ZombieBucket is a puzzle game that suffers from a very specific frustration-related flaw; It's lack of precision. It's a bit like playing Tetris, but your blocks are controlled by physics instead of always falling the same way. "Matching three" isn't exactly revolutionary here and the addition of timer-based energy system, daily bonuses and the ability to buy and upgrade your buckets isn't exactly what improves the core gameplay for me.

I vaguely remember playing Doodle God a while back; you would mix elements like earth and fire to create more and more elements. The concept worked because there is plenty you can make using your imagination and a few basic items and the 'goal' of the game to finding all possible combinations felt okay. Now with Doodle Tanks, you have to fumble around aimlessly with tank parts, engineers and other doodads, making matches that don't make sense, basically trial-and-error-ing the whole thing.

Noodles! is a mighty fun game, I've spent a bunch of hours with it and never did its mechanics fail to amuse me. That being said, there was too much of it, I've stopped at about 40% of the game being over, and what was left to do was more of the same. Some games overstay their welcomes and without adding new mechanics or without metaphorical carrots to dangle in front of me, I had to stop before I got really bored with the same puzzles over and over.

HOOK is pretty great. It's a puzzle game with a fixed set of hand-crafted trials where you have to retract hooks scattered in a predetermined fashion. This game is very good at teaching you its mechanics as you go through and it adds new and interesting things over time. I had a great experience with it and blasted through it in a few days. I have almost nothing bad to say about it and that's always a good feeling.

Twisty Hollow is a delightful little puzzle game, I have close to nothing bad things to say about it and I'd recommend to all iOS owners that also are puzzle fans. The goal is quite simple, you rotate three circles (one representing workers, another representing tools and the third one representing materials) in order to fulfill requests from people. For instance, someone wanting bacon will require you to match a pig, a knife, and a butcher, but as the game goes and more complex recipes come into play you might have to match a fishing rod with the bait to get fish, then the knife, fish and chef to get sushi. The game keeps on adding new mechanics so it's fun to go through the motions.

TouchTone has a much interesting framing device than the actual gameplay most of the time and the relative boredom I had while moving move rows and columns of lines in order to reflect beams on targets outbalanced my desire to see the story through. Which is a shame since it seemed at least interesting and novel, setting you as this spy going through communications in order to assess whether someone is relevant to national security or not. I'm a bit disappointed by it.

When I think of 'mining' games, much like the Motherload of old, I think about digging down to find valuables that you sell for various upgrades in order to be able to dig deeper for more valuables that can be sold for more upgrades, ad infinitum. If you're telling me that your game is a 'mining' game but with multiple levels and you need to get to the bottom of each mines in order to continue, I might find that a bit weird, but the potential is still there for a fun game. Obviously, the more you'd progress, the tougher the levels would be, so you would need upgrades. Pocket Mine 2 takes a tiny sliver of that idea and fills the rest with nonsense.

AlphaOmega is a puzzle game where you swap letters around in order to make words on a scrabble-like board. The core idea of the game is interesting, but it's full of little systems that could have been polished a bit more and some tasks could have been designed as to help the player be less frustrated rather than annoyed at how stuff works. I did have a bit of fun with it, but ultimately it's a bit too flawed for me.

ROP is a little puzzle game where you move ropes around in order to match shapes shown at the top of the screen. The difficulty comes from ropes being tied around in weird ways and you not being allowed to place two rope ends at the same place on the grid. It's not bad, even if there isn't much to say about it.

Switch&Drop starts by asking you to agree to a EULA, this is always a good sign. Otherwise you just can't play the game. S&D is a game where you drop blocks by sliding lines of colored puzzle pieces and the goal is to match three or more to break them and activate special bonuses. It would probably be fine if it didn't have in-app purchases, energy timers and best values. This might sound a bit reductionist - I'll admit I haven't played that game for very long - but putting your worst foot forward isn't a way to make me care.

Mujo is a matching game where you match 3 tiles in order to do stuff - mostly damage to enemies, but you can also use them to level your heroes and collect treasures as well - and you can also 'combine' matched tiles in order for them to do even more effects. Tiles aren't destroyed automatically if 3 touch and breaking them brings the stack down. You can also raise the stack of tiles if you don't have any moves. An interesting fact about Mujo is the lact of 'lose' condition, you can play most levels forever and never lose. A fact that is rendered pretty moot by the battles that take forever and render the game boring to play after a short number of levels.

Shadowmatic is a neat concept - you rotate objects in order to cast specific shadows that aren't obvious at first but should become more apparent as you move stuff around. To increase the difficulty after a while, the game throws multiple pieces and now you have to move them relative to each other as well. In practice I find that fumbling around rotating pieces of weird shapes in order to arrive at an unknown goal is quite frustrating and the hint system should be more straightforward.

I don't have any bad thing to say about Evolve:Hunter Quest. I feel it's the right kind of free to play match three game with sufficiently deep gameplay systems, enough variety to make the player want to continue playing and most importantly, no energy system. This might sound silly, but if this game had an energy system (where attempting maps was throttled by such) the experience would have been completely different. As it is, it feels fair and balanced and losing a level isn't a terrible thing - because you would've lost energy for no gain - and I have no real opinion on it's tie-in with the Evolve shooter on PC. Besides setting, it doesn't provide much to this game.

Puzzle Forge 2 is a pretty neat little puzzle game where the goal is to make gear for customers going to your forge. To do so, you place rocks on a grid and then you place molds next to two rocks to craft parts that you need to combine to create weapons, armors and more. Combining rocks makes better materials and the game adds a bit of complexity with gems (and the combining thereof) and magic that you use to power-up the gear you're making. You lose the game when you can't complete customer requests too many times or when the board fills up - the latter happens more often than the former.