Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden is a strategy game, a bit like XCom or Fire Emblem, where you control a cast of mutated animal humanoids as they try to survive and discover the secrets of a post-apocalyptic world. With a larger focus on exploration, setting up ambushes before fights and customization of your characters via skills and equipment, I was getting ready for a grand ol’ time with it. Ultimately my adventures through MYZ:RTE were cut short by a bunch of really difficult fight that I couldn’t figure my way around, which is a darned shame.
2023 was a fun year overall, for me personally, but also pretty terrible for the world at large. Free Palestine. Here’s a list of games I’ve played and why they’re in my top ten. Solidarity for the working class.
Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos reminds me of A Link To The Past in an okay-ish way, a special kind of affect that I would attribute to other games from my past like Graal Online. A somewhat fine experience, Rogue Heroes is a bit unfocused and makes strange decisions on the multiplayer side, but overall I had fun with my friends playing it. It’s certainly neat and if you’re in the mood for some co-op adventuring, it might occupy your time for a bit!
Owlboy is a beautiful, inventive and unique 2D platformer full of heart where you play an owl against incredible odds and danger, flying around, carrying other characters and using their weapons while dodging dangers, fighting bosses, collecting coins and participating into different gameplay sequences that keep you on your toes. For all its beauty and care, I didn’t have that great of a time with Owlboy. I felt like the controls were a bit confusing and made combat something that could go downhill very fast.
Cmd C is an okay idle game themed around programming and computer science tasks. While I enjoyed the concept it has of tiered mechanics, challenges and upgrades, the act structure really took me out of it because I rarely play idle games for their story. It’s not completely a bust, but I didn’t stick with it too long.
Kingsway is an RPG with an interesting concept; What if everything in the game was represented by Operating System elements? Bags as folders, different pages of the UI (stats, skills, etc.) represented by various programs on your desktop; Blue screen when you die, and more. I wasn’t entirely satisfied by my experience, feeling that the core gameplay loop wasn’t satisfying enough and that the whole “OS RPG” paradigm wasn’t pushed far enough for me.
Universal Paperclips is the iOS version of a classic browser based game where you start manually making some paperclips and idle your way into transforming the whole universe into paperclips; A few systems are added on top of each other, like the stock market, quantum computing and game simulations, all to feed into your paperclip making. Ultimately, the balance on mobile didn’t work well for me, and at some point progress became excruciatingly slow, so I stopped.
Million Onion Hotel is a stylish Match-3 like game where you tap on onions, fruits and a bunch of other weird things to get a combo multiplier going and progress through some levels. I couldn’t understand how to play it and lost interest pretty quickly after a few boss fights where my time was just drained constantly. Quirky story segments, collectibles and a bunch of different mechanics layered on top of each other couldn’t get me to put more time into it, sadly.
Mindustry is a strange mix of tower defense and factory management where you have to build miners, builders, conveyor belts, research upgrades and collect resources while at the same time defending from enemies that attack your structures in waves using turrets and other means of defense. This game has proven too stressful for me, too unwieldy to play on the iPad, and ultimately too difficult.
War For The Overworld is the spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper; a game where you manage a fantasy dungeon by summoning creatures, directing their work, building rooms and fighting enemies to - usually - destroy the core of their dungeon. I had a bit of fun at the beginning of the game, but that evaporated as I went through the campaign, and I lost interest. I wouldn’t say that WFTO is a bad game, but it’s not exactly what I wanted.
I was looking for a factorio-alike on iOS to give me my fix of belts, resource production and maths when I stumbled upon Sandship: Crafting factory. A free-to-play title where you run a huge ship going through a desert, building internal facilities to craft various items, complete missions, level up and keep at it with new content always showing up. The core mechanics are okay, but the free to play timers, boosters and other tricks ruined the experience for me, as they usually do in this kind of game.
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.
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!
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.
Wilmot’s Warehouse at first felt like it was supposed to be a zen game about re-organizing items in a warehouse and trying to figure out the optimal ways to place your stock, but it just devolved quickly into a stressful mess for me. I really enjoy the minimalist style and the core idea of what the game is trying to do, but I dropped it off quickly because being under time pressure to fulfill orders just wasn’t for me.
Slime Rancher is a simulation game where you manage a ranch filled with cute slimes. Armed with a vacuum gun, you move them around, feed them, expand your ranch, explore the world around your ranch, find new species of slimes, gain upgrades and repeat this loop. I didn’t have a great time with it, sadly - I was looking forward to trying this game - because I found the normal ‘Adventure’ mode to be extremely aimless. I do enjoy a game of that style - I had a blast with Graveyard Keeper earlier this year, for instance - but the lack of objectives combined with technical issues made me put down Slime Rancher quicker than I would’ve hoped.
Idle Life Sim is an idle game with a really interesting visual style and core game system, but nothing else going on for it. The absolute lack of player actions beside watching ads and not playing the game for long periods of time (also limited by the game if you don’t buy some expensive doodad) made me lose interest quite quickly. I must say that I’ve tried a bunch of idle games recently and this one continues the trend of not letting the player do anything while idling, which doesn’t work for me. I wish they had made something else out of that game.