Mucho Taco is a bad idle game on iOS that first might have been a cool cookie-clicker rip-off but instead does nothing new or interesting with the genre and eschews some of the things that I would expect in an idle game. With bad core controls, slow progression and random consumable items, it's not a game I'd recommend to anyone.
Dead Rising 3 felt way more arcade-y to me compared to what I remember from the second game; You had to die and restart from the beginning in order to improve your chances on your subsequent runs. Dead Rising 3 is nothing of the sort, I've managed to play a good chunk of the game without ever dying - although there were some tight spots here and there - and besides a few bosses that took way more punishment than regular zombie hordes, the game was pretty easily in general. I still had fun with it, going from objective to objective, building weird weapons and exploring around the streets of Los Perdidos.
I absolutely adored Hitman Go when it came out a while back, and now Square Enix Montréal did it again with the "GO" treatment over the Tomb Raider franchise. They did it quite well, keeping the spirit of exploration and puzzle solving alive and well while making the whole experience feel like a board game with very intricate pieces. Perhaps because of technical issues - due to old hardware? Hard to say - my experience wasn't as smooth as I would've preferred. Some small choices on the way puzzles were designed did frustrate me a little as well, but overall I really enjoyed this game.
There is a really neat free to play third person action-RPG at the core of Warframe. Something that might have stuck with me for hundreds of hours in other circumstances. Almost everything was there; The mechanics were solid, the core gameplay was fun, there seemed to be enough customization/progression options and overall this grindy feel that came from the whole thing made me think this was going to be my next 'filler' game; A game that I'd play whenever I had free time with nothing else to do. Sadly, it all broke down after a while and the came couldn't keep me interested a single second more.
Tomb of Tyrants is a weird mix, on one hand you have a puzzle game where matching four and more of a type of tiles produces resources for you to use in building and buying units and floors for your dungeon. On the other hand you have a dungeon building game where adventurers try to kill your tyrant and only your dungeon and creatures can stop them. I felt that both aspects of this game didn't work perfectly well together, although I had some fun with ToT. No matter how well the game worked, it was still a very interesting idea.
Beat da Beat is a great game on iOS, it's a bullet-hell like shooter where music dictates when enemies and bullets are going to spawn. With a great soundtrack, precise controls and a few good customization systems layered over it, I had a ton of fun with this game. It's not entirely perfect, but if you enjoy shooters or music games, this one is a custom-tailored experience for that platform, and it works.
Devilian made me feel gross; Devilian made me feel like I had clicked on one of these stupid 'come play with us my lord' flash ads that would creep on the internet if I disabled ad-block for a few seconds; Presented as a free-to-play action mmorpg, my interest was piqued by the mix between Diablo-like gameplay and MMO systems. This game is not entirely without merit, but there are a few glaring flaws both in the way it plays and how it markets itself. I had a few good moments with it, but not much more. I'd rather play Path of Exile or Diablo 3 when the next season starts.
League of Legends developer Riot released this simple iOS game for a limited time - I don't think it's available anymore - as some kind of weird joke. I think that BPR is a neat little piece of LoL memorabilia in a way, and an okay game on its own, but it shows that this wasn't a 'real' product, released to actually make money in any way. It's a game where you run up and down while trying to bump into little creatures while using your rocket arm to grab them - and other enemies - in order to survive.
Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey Remastered reminds me of Bookworm Adventures, in a good way. It's a game of letters where you use a grid of tiles to make words in order to damage your opponents and find treasures. Along the way, you buy various upgrades, complete challenges and unlock new stuff. You can customize your character in many ways to fit better with your playstyle and the game gets plenty challenging and I lost many hours to it while trying to complete every objective, obtain every achievement and finish all of the elite levels. It's a really great game.
Another year of videogames, another review of my top ten favorites from this year! I only have played about 30 new games in 2015, so it wasn't too difficult to get ten of them to stand out from the others, a good mix of console and PC games, and a good distribution of genres I think. I have high hopes for 2016 - to see if a plethora of product announcements turn into actual good games - but for now, let's go down memory lane a little and muse on these games I have enjoyed.
Defense 2 follows much in the footsteps of its predecessor in the tower defense genre to bring you a game about protecting cores from aliens by building towers on their paths - sometimes even making the paths themselves. I had a good time with it, even if I was perplexed by some of its systems and had to tone the difficulty down to Easy in order to enjoy it. The story also kept me interested, which is a nice thing for a tower defense game where characters are usually not a huge presence.
Dice Mage has a cool core idea, you're a mage fighting using dice. Based on equipped gear, the numbers of your rolled throws do different things and if you roll higher than your enemy, you deal damage to them. If you don't roll high enough, you can pay some mana to re-roll. There are a few minigames and some gear to buy and equip to customize your character. It's a neat little game but too thin, with not enough meat around that cool core idea.
Ori And The Blind Forest is a neat little metroidvania with a really nice visual style. Some of its systems are quite interesting and I had a good time playing it, even if it ultimately ended in frustration towards the way this game checkpoints your progress. With RPG mechanics, exploration and some good skill-based platforming, this could have been an amazing game, but it sadly just came up short to that.
It is a bit sad when lack of greedy design choices in mobile games is enough to make me root for a title and enjoy it way more. Pac-Man 256 is pretty neat for many reasons, but the way it deals with microtransactions, free to play mechanics and the like is also very interesting and didn't impact my enjoyment of the game. While simple, it's pretty competent at what it set out to do and I had a good time with it.
Angry Birds 2 follows the pattern of many sequels to popular games by once well-meaning studios; Plants versus Zombies 2, the more recent Peggle games and all these iOS sequels of non-mobile games. It takes a cool core idea, adds free to play mechanics and other useless busywork and hopes to bank on some nostalgia here and there. There's also something a bit silly in calling a game "2" when you have made about 30 of them, but that's another story entirely. Angry Birds 2 gets a 2/5, because it's pretty bad.
The Long Siege is a neat tile-sliding game where you create soldiers, archers and mages in order to attack an opposing tower. You can also match resources to upgrade your own tower and your units as well and you defeat enemy after enemy while completing quests and encountering more difficult foes. I had an okay time with it, but I wasn't pulled into its mechanics very deeply; Instead I just matched tiles.
Castle In The Darkness is mighty tough and loves to make references to various NES games. It's a metroidvania where you play a knight going around variously difficult maps, killing enemies, getting gold and finding items. There are traps everywhere and the checkpoints are too few. If the game had allowed some kind of easier mode, I probably would've stuck with it until the very end, unfortunately the high difficulty combined with some frustration towards certain systems made me stop after a few days of playing.
BlitzKeep is a really neat iOS RPG where you fling yourself around on enemies to kill them in order to level up, collect power-ups and get strong enough to kill stronger enemies to repeat this cycle. You get gold for doing so, and you can use that gold to unlock new character classes with various abilities and upgrade your stats as well. I liked it and I wish I could've played it more, but after a very short while it just... stops. And the endless mode they've included doesn't do it at all for me.
Wormarium bums me out. It's a neat little concept, it controls fairly well and there are no in-app purchases and dubious balance decisions. There's plenty of things to unlock and a whole bunch of levels as well, unfortunately, it's way too difficult for me. I've banged my head on the same level over and over and simply couldn't finish it! What a sad way to finish playing a game, uninstalling it only because I can't progress any more.
Space Galaga International Edition is bogged down by weird controls and superfluous mechanics that overall just burden it with useless padding. The core game could be interesting - a galaga-like arcade shooter where you acquire new gear and upgrade it, with stats and pilots and a progression, but instead making you collect currency to buy and fuse stuff while you spend more time opening space chests and messing around menus trying to figure out what's useful and what's not. I thought I might have an okay time with this game, but in the end, I didn't.