Lego Marvel Super Heroes isn’t very good. The last lego game I’ve played was the first Star Wars one and that was a while ago. While I think this game has some charm with its characters and references and while I think somee of the core gameplay is quite solid, there was too much of a confusing mess when I tried playing this one and I stopped pretty quickly to go spend my time somewhere else.
Knights of Puzzelot is a haunted game, haunted by the specter or free to play mechanics and tactics to get your money. The core game is quite good, but that’s even more of a bummer when almost every step of the way, I’m left wondering if something is difficult because they want me to pay, or if it’s just annoying for the sake of convincing me to pay, or wondering if the next level is going to be the one where I have to grind or pay to get past.
There is a brutal simplicity in Hitman Go, one that flows from it’s very clean design and the refined list of actions players can take, one that stems from well-designed puzzles that eschews randomness in favor of careful logic and planning. That simplicity was a two-edged sword, but I had a fantastic time with Hitman Go
Games where you match blocks are not that rare, but I love those with RPG elements and clever mechanics here and there. 10000000(000?) was a good example of such a game, but Block Legend is less so. I found that a few mechanics were superfluous or not well thought out and the progression was almost doing more harm than good.
While it might look like an innocent match-3 game with RPG mechanics, Puzzling Rush is terrible, for the single reason that never ever, any mechanics are explained, leaving the player with a bunch of symbols and ‘HELP’ screens that are confusing and impossible to decipher.
Threes is simple fun, it’s an addictive little puzzle game and while it’s distilled to the core of it’s gameplay concepts - almost to a bare-bones extreme - its simplicity allows for a fun five minutes here and there of moving tiles around.
Puzzle Quest Galactrix is a sad puzzle videogame in the line of other great Puzzle Quests. It’s core gameplay is perfectly fine, mind you, but it is ruined by abysmal controls between fights and poorly designed UIs and quests. I enjoyed my time solving puzzles and fighting, but everything between that was painfully boring.
Even with such a name, The “Amazing” Alex isn’t an amazing game. Maybe clever at first, coalescing thoughts about The Amazing Machine of old, but soon a sour disappointment with puzzles based on luck and gratuitous trial-and-error with a broken interface and lack of depth will replace any fondness you might hold for the game.
The Room 2 is the sequel to another puzzle game of the same title where you solve gigantic mechanical puzzles by sliding, opening, poking, turning, finding and placing objects on a fantastical device only to peel layers upon layers of additional puzzles hidden inside the first ones. It’s a pretty good game, but not as good as the original.
Containment: The Zombie Puzzler is a little action-puzzle game where you have to swap differently suited citizens around zombies to kill them. Instead of matching 3, you have to box them in, and then the zombies die and new citizens march in and you get power-up sometimes. I can't say it grabbed me.
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started playing Gunpoint, but it surely wasn't a puzzle game. I thought it was going to be a neat little 2d shooter with some platforming spliced in and an interesting story. I realized pretty quickly that it was a mix of stealth and puzzle more than anything. Great stealth and puzzles.
Device-6 is a puzzle game that prefers style over substance; While it is very interesting visually to have some kind of novel where the orientation of the words change and you scroll through the story like you were a character moving in a book, actually playing it never felt 'fun' for me, the puzzles were more alike to busywork than brain teasers. Also, even if it has no impact on the gameplay argument, I didn't find the story particularity interesting, therefore that failed to grab me and prevented me from deleting it.
Even with its buggy programming and weird tutorial decisions, Marvel Puzzle Quest is great. This iOS/Android free to play puzzle game offers a variety of characters, levels, upgrades and gameplay systems that made me play it a ton. The free to play hooks aren't too bad and don't remove from a good experience matching gems and being the hawkeye.
Puzzle and Dragons is insanely successful, it seems. I've decided to try it out as soon as it went live on the Canadian app store, and my god, it is a load of nonsense. The core mechanic of the game (moving gems on a board) manages to be mostly luck-based and somehow less refined than old match-3 games and/or Tetris Attack and/or puzzle quest managed to do years ago. The monster collection part is also completely nonsensical and random but at the same time, vital to progress through the game.
Bad Piggies is a physics-based game similar but not identical to Angry Birds. In this game, you build vehicles and try to get at the end of multiple stages by completing optional objectives to win stars that will allow you to play harder levels and unlock more things to play with in sandbox mode. This game is pretty silly and I enjoyed it a bunch.
Scribblenauts Unlimited is fantastic, charming and very interesting. That makes for a very good review if you're into that kind of game but a poor way for me to look at it and suggest things that could be improved. I usually am very nitpicky when I look at games because my goal here is basically to play armchair game designer and say 'well maybe I would've tightened up the graphics on level 11!' but if the game is all fine and good, it's a bit hard to do.
I can't say that I've played many first person puzzle games in the vein of portal recently, mostly because they often encompass some elements of first person platforming and I'm not a big fan of that concept, but probably because I love my puzzles more in the Layton sense, removed in some way from the flow of the game in self-contained bits and chunks. Antichamber is doing the first person puzzle thing greatly with many surprises and fairly impressive technical tricks.
I'm terrible at stealth games. In metal gear solid, I constantly have to shoot my way out of failed sneaking operations, and I don't feel bad because even tho it was ridiculously tough to win such encounters in the old MGS games, the recent ones - such as peace walker - left you with good options and choices in case you knew you had to fight at one point or another. I've heard many good things about Mark of the Ninja and decided to give it a shot.
Puzzle Chronicles is a nice switch on the classic puzzle fighter genre that got popular with Puzzle Quest and games like it. I'll state upfront that videogame titles haven't got better with times since you can notice how similar both of them are. Usually, puzzle fighters are turn-based grid fighting games where you match gems and skulls and wildcards, often you get experience and gold to find yourself equipped with skills and items that affect the flow of the game in some way, fighting against an array of enemies also empowered with special abilities. Sometimes, mini-games will allow you to do different things to increase your choices.