Iconoclasts is a delightful metroidvania that reminded me of a bunch of neat feelings plucked from other games combined together to create this stylish and interesting adventure platformer. Going around with your giant wrench, you fight enemies, solve puzzles and collect things while advancing a riveting story with pretty interesting characters and foes to defeat. I had a good time with it! I found some of the puzzles a bit fiddly and the upgrade system to be too thin, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Inbento is a delightful puzzle game where you need to replicate a target ‘bento box’ with a few pieces in your own box. You switch, move and duplicate food items until you solve the puzzle, then move on. It’s very simple, but also very relaxing, without any stress and the core mechanics are very good. It’s one of these reviews where there is not much to say because the whole experience is well-made and self-contained in a way that makes too long a review a bit pointless. For a little premium game, I totally recommend inbento!
Rebel Inc is the spiritual successor to Plague Inc, a game about infecting the whole world with a deadly virus. In this version of the strategy genre, you have to manage a region of the world in turmoil after a war and get to 100% stability in order to win. To do so, you have a wide range of upgrades you can buy and tactics to deploy, especially when insurgents decide to come into play and require you to act militarily as well. I had an okay time with this game but ultimately found it was too much of a numeric mess with so much data that I just couldn’t process it all and had to make uninformed decisions, which never feels great.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Civilization games. They’re the kind of games I just can get into for endless hours without a care in the world, without going to sleep even if I should, just clicking away at the ‘next turn’ button until my plans either come to fruition or the whole game comes crashing down on me. Of course, I’m not a -great- Civilization player, I just go for the easy-ish difficulty and try to min-max my civilizations into getting one of the various types of victories you can get. Nonetheless, I had a blast playing Civilization VI and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone that has even just an inkling of passion for strategy games.
Knighthood is a mobile RPG with a great look, fairly simple but engaging mechanics and way too many layers of micro-transactions, currencies and other cruft layered on it. You play a ‘Rage Knight’ fighting your way through a land of monsters, collecting gear, leveling up, summoning powerful heroes and trying to keep track of all the activities you can do. I had a nice time with it (never hit a wall where I needed to spend currency) and would’ve played more, but ultimately lost interest.
Looking at an old game like World Of Warcraft Classic is always, in theory, a balancing act. These old games exist to tickle our nostalgia bones and in some cases serve as formative works and warnings for the future game designers among us. Even by keeping that in mind, this is still a product being offered to play today, so I put on my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and dreaded going back to the old school World of Warcraft. After going at it for a while, my conclusions are that it’s still a somewhat enjoyable game but ultimately a snapshot of a different time where I had way much time for MMOs and lower expectations of what the genre could do.
Idle Crafting is a depressingly badly balanced idle game with a nifty style and a cute premise. What if you destroyed blocks in order to gather materials that you then use to craft tools to make you better at destroying blocks? In theory, that’s fine and fun. In practice this game is an ad-fest with blocks getting so difficult to destroy that you need to leave the game and come back later to upgrade your character and automatically-attacking pet friends. What I want from idle games are reasons to stay there and play, not reasons to put them down extremely quickly, and Idle Crafting gives me plenty from the second category.
Action RPGs are my favorite kind of games. I could play them forever if unstopped. I have over 3000 hours easily in ‘recent’ ARPGs and I’m always willing to try new ones. When I heard about Wolcen, I really wanted to dive in, but reports of bugs, weird balance issues and other wonkiness kept me at bay… for about a week. After 45 hours I can safely report that Wolcen needs some more work before it gets to a point where I could easily recommend it to everyone, but they clearly had a running start, being inspired by other ARPGs as it is while making interesting design decisions on their own, so they’ll probably get there. Regardless, I still had a good time with it!
Deep Town is a pretty interesting little idle game where you dig, create items with the resources you find, fight some underground enemies and collect upgrades to create new stuff to keep the whole process going. I found many systems and core tenants of the game to be fun and engaging, but sadly the whole affair is packaged in a free-to-play model that means it sacrifices much of what could make it great in order to sell you premium resources, turning it into a disappointing wait-fest.
TASTEE: Lethal Tactics profoundly disappointed me. From strange technical issues to an overly complicated introduction, what really did me in was the core gameplay that absolutely made no sense to me. In this strategy game, you move units around while planning your actions in order to complete missions and ‘play’ your turns at your own pace. In theory, this is really cool - and the game’s tutorial made the whole process seem really interesting with the many ways you could watch turns play out before picking the right one. In practice, the actual game uses fog of war in a very aggressive way that turns any odds of having fun into a trial-and-error slog.
Arknights is an interesting take on the mobile gacha game where the gameplay is a tower defense instead of being an idle RPG or a slight tactics game. I had an okay time with it, but didn’t stick with the game long enough to see the depth of what it could offer. I was repelled almost immediately by the whole ‘free mobile game’ feeling that permeates everything about it. The endless menus, seemingly infinite number of different currencies to buy, grind and use to upgrade vague stats and skills. It’s too bad, because tower defense games are one of my favorite genres, and this could’ve been neat!
Graveyard Keeper is a neat twist on the farming simulator genre where instead of a proper farm - although you can have a small one - you run a graveyard. Filled with way too many things to do as these games are, I had a really good time with it, up to the point where the volume of systems stacking on top of each other came crashing down on my impatience to complete the next tasks I would need to progress through the story. If you have infinite time and love slowly going through systems, I highly recommend Graveyard Keeper.
Glitchskier is a simple iOS arcade shooter oozing with aesthetics. While the gameplay is perfectly fine, I found it a bit too shallow to give it that much more time. What I really liked about this game was everything surrounding the core gameplay loop of shooting around and collecting powerups, but I still had a good time. I kinda wish there was more to it, some kind of secret metagame or story, but oh well!
Cosmic Star Heroine is an RPG that has clear Chrono Trigger influences made by the studio that brought us Breath Of Death VI and Chtulu Saves the world a few years ago. I really enjoyed these games and I also really enjoyed CSH, a game about a special agent in a futuristic security force that gets tangled into a conspiracy and has to fight her way out of it with her fellow party members. The battle system and other mechanics in this game are pretty good and the story was fairly engaging. I also liked the music and some of the graphical choices they made, so I’d totally recommend it to everyone!
I’ve never been the biggest Elder Scrolls fan but some stuff stuck with me with the other versions of these games; The sense of exploration, character building and the story. The combat always felt a bit too random for me, so I went with the ranged options - or just trying to diplomacy my way out of most situations. Elder Scroll Blades on mobile devices is the distilled essence of walking along linear maps to try and accomplish cookie cutter quests while doing a ton of combat. Not my cup of tea, even if as far as mobile first person games go, this wasn’t terrible.
The first CSD game was pretty great, a ballet of specific key presses in the correct order punctuated by the sting of frustration one feels when they made a mistake while playing an unforgiving game. I had a less good experience with the iOS version but I still fondly remembered the first game. Fastforward to a couple of weeks ago when I started playing the second one and wow does this sequel build up on the original game in fun ways and with very addictive new level structures and hooks. It’s one of these rare games that I review for more than a few hours because I just want to keep playing, Cook, Serve, Delicious 2 is simply amazing and I’m super excited to see what comes next in the franchise.
Spaceplan is a strange but interesting story-based idle game that uses idle gameplay only as a story conduit where you are in a spaceship and need to figure out what happened to the universe by using the power of potatoes. Starting with small solar panels and ending with massive canons shooting energy-creating drones down at planets, I found the actual act of playing the game took too long and that it wasn’t super fun idle mechanics. Otherwise I was pretty curious where the story could go so that kept me going, but ultimately the ending also left me unsatisfied.
Hyper Light Drifter is a more action-oriented zelda-like where you explore a large world, fighting through difficult challenges in order to figure out the secrets of the place you are in. With a really kickass visual style and a good mix of challenges with rewarding exploration, I thought I’d be way more into it than I was in the end. I had some trouble with the controls and the difficulty of some segments of the game that ultimately left me frustrated. It’s a shame because I managed to tough it out for about a quarter of the game.
Almost A Hero is half an idle game, half a free RPG that combines mechanics from idlers with a surprising amount of depth; I wasn’t sure what I was getting into - since mobiles RPGs are pretty hit-or-miss for me, but this one was great! I probably would’ve stuck with it for way longer if I didn’t want to go down my list of iOS games to play. With a ton of things to unlock, a very generous currency progression and some interesting game mechanics that unlock themselves after a long while, Almost A Hero is real neat.
I can see the brilliance in Return Of The Obra Dinn, a first person puzzle game that puts you in charge of identifying all passengers of a boat just returning to port, figuring out how they were killed, and who - or what - caused their deaths. With a novel framing of being part of an insurance company and doing all of this for insurance reasons - using a mystical watch that lets you see the moment of death of any corpse - you navigate the four levels of the boat, watch death scenes, re-watch them, try to figure out who’s who and - if you’re not me - piece together things on your own. I had an okay time with this game that turned sour the moment when I had no new scenes to view and was left to my own devices. I just couldn’t figure anything out, so I resorted to cheating. But this is not the only way this game can go and I still recognize how brilliant it is, I just couldn’t get through the whole thing by myself.