level where the cubes have so much health that you can't get through anymore. But never fear! You get special Time Cubes at certain levels, and you use them to upgrade many stats, in order to be stronger, to be able to destroy more cubes. You get the idea!
Noodles! is a mighty fun game, I've spent a bunch of hours with it and never did its mechanics fail to amuse me. That being said, there was too much of it, I've stopped at about 40% of the game being over, and what was left to do was more of the same. Some games overstay their welcomes and without adding new mechanics or without metaphorical carrots to dangle in front of me, I had to stop before I got really bored with the same puzzles over and over.
SkyForge did not grab my attention at all. It might have been a neat free MMO, but I really don't enjoy the combat system - and what else is there, really? You might be able to change jobs at-will and some of the systems might be neat but if I don't enjoy killing things, there is not much left for me to do.
You Must Build A Boat is a perfect iOS game, it's build from the ground up to work on touch devices, it has no in-app purchases, no timers and no ads, it could be a bigger product on a portable console without much changes. The #1 block-sliding upgrade-buying boat-building game of 2015 was a blast and with only a few blemishes to an otherwise amazing title, I've only had fun with it and probably would've kept playing if the New Game+ carrot had been more enticing.
Valkyria Chronicles is a weird mix between a turn-based strategy game and a third person shooter set in fictional Europe during a parallel world World War. With plenty of content, neat style and somewhat deep systems, it could've been a great game for me, sadly it doesn't go over "good" since the mix of strategy and shooting created a bunch of frustrating messes that I didn't enjoy slogging through at all.
Tadpole Tap is a simple little game where you're a tadpole, and you tap on things to stick your tongue out and grab them. By doing so, you accumulate flies that can be used to unlock new upgrades and different tadpoles. It's an okay game, I suppose, but it didn't grab my attention at all. After playing for about an hour, completing a number of runs during that time, I put it down and moved on to something else.
In this latest PoE expansion, a few things change, a few are added and much is left as-is. It's still a good occasion to come back and play some more Path of Exile and I'm having a good time with it, but PoE:A doesn't solve all my problems with this game. In the crowded realm of action RPGs, it's very hard to strike a good balance between complexity and fun and I feel that PoE is leaning too much on complexity while keeping the game a bit too obtuse and difficult to fully enjoy.
Century City is an okay idle game where you build a city and spend time by tapping in a mine to get more money to build you city. It's not the worst idle game I've played ever, but it's a bit boring. There isn't much to do besides tapping inside the mine - and sometimes playing some very simple mini-games - so it didn't grab my attention for super long. The isometric style is kinda cool, however.
GemCraft is great, I remember the old days when I actually paid for the complete version of such a game on Kongregate, something that was unheard of for me back in that time - paying for flash games - but it's a nice tower defense game that might last you a long while. There's so much stuff in it and it all is based on solid core mechanics and titular gems. It's not an entirely flawless game, but after you get over some bumps in difficulty and some clunky UI, you'll have a solid game to keep you playing and unlock stuff, level, and get better at it.
Masters of the Masks is a confusing and convoluted free to play turn-based RPG where you spend stamina in order to fight guys, only to die on the fourth level because the balance is out of wack. To do so, you find materials to create masks and gear and you spin wheels and wait for a few minutes in order for crafting to complete - or you can always pay to make it faster. I didn't have much fun with it.
I'm probably going to give Beside a second look somewhere in the future if it gets massively updated or something of the sort, because I didn't enjoy my time with what's currently out there right now. Besiege is a puzzle game of sorts where you build siege engines out of many different parts in order to complete objectives, you have a large range of choices for parts and control over them and the objectives are also varied. That being said, I got quickly frustrated after getting stuck very early on with no help from the game at all.
HOOK is pretty great. It's a puzzle game with a fixed set of hand-crafted trials where you have to retract hooks scattered in a predetermined fashion. This game is very good at teaching you its mechanics as you go through and it adds new and interesting things over time. I had a great experience with it and blasted through it in a few days. I have almost nothing bad to say about it and that's always a good feeling.
I had never played a Fable game before and this looked like a good thing to try. I had heard much about these games, how they were ambitious in some ways and failed in others, and while I didn't know what I was getting into, I thought it would be some kind of third person action RPG with farting. It was more or less that, but the action RPG part didn't feel great and I also didn't feel much involved in the farting aspect of the game. I know this game is also quite old, but there's not much I can do about it, playing it only now.
This is a bad game. If you ignore the core, the mechanics around it are encrusted with layers upon layers of systems, resources, microtransactions and other purchases, unlockable content and levels, things that need to be added carefully to not spoil the broth. But then, if you look at the main game, this just adds insult to injury, as the core gameplay is clunky, unbalanced and not fun.
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.