Dash Quest is a weird game, on paper it's a straightforward RPG where all you do is dash in one direction and kill enemies by hitting them with your weapon, cast spell and use items, all in order to get gold and complete challenges in service of buying better weapons and getting more options to kill enemies and repeat the cycle anew. In practice it's a mess of gameplay modes, in-app purchases, abysmally slow progression and buggy mechanics, I didn't have much fun with it.
I didn't exactly know that Soda Dungeon was going to be an idle game and I was pleasantly surprised when I hit the sweet spot of the gameplay loop. You hire adventurers to run through a dungeon, get gold and items in order to make the next batch of adventurers go further while allowing you to buy upgrades for your tavern and unlock new classes as you go. Then after a while you reset the game and start over with some bonuses. You can manually control the battles, but otherwise, everything is automated. It's a great game and I can't wait to continue playing it.
The Sequence is a neat little puzzle game on iOS where you have to bring dots from one circle to another using a sequence of mechanisms you lay down on a grid. Some of these pull or push, others will rotate things, some invert the action of mechanisms they target, others just shut them down. It's all a matter of following a proper sequence of action and figuring out where the pieces go in order to solve each puzzle. I had some frustrations with it, but overall it was a very good experience and a mighty fine puzzle game.
Puzzle Craft 2, if anything, made me uninstall it and go back to Puzzle Craft 1 instead. It's not a terrible game and it improves/adds complexity in many aspects over the original, but all of this comes at the cost of terrible free to play mechanics, less gameplay for free, various ways to nudge the player into giving the game money and an overall sense of disappointment with most systems in place. Almost every new cool thing they've added comes with a balance of desire to uninstall the game, so that's not very fun. (Also I'm sorry, my iPad ate my screenshots)
Mucho Taco is a bad idle game on iOS that first might have been a cool cookie-clicker rip-off but instead does nothing new or interesting with the genre and eschews some of the things that I would expect in an idle game. With bad core controls, slow progression and random consumable items, it's not a game I'd recommend to anyone.
I absolutely adored Hitman Go when it came out a while back, and now Square Enix Montréal did it again with the "GO" treatment over the Tomb Raider franchise. They did it quite well, keeping the spirit of exploration and puzzle solving alive and well while making the whole experience feel like a board game with very intricate pieces. Perhaps because of technical issues - due to old hardware? Hard to say - my experience wasn't as smooth as I would've preferred. Some small choices on the way puzzles were designed did frustrate me a little as well, but overall I really enjoyed this game.
Beat da Beat is a great game on iOS, it's a bullet-hell like shooter where music dictates when enemies and bullets are going to spawn. With a great soundtrack, precise controls and a few good customization systems layered over it, I had a ton of fun with this game. It's not entirely perfect, but if you enjoy shooters or music games, this one is a custom-tailored experience for that platform, and it works.
League of Legends developer Riot released this simple iOS game for a limited time - I don't think it's available anymore - as some kind of weird joke. I think that BPR is a neat little piece of LoL memorabilia in a way, and an okay game on its own, but it shows that this wasn't a 'real' product, released to actually make money in any way. It's a game where you run up and down while trying to bump into little creatures while using your rocket arm to grab them - and other enemies - in order to survive.
Dice Mage has a cool core idea, you're a mage fighting using dice. Based on equipped gear, the numbers of your rolled throws do different things and if you roll higher than your enemy, you deal damage to them. If you don't roll high enough, you can pay some mana to re-roll. There are a few minigames and some gear to buy and equip to customize your character. It's a neat little game but too thin, with not enough meat around that cool core idea.
It is a bit sad when lack of greedy design choices in mobile games is enough to make me root for a title and enjoy it way more. Pac-Man 256 is pretty neat for many reasons, but the way it deals with microtransactions, free to play mechanics and the like is also very interesting and didn't impact my enjoyment of the game. While simple, it's pretty competent at what it set out to do and I had a good time with it.
Angry Birds 2 follows the pattern of many sequels to popular games by once well-meaning studios; Plants versus Zombies 2, the more recent Peggle games and all these iOS sequels of non-mobile games. It takes a cool core idea, adds free to play mechanics and other useless busywork and hopes to bank on some nostalgia here and there. There's also something a bit silly in calling a game "2" when you have made about 30 of them, but that's another story entirely. Angry Birds 2 gets a 2/5, because it's pretty bad.
The Long Siege is a neat tile-sliding game where you create soldiers, archers and mages in order to attack an opposing tower. You can also match resources to upgrade your own tower and your units as well and you defeat enemy after enemy while completing quests and encountering more difficult foes. I had an okay time with it, but I wasn't pulled into its mechanics very deeply; Instead I just matched tiles.
BlitzKeep is a really neat iOS RPG where you fling yourself around on enemies to kill them in order to level up, collect power-ups and get strong enough to kill stronger enemies to repeat this cycle. You get gold for doing so, and you can use that gold to unlock new character classes with various abilities and upgrade your stats as well. I liked it and I wish I could've played it more, but after a very short while it just... stops. And the endless mode they've included doesn't do it at all for me.
Wormarium bums me out. It's a neat little concept, it controls fairly well and there are no in-app purchases and dubious balance decisions. There's plenty of things to unlock and a whole bunch of levels as well, unfortunately, it's way too difficult for me. I've banged my head on the same level over and over and simply couldn't finish it! What a sad way to finish playing a game, uninstalling it only because I can't progress any more.
Space Galaga International Edition is bogged down by weird controls and superfluous mechanics that overall just burden it with useless padding. The core game could be interesting - a galaga-like arcade shooter where you acquire new gear and upgrade it, with stats and pilots and a progression, but instead making you collect currency to buy and fuse stuff while you spend more time opening space chests and messing around menus trying to figure out what's useful and what's not. I thought I might have an okay time with this game, but in the end, I didn't.
Adventure Time Card Wars is an okay CCG. It uses some tropes of other card games with a few twists and some dubious design choices that made me scratch my head about their presence in the game. Some expected iOS game bloat - energy timers, premium currencies and random card packs - bummed me down a little, but otherwise I had fun with it. I still know nothing of Adventure Time, but it sure added some flavor to the cards and characters. Maybe I would've enjoyed it a tiny bit more if I knew what this was all about.
Production values won't save your flawed product; That's the lesson Fallout Shelter keeps on teaching us. Okay, it might be making tons of money - the fallout name and setting will bring users in, for sure, even if they had never played one of these free to play timesink money grabbing schemes yet - and it might look and feel better than most of these shameless Skinner boxes, but I'll have nothing to do with it. This is farmville in a post-apocalyptic setting.
One More Dash is a pretty simple iOS game, but it's completely okay for what it tries to do. You tap on the screen so your marker dashes from one circle to another, scoring points, completing missions and buying new color schemes for a few things in the game by dodging spikes, bouncing on walls and picking up special currency dots. Not much to say about that!
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.
KoPAP2 is too greedy for its own good. It stacks even more gold sinks on top of its already money-hungry systems and then adds randomness to the mix to a frustrating result. I don't mind getting gold to buy the special furniture (like in the first game) or to buy more party members, even the seemingly infinite moneysink that 'equipment' represents isn't too bad in the long run, but everything else almost requiring you to grind combined with weird balance made me wary of the game pretty soon. Which is a shame because I have completed the first one.