As far as iOS platformers go, SpellSword is fine, you pick up cards that enchant your weapon with various spells while killing monsters, looting rupees and completing missions, between them, you upgrade your character and buy more gear. It’s fine, but it would be better on something with actual controls.
Castle DoomBad is a tower defense game where heroes infiltrate your towers via the main door and windows to try and rescue a princess to bring her out of the building. Your job is to build traps and summon minions to kill the heroes before they reach her glass cage. Yes, there are two currencies and one is more premium than the other one, but I never even felt the specter of microtransactions ruin my fun.
Quest Lord is an old school RPG where you move in a 3d environment in first person. It’s very confusing and quirky and I lost attention pretty fast after not being sure where to go, fumbling around with a weird UI and not being sure if certain features of the game were bugs or just weird things.
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.
I was a bit skeptical when I saw trials on the iOS store, after all, games ported from consoles are either barely resembling their counterparts or control really badly when developers try to figure out a way to make the game work at all. Trials Frontier avoids these two things, but falls down in the free to play hole pretty quickly. It’s still a fun experience for a while, controlling well and adapted to touch controls. I even thought the systems it added (leveling, loot, upgrading your bike) were better than the bare-bones progression of the PC/Console 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.
I don't know if there was something I was doing wrong with Fiz when I played it but the game didn't explain much to me. Although I had a poor time with it, Fiz is well done, devoid of microtransactions with a bunch of systems to exploit and some sense of discovery and a ton of content, I thought at first that I would play through the whole thing, but got annoyed after a short while and stopped.
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.
Starborn Anarkist is a little dual-stick shooter where you complete challenges and defeat tons of enemies/bosses to unlock new gear to make your ship designs stronger to keep doing the same thing. You upgrade temporarily your offence/defence/speed during play sessions in some weird way.
Rayman Fiesta Run is a little running game where you jump, punch and glide across levels, trying to collect everything. I liked it quite a lot, even if some of its systems attempt to change the dynamic of the game - and fail at it - and the very shallow nature of the upgrades you get along the way disappointed me.
I had heard good things about EMPIRE: The Deck Building Strategy Game and decided to check it out! In my head, a strategy deck building game would have you start a campaign with very little cards and as you win fights you'd add more cards to your inventory until you beat the story. That idea sounded interesting in my idea; sadly for me my expectations weren't met. I was wrong about what this game was going to be, and what I got instead was too frustrating to keep me interested.
I'm on a bad streak of iPad games nowadays, okay, Devil's Attorney was great, but the games I've been trying out recently... They're not very good. Take Doom & Destiny for instance, I'm kinda baffled how a game full of RPG maker assets could land on iOS. Can you even use RPG Maker to make iOS games? Probably not, but this game feels like it. Also it's pretty immature and dumb, like Unepic was. I probably would've cared much more about it if it played the story straight.
Devil's Attorney is a nice little turn-based RPG for iOS. You play Max McMann, a shady defense attorney that'll defend anyone. You go to cases, fight with the skills you have unlocked, and then gain money to buy items and furniture that allow you to unlock more skills. The writing is very funny and even if the randomness breaks the game a little, I've enjoyed it so much that I beat it in a few days.
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.
Far from me to remind people of the review I wrote of the original PC version of Cook, Serve, Delicious but CSD was one of the contestants from my game of the year last year, it was a fun, fast paced wario-ware in spirit game where you made foods and accomplished chores in a restaurant in a micro-game fashion. I was pleased to try the iPad version - maybe it would've fixed the few things I didn't like about the original - oh, how wrong was I.
Not unlike Gun Runner - some game I've made - Escape From Doom is an endless runner with first person shooter elements, however, poor controls ruin the whole experience and no amount of little perks and unlockables will make me want to play any more of it.
Steampunk Tower is a perfectly competent tower defense game. Instead of building towers, you place turrets into a big tower standing in the middle of the battlefield. Enemies attack you from left and right and you can move turrets around to upgrade them or to reload ammo. Enemies are weak against some type of turrets but strong against other, forcing you to build a wide array of defenses, you can upgrade them between fights, using oh-so-precious dollars. It wasn't the best tower defense game I've played, but I enjoyed it.
Giant Boulder of Death suffers from the 'too free' game problem; It's free, but it's also full of pop-out ads and suspicious redirection to the facebook app. It's too bad, because the game itself is fun, you roll a boulder down a hill, crushing everything, doing so, you accomplish missions, get gold and gems (premium currency, check!) and upgrade your boulder in some capacity.
Gunner Z is a sad state of affairs. The core gameplay (on-rails shooter) could be fine on its own, but it's bogged down by so much microtransactions and hooks to try and make you spend money that everything in this game is terrible. I had some fun with it, but it wasn't worth my time.
A bit like King Cashing, Tower of Fortune is a game based on slot machines. You explore maps by spinning slots, you fight enemies that way, you collect loot, forge items and interact with the tavern by pressing a 'SPIN' button. The comparison stops there, though. While King Cashing was a fun RPG, this game is a brutal roguelike and dying means having to start all over (except if you bought a thing that saves your equipment when you die) and the game kinda feels unfair at times.