The Witness is a first person puzzle game about solving puzzles on boards where you mostly draw a line from one point to another, following rules divided in themes - by physical location, mostly - that the game never explicitly tells you. You have to figure out from very simple puzzles what the logic behind it is and from that solve harder puzzles until you complete everything in an area and move on to the next mechanic. I had an interesting time with that game, it's not perfect and I'm unsure about the whole first person movement aspect of it, but it's a good puzzle experience that I would entirely recommend.
Hex is a pretty nifty CCG with a cool single-player component built like an RPG campaign; You build a character, collect cards and skill points to place in a tree, you complete quests - mostly by playing card games - and you explore dungeons, fight difficult tricky battles and improve your decks and its cards with gear and special abilities. I haven't touched the multiplayer of the game at all, only playing the single-player side of it, and I still had a great time with it, way better than I had with Heartstone back when I played it. If you're interested in an original spin on computer card games, Hex is one for you.
The Sequence is a neat little puzzle game on iOS where you have to bring dots from one circle to another using a sequence of mechanisms you lay down on a grid. Some of these pull or push, others will rotate things, some invert the action of mechanisms they target, others just shut them down. It's all a matter of following a proper sequence of action and figuring out where the pieces go in order to solve each puzzle. I had some frustrations with it, but overall it was a very good experience and a mighty fine puzzle game.
Trimps is a great idle game; It's got everything you need from one of these, progression, interesting choices to make, lots of unlockables with multi-tiered upgrades and challenges, time consuming activities, a simple and clean gameplay loop and a few new ideas that make it stand out from the other idle games of this world. This is currently my idle game of choice and I play it everyday, managing my Trimps to continue progressing through the game while also doing other things. It's a really neat thing.
Puzzle Craft 2, if anything, made me uninstall it and go back to Puzzle Craft 1 instead. It's not a terrible game and it improves/adds complexity in many aspects over the original, but all of this comes at the cost of terrible free to play mechanics, less gameplay for free, various ways to nudge the player into giving the game money and an overall sense of disappointment with most systems in place. Almost every new cool thing they've added comes with a balance of desire to uninstall the game, so that's not very fun. (Also I'm sorry, my iPad ate my screenshots)
Sneaky Sneaky is probably not a bad game, but it's certainly not the game that I thought it would be; On the surface, this is a sneaking game where you move on a grid to try and go to the end of dungeons while avoiding enemy patrols, traps and other obstacles, collecting jewels and killing foes along the way. The core concept is quite interesting, but the execution is flawed as the game is played in real time. Whenever you get spotted by the enemy, the game switches to a turn-based mode that I wish was the whole game, really.
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.