Colosatron is a weird thing. I'm almost tempted to say that it's barely a game because of the limited input you have on it. You don't control the main character - a giant robot dragon rampaging around cities - but you rather work to improve it by adding weapons on it and by sometimes using one of two skills you can unlock after destroying the first capital. I've had some fun with it, altough it was mostly mindless and I never felt challenged at all by any of it.
Paperma is an okay little puzzle game where you fold paper around in order to fill a certain area of the screen with it. You have a limited number of moves to do so and a percentage score that tells you how much of the area you've filled - and how much of the outside area isn't filled. If you get stuck, you can buy hints that reveal the next move you should do. It's one of these calm puzzle games where you can solve a bunch of time while taking your time.
Battleheart Legacy is a fine iOS RPG that has some of the mechanics from the older Battleheart game. While it's predecessor was a series of RPG fights in single-screen rooms, this game is more of a complete adventure where you move around, fight random and scripted encounters, learn passive and active abilities for various classes, buy gear and complete quests. It was a good time even though I've had a few issues with it's mechanics and the way it told part of its story.
Tales of the Adventure Company is a game where you have to go through floors of grid dungeons in order to fight a boss, along the way you defeat random enemies with various powers and weaknesses, collect new party members and find potions to boost them. I had a good time with this game, although there are a few bugs here and there like keys appearing out of nowhere and interface layers piling up on top of each other for no reason.
Angry Birds Epic might be a good game, it might just be. I would have gladly paid 10$ for that same product without the free to play junk, the unbalanced enemies and the random popups to try and bait you into clicking on ads. ABE might be a good game in a parallel universe, but in this one, it’s a neat idea flawed with greedy intentions.
There is not much to say about Demons vs Fairyland as it reminds me of many other tower defence games with a few things thrown in there to try and change the basic gameplay structure. I can’t say that I’m a fan of some of these things and while playing on easy, I’ve found the game too difficulty - a fact that is only exacerbated by the pay-to-win items you can buy.
Bicolor is a fun little puzzle game with very little issues. Then again, the gameplay is also pretty straightforward, you have to fill the screen with one color by moving tiles around. They have a number on them, and that’s the number of squares you have to move them before they disapear.
FTL: Faster Than Light is a great space-themed roguelike. The core mechanics are pretty great even adapted for the iPad. From moving around the galaxy to fighting enemy vessels, there is much to do and many tries need to be taken in order to get to the end, more so to defeat the last boss
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.
Wayward Souls is too difficult for being on iOS. The quick, almost twitchy-like type of control you need for something like this action RPG is impossible to achieve with touch controls and to make matters worse, the upgrades and systems don’t really work in any way that helped me get better after each successive try.
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
Altough it crashed to desktop quite a few times while I was playing it, I really enjoyed my time with Warhammer Quest and plan to sink some more as soon as I have the chance. It’s a great little RPG with interesting mechanics and hooks to keep me playing for quite a while
Braveland is an amazing little strategy game from iOS in which you control your army of peasants, knights and archers in a quest to defeat an evil king. You also have a hero with stats and equipment. I really enjoyed that game and I wish there was more of it. Actually, it ends quite abruptly by saying “END OF BOOK ONE” and then you can’t continue to a theoretical book two, what’s up with that?
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.
Out There is a brutal space adventure game where you are an astronaut in a spaceship and you need to go at the bottom right of the map. To do so, you spend fuel, oxygen, break your spaceship instruments, find alien planets, make decisions, spend fuel, salvage something for precious iron, spend fuel, then drift endlessly in space. I enjoyed it, even if I couldn’t make it very far.
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.
Epoch 2 is very similar to its predecessor, but I liked it nonetheless, the basic infinity-blade-like game where you have a few spots to move and a few actions you can take against wave of enemies suffers from a few weird things here and there but has quite a lot going for it.
A card game where you play your units and other special moves using maths, Calculords is mighty interesting, but a bit confusing as far as the deck building goes. I really enjoyed my time with it even if it felt like the screen didn’t detect my tapping some of the time, which was quite annoying.
Blowfish meets meteor is unfortunate. On one hand, it has a terrible control scheme for a breakout type game where taping left and right is imprecise and unpractical, on the other hand, the early level design felt so boring that I just turned it off.
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.