Infinitode is a free tower defense game on iOS that boasts huge maps, a large skill tree with tons of upgrades, and a good number of tower and enemy types. I think the core idea is pretty interesting, but the monetization system kinda ruins the whole thing and makes it an extremely grindy endeavor that could’ve been better served in the game design sense if the game had been premium with tweaked balance. I had an okay time with it, but I just couldn’t see any light out of the grinding tunnel - and the progression was just so slow - that I stopped.
Loop Hero is a really neat roguelike that has you automatically loop around a track, fighting monsters, collecting gear and items and placing cards around the map to create forests, villages, deserts and rivers, all in order to help - and sometimes hinder - your hero get strong enough to defeat the boss of the level. With a really interesting art style, good music and some nice progression elements, I really enjoyed what I played of Loop Hero even if my interest for the game fell off near the end and I couldn’t get past the last bumps in difficulty.
Dungeon Falan is a game I feel like I’ve played a dozen of times so far in my long iOS journey; You fight enemies by sliding your finger across tiles that can be swords, shields, money or potions, accumulating resources, leveling up and damaging foes along the way. You have a wide array of stats, skills and items to help you, but ultimately your foes will overwhelm you and you’ll have to start over. This is an okay one of these, which in those times of idle games is a breath of fresh air, but some of the design decisions they took were a bit weird for me.
Stellaris is an amazing 4X space strategy game that has you lead a civilization of space explorers across the galaxy, colonizing planets, building them up, researching technologies, making choices and ultimately grow to be a powerhouse in some fashion. I had a terrific time with it and I could see myself playing it more or less forever like a Civilization title. I even bought some DLC for it because it opened up neat possibilities that weren’t in the base game - something I do fairly rarely.
Star Vikings Forever is a strange little game that felt like it was tiptoeing between being a puzzle game and a strategy RPG. You go through grid-based maps of enemies, traps and treasures, surmounting considerable odds by using your party’s skills and the enemies own attacks against themselves, while leveling up character, recruiting new ones and getting gear for them. I wish it had chosen what it wanted to be more definitely. As it stands, it was a bit frustrating no matter which way I would approach it.
Torchlight 3 didn’t grab me at all like Torchlight 2 did. I tried to enjoy it, I gave it time, but it ultimately felt like a pretty bland by-the-numbers action rpg experience that I probably won’t play again, which is a damned shame. It doesn’t really do anything new or different, and what slight deviations from the genre it does do not bring anything really fun to the genre. I still went through the game once, but couldn’t even do that a second time.
ADventure Ages is a reskin of ADventure Communism (because apparently the red scare is still real in TYOOL 2021 and made that game perform worse than they wanted) where you buy things that make things that make things. It’s just bars filling up and clicking on buttons to make them fill up. Some fill faster, others take a few minutes. I played it way too much, because the weekly events felt kinda addictive - you could get neat rewards if you played it for almost four days straight. I’m still not a big fan of the ‘population’ mechanic that hard-caps the speed at which you can progress, but you could always pay your way out of it, so I guess that’s the point.
Opus Magnum is a wonderful puzzle game by Zachtronics about creating alchemical products using reagents and tools that you can program. I didn’t get too much into the whole ‘optimization’ thing this time around, but I did beat the game and some of the optional puzzles. It was a ton of fun and I would 100% recommend it to everyone who enjoys puzzles in the slightest. The export to gif feature (which allows you to create animated gifs of your solutions) is also genius.
Exponential Idle tries something a little bit different with the idle game genre by seating its simple gameplay mechanics into a bit of lore and some heavy math stuff that I really couldn’t wrap my head around. Even with some attempts to explain everything in a tall instruction screen, I still really couldn’t figure out what was going on and just tapped everywhere. It’s a bit of a shame, because a math-based idle game could be really neat! This one just was a bit too much.
Sea Of Thieves is an online adventure game where you play a crew of pirates roaming around a great sea, looking for treasures to plunder, skeletons to defeat and other ships to sink. It entirely lives on the fact that you can play it online with your friend, and ultimately dies because of the lack of content, lack of progression, frustrating player encounters and the fact that your millage may vary with your friends depending on what kind of gamers they are. I still had a good time with it, but it’s entirely because it’s something I could play with my buddies during these quarantine times.
Idle Game 1 is a very minimalist, very simple idle game that takes some of the core ideas of classic incremental games and reduces them to basic interactions, removing most of the player choice you’d find into a more advanced title, but still leaving just enough to create an interesting loop where you very quickly reset your game multiple times in a row until you can reset for a bigger bonus. I didn’t stick with it until the end, but I still found it kinda neat.
World Of Warcraft: Shadowlands is the latest expansion for an MMORPG franchise that I’ve been playing since the beginning. Attempting to shake up a new things to solve the incredible bloat of a 1-120 leveling experience while giving players a new expansion with a choice of faction that would influence gameplay options, adding a new tutorial area and updating the character creation options, there’s a lot to enjoy in Shadowlands, but there’s a lot that frustrated me and quickly deflated my original idea of trying everything it had to offer. I still played it quite a bit!
VMOD is a simple little puzzle game for iOS where the goal is to activate all buttons on each level. The game goes through a bunch of new mechanics up until the end, so it never gets too boring, but after a while I’ve found that it became difficult for me to properly solve the puzzles, so I did a bit of mindless mashing in some instances. Nevertheless, it’s an okay game and I had some fun with it.
Factorio is an incredible game of crafting, research and automation where you crashland on a planet with almost no resources and nothing available to you until you manage to create a sprawling base filled with machines building everything you could ever dream of. Its got depth, challenge and plenty of time-filling action trying to optimize systems, perfect processes and optimize solutions. I had an absolute blast with it!
Kartrider Rush+ is a mobile racing game that reminded me of Mario Kart Tour in a good way; While being a hundred percent bogged down by microtransactions, superfluous systems and other free to play mechanics, I felt like the handling and feel of the game was pretty good here and the racing was actually fun and reminded me of ‘classic’ Mario Kart games. This is too bad, considering how everything else around the core systems seemed to be here to bring it down.
Oh boy 2020, oof. I haven’t even played that many videogames released this year! I barely could come up with ten of them, so I had to get creative near the bottom of my rankings. Even in the current circumstances I’ve had a quite comfortable 2020 so I’m counting my blessings. Even having the luxury to spend some time coming up with a GOTY list is making me grateful of my luck. 2020 gets a 1/5 stars. Without further delay and whining…
Territory Idle is a idle/incremental game where the core mechanics is growing an island by buying or fighting for tiles until you can sail away to another continents, accumulating various upgrades along the way. With plenty of systems working on top of each other, Territory Idle kept my interest the whole way - I managed to beat the game, in a sense - but ultimately I was left disappointed by the strange balance, lack of quality-of-life features, a few small bugs and a breadth of options that weren’t really all equivalent.
Miracle Merchant is a quite simple puzzle game about brewing potions using cards from four colored decks in order to meet the specific requirements of your stylish clients and get enough points on each turn to continue until you eventually run out of cards. To make things more difficult, you have cursed cards that remove points when you play them - but you sometimes need to - and a few more special cards effects to consider in order to maximize your potion-brewing capabilities. I had a good time with this game, feeling like the great core mechanics weren’t supplemented by enough meat around the bone.
Lucifer Within Us is a puzzle game that delivers a twist on the Phoenix Wright style of investigative mystery inside a strange cyber-religious setting where you play an inquisitor tasked of finding demons possessing. The game has some neat aesthetics and good writing, but it overall left me a bit perplexed, as much on the ultimate finer points of the story, the difficulty and overall length of the game and the core mechanics that bring everything together. I still had a good time with it and blasted through the whole thing in one sitting, so I’m overall appreciative of what they did with it.
Minimal Dungeon RPG is a strange mix between an idle game and a more classic RPG. It’s certainly incremental in it’s nature, but you’re not waiting for incredibly long periods of time, waiting for something to happen. Instead you tap on tiles in the rooms you’re visiting and you perform actions like exploring or fighting monsters that way. Where you need to wait is for your action and hit points to recover and allow you to keep tapping away. It’s a neat concept, but it got too stale too quickly and it also felt like being a free-to-play game hindered it a little.