I can't say I enjoyed my time with SUPERHOT, which is a bummer since I really thought that the length of the game was indicative of how polished the end result would be and of how refined the gameplay was. I didn't find the time mechanic to be particularly interesting, nor the surrounding framing device, so there wasn't much in that game for me. It might be a bit reductionist, but I fear that SUPERHOT might be almost any shooter with a variable time scale.
I Keep Having This Dream is a delightful little game that I would keep playing to completion if my plate wasn't already full as-is with other games to look at. It's a roguelike puzzle game where you place tiles in order to get to the exit of a series of increasingly difficult levels while followed by an entity called The Nemesis. You level up and find new gear, you unlock new enemies and new events to hinder and help you and you try to get as far as you can. It's great!
Concrete Jungle is a weird little game where you're trying to build a city using cards from a deck that improve or worsen tiles on a grid. The goal of each level is to collect enough points on each column to advance the board forward, losing you lives if you can't figure out how to clear them. The addition of multiple characters with skill trees and card unlocks as you level up is nice, but I found the game too difficult and a bit too random to be enjoyable for me.
A Dark Room is half an idle game, half an RPG and both part aren't that great. You start from nothing and build up to having a bunch of people working under you, then you go explore the world with increasingly better stats and random events occur from time to time. It's an interesting game to be sure, but I stopped having fun with it when the idle elements became too slow to build up to unlocking anything new and I can't say I cared much about the narrative either.
Miitomo is as good as the amount you care about your online friends and what they think about things. There's not much in it otherwise besides some light Mii customization and the only mini-game included is pretty terrible. It's more of a social app than a game, but I enjoy using it almost daily because, like I said opening this review, it's only entertaining and relevant if you care about that kind of stuff, and I do!
Besides being a grab at people's desire for more Kingdom Hearts, KHXU isn't much in terms of a game. It's full of free to play mechanics that I dislike - mainly fusing stuff and getting random items in exchange for the premium currency - but I've gotta say that the kingdom hearts feel is there. With some retooling this could've been a 'real' game that I would've cared about as an entry in the KH franchise, but besides being a grab for fan attention, it's a bit disappointing.
Tap Tycoon has some trappings from Venture Capitalist - upgrading your revenue generating items will improve their speed and percentage-wise value - and being allowed to buy helpers that automatically collect stuff for you, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I did VC. The idea of old-school tapping a bunch on the screen to collect trace amounts of cash isn't that fun and in the grand scheme of things, you're better off generating passive revenue in these kind of games. There's some 'war' aspect where you send soldiers to fight for your country and some card system, but both were obtuse and confusing in their own ways.
Grim Dawn is the spiritual successor to Titan Quest, an Action RPG that I've played for a great number of hours back in the days. Backed from their own website, then on kickstarter, it came out only a short while ago and I've managed to play through most of it as two different classes. It's a really neat game full of interesting mechanics that keep the genre fresh and leave the nostalgia simmering below the surface. I had a ton of fun with it, even if - as usual - some aspects did leave me a bit frustrated and could've been ironed out a little.
Victor Vran is a great game, it's the follow up to the Incredible Adventures of Van Hellsing that I always wanted, an Action RPG with tons of contents, reasons to explore the arsenal at your disposal, challenges, crafting, loot and a weird almost moba-like core mechanic. I completed the game in about 18 hours, but that's mainly because I messed around all the challenges and secrets to find before finally going to that last boss, I had a really good time with it.
SquareSpace ate my Frontier Defense review.
It's a neat tower defense cross idle iOS game, the premium currency is fast to get and there's plenty of stuff to do, heroes and shooting units to upgrade and buttons to tap in order to attack and unleash special abilities. I had a fun time with it.
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.