Terraria meets exploring island on your ship with your crew, fighting enemy pirates, finding treasures and dying of scurvy, Pixel Piracy is an odd one. I definitely think it's an interesting game, but some of its mechanics are a bit on the cumbersome side, some of its systems are bugged in ways that hurt the player way too much, and it's progression leaves a bit to be desired. That being said, I still had a great time with it and managed to overlook its few flaws.
Adventure Time Card Wars is an okay CCG. It uses some tropes of other card games with a few twists and some dubious design choices that made me scratch my head about their presence in the game. Some expected iOS game bloat - energy timers, premium currencies and random card packs - bummed me down a little, but otherwise I had fun with it. I still know nothing of Adventure Time, but it sure added some flavor to the cards and characters. Maybe I would've enjoyed it a tiny bit more if I knew what this was all about.
Crypt of the NecroDancer is a delightful rhythm-based roguelike. I had a ton of fun with it, but I couldn't make it very far. The loop of constantly dying and restarting over a bit stronger kept me going for a good while and I'd recommend this original game to a wide range of players, from both the side of rhythm enthusiasts and roguelike fanatics. I had some issue with the controls and still had issues with the difficulty at the end, but these are minor flaws in face of the positive things I have to say about it.
Production values won't save your flawed product; That's the lesson Fallout Shelter keeps on teaching us. Okay, it might be making tons of money - the fallout name and setting will bring users in, for sure, even if they had never played one of these free to play timesink money grabbing schemes yet - and it might look and feel better than most of these shameless Skinner boxes, but I'll have nothing to do with it. This is farmville in a post-apocalyptic setting.
Grimrock 2 is a well made RPG with roots in a past for which I have no nostalgia. The arcane mechanics it uses, combined with spotty systems that feel weird and unpolished - all of that mixed with the relative difficulty - prevented me from getting super invested in it. I had an okay time and a few of the things I did were fun, but overall I wasn't sad to move on.
One More Dash is a pretty simple iOS game, but it's completely okay for what it tries to do. You tap on the screen so your marker dashes from one circle to another, scoring points, completing missions and buying new color schemes for a few things in the game by dodging spikes, bouncing on walls and picking up special currency dots. Not much to say about that!
Gauntlet isn't half-bad, I quite enjoyed my time with it. I have never played the original arcade classic, but this version is a tough little action-rpg where you kill tons of enemies, dodge traps and solve simple puzzles in a dual joystick shooter-like style of gameplay with light character customization. The lack of real progression and the clunkiness of the controls in some spots made me put it down, but I still had a good experience and would shoot the food again.
ZombieBucket is a puzzle game that suffers from a very specific frustration-related flaw; It's lack of precision. It's a bit like playing Tetris, but your blocks are controlled by physics instead of always falling the same way. "Matching three" isn't exactly revolutionary here and the addition of timer-based energy system, daily bonuses and the ability to buy and upgrade your buckets isn't exactly what improves the core gameplay for me.
I'm still a bit confused with The Beginner's Guide because I can see two explanations for it; Either you have to take it at face value, in which case the game is a bit creepy in spots and maybe passes way over my head, or you can see it as a literal work of fiction; a meta commentary over game development, in which case I feel that it's great and powerful at what it's doing. Since I really have no way to know, I'll average these thoughts out and summarize them by saying that TBG is a great thing.
KoPAP2 is too greedy for its own good. It stacks even more gold sinks on top of its already money-hungry systems and then adds randomness to the mix to a frustrating result. I don't mind getting gold to buy the special furniture (like in the first game) or to buy more party members, even the seemingly infinite moneysink that 'equipment' represents isn't too bad in the long run, but everything else almost requiring you to grind combined with weird balance made me wary of the game pretty soon. Which is a shame because I have completed the first one.
Undertale is amazing. It's a funny, whimsical, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes disturbing turn-based RPG with a flair that I cannot help but compare with Earthbound in some ways. The strength of its plot, the complex story you can experience multiple times, the depth of it's mechanics (pretty cool wario-ware battle system) and the humor make this a game you won't want to skip if you're a fan of any of these things.
I vaguely remember playing Doodle God a while back; you would mix elements like earth and fire to create more and more elements. The concept worked because there is plenty you can make using your imagination and a few basic items and the 'goal' of the game to finding all possible combinations felt okay. Now with Doodle Tanks, you have to fumble around aimlessly with tank parts, engineers and other doodads, making matches that don't make sense, basically trial-and-error-ing the whole thing.
I'm a big Puzzle Quest fan, but I can't say that I enjoy roguelikes - or the FTL model - very much. This made my relationship with Ironcast a bittersweet one; Some of its core mechanics are pretty fun, others are kinda infuriating, and there's this inevitability aspect that stresses you in time and reduces the number of actions you can do in a set game that leaves some of the fun aspects of match-3 RPGs behind.
I've spent so much time on Adventure Capitalist. Countless hours tapping things to upgrade them so I would get enough money to buy more things and upgrades to get more money to do that ad infinitum. Then you reset your things but you get even more money next time. And the numbers go really really high and you can buy things to make the numbers go even faster. It's basically the only iOS game I've played so far that made me watch its ads gleefully - because it made the numbers go faster, and watching a 30s ad is always worth it to do that. If you like idle game - which I'm not sure what that says about you, or me - you gotta try this one.
Apotheon is a bit weird. It has the trappings of a metroidvania, but some of its elements feel more like Dark Souls-ish systems, and the basic controls didn't feel good to me at all. I gave it a fair try, but I didn't enjoy it very much. I'll take a few seconds to say that it has a cool graphical style and potentially neat concepts, however.
Sonic Runners is trash. I really hated it. And I didn't even play it that much. There was some loading, some menus, some clutter. Maybe if it only had been a sonic endless runner without fifteen layers of free to play stuff layered onto it. I'm sure Big The Cat is in it also. It also ran terribly on my iPad. Oh well.
Does anyone remember what D3 was like when it came out? What a shame, what a bunch of wasted potential. I vividly remember not being unable to complete any kind of end-game fight since enemies overpowered me by a huge difference. There was also no good loot to find, everything 'nice' I had at that point was bought at the Auction House using gold. Also enemies regenerated when you died, so fights were terribly boring. There was nothing to do except run the story over and over... Heck, I remember when hanging around Tyrael in Act 3 and leave him kill stuff was a viable strategy! The diablo 3 expansion fixed most of these problems, and 2.3 is just another step in a path of greatness.
Trulon is a classic turn-based RPG where you fight using cards that represent your different moves. You go along through a story, fighting enemies and collecting cards to build your deck, you equip various pieces of gear and complete quests. You walk around on a world map. It's neat and well-built, it also uses the strengths of iOS devices in the form of the card-based battle system. That being said, it felt way too slow for me, and that slowness turned into boredom.
Infested Planet is a neat little tower defense/action game where you control a bunch of soldiers and you need to complete objectives that most often than not involve destroying alien bases and taking them over while hordes of enemies move toward you. I had a good time with it, even if I'm not a fan of the upgrade system/general and that gameplay often felt confusing.
Magic Touch: Wizard For Hire is a game about drawing symbols on your iOS device in order to burst balloons. It's a pretty fun game! Although the core mechanics are very enjoyable, I didn't play it for too long because of a lack of clear progression, luck-based difficulty spikes and the abusive usage of full screen video ads in a free game - an eternal debate I'm having between myself and the iOS game space.