Dash Quest is a weird game, on paper it's a straightforward RPG where all you do is dash in one direction and kill enemies by hitting them with your weapon, cast spell and use items, all in order to get gold and complete challenges in service of buying better weapons and getting more options to kill enemies and repeat the cycle anew. In practice it's a mess of gameplay modes, in-app purchases, abysmally slow progression and buggy mechanics, I didn't have much fun with it.
Path of Exile is still a 5/5 game in my book, but this expansion by itself isn't that great. I'm not a huge fan of precise trap-dodging in action RPGs, especially in ones where lag spikes are quite frequent on my end. Luckily, dodging stuff isn't the only new mechanic added in PoE:A, with subclasses to unlock, more gear to find and more ways to find it, this adds another layer on top of an already pretty great game while bringing a few more bits of new content.
I really didn't enjoy Downwell. After hearing many good things about it I've decided to give it a look, but a few hours in and I couldn't play it anymore. I recognize that it's a well-made thing, but I'm not enjoying it at all, and I think that to make it a fun game, a few things would've been required for this arcade experience to really shine.
I didn't exactly know that Soda Dungeon was going to be an idle game and I was pleasantly surprised when I hit the sweet spot of the gameplay loop. You hire adventurers to run through a dungeon, get gold and items in order to make the next batch of adventurers go further while allowing you to buy upgrades for your tavern and unlock new classes as you go. Then after a while you reset the game and start over with some bonuses. You can manually control the battles, but otherwise, everything is automated. It's a great game and I can't wait to continue playing it.
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.