Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is an okay version of Animal Crossing for mobile devices. It's not great, but it's not catastrophically bad either. I fell off it pretty quickly because what was there didn't catch me enough to keep me away from my 3DS and Vita, it's a campground simulation game where you collect fruits, bugs and fishes to give to animals in order to level up their friendship and get more stuff to decorate your camp with. The interactions are minimal and even if the whole package is well presented and isn't THAT different from mainline Animal Crossing games, the differences were enough to leave me uninterested.
Arkanoid vs Space Invaders is an interesting mix of two classics that blends into something that's really fun to play - but can get pretty frustrating at times - with a good variety of gameplay elements and some light customization. The basic concept of the game is to move the Arkanoid paddle around to reflect Space Invader projectiles - and sometimes a ball - in order to accomplish different objectives. I did stop after a while because the game was asking too much from me and it was just an experience in futility at this point, but that was hours in and it was well worth my money.
Squarespace doesn't auto-save and it ate my review of Blyss. Here is the short version; Blyss is a game where you draw lines over tiles to remove dots on them and you need to get rid of all tiles without creating a situation where you don't have any more room to draw 3 or 4-tiles lines. It's a neat game with very little mechanics so it didn't grab my attention too much, but it's still a solid puzzle game.
Dandy Dungeon has a somewhat neat core mechanic of puzzle-rpg that is heavily bogged down by free to play mechanics and unnecessary cruft. There is a good idea in there about planning paths for your character to take and defeat all enemies, but I think that it would've been a better product with a premium price and more balanced mechanics. I had -some- fun with it, but in the end it could've been way more enjoyable than what it was.
Euclidean Lands is a small puzzle game for iOS where yo move your character around while trying to defeat enemies in a set number of turns, the interesting hook comes from the fact that you can rotate and turn around all parts of the map and that action is happening in all dimensions. I enjoyed it, but completing all levels with a perfect rating was a bit too much for me, and I kind of wish that they had an undo function, since sometimes it's easy to mistakenly move somewhere.
TurretZ is a weird mix between twin stick shooter, idle game and tower defense. I'm not sure which of these genres this game is supposed to be, but it isn't very fun. You have a planet in the middle of the screen with a whole lot of enemies around, and the planet rotates while auto-firing with various weapons, after you defeat a bunch of enemies, a boss appears. Defeat that boss, and you get to the next level, which is almost identical to the previous one. The planet is tough to control, your weaponry is unreliable, and progression is extremely slow, I didn't enjoy TurretZ much.
Crashlands is a neat little game almost in the vein of something like Don't Starve combined with Minecraft or Terraria. It's not entirely a survival game, it's not entirely a crafting/decoration game, but it has elements of both and it pits you against a large world where you must accomplish missions, mine resources, craft better gear, rinse, repeat. It's a fun and interesting idea, but I'm not sure it works 100% well on iOS, both because of control issues, and also because when I have hours to spend doing nothing but tight loops of crafting and fighting, it's rarely on my iPad.
Layton's Mystery Journey is an iOS/Android version of an upcoming 3DS game featuring the daughter of Professor Layton as a detective going around the Level-5 version of London, solving puzzles and figuring out the implausible logic behind a series of weird cases. It's a good version of such a game, although it's clear that they haven't put enough work into making it a complete mobile experience. Not to say that LMJ isn't good, but it's for sure not exactly at the quality of a DS or 3DS game.
Sonny was a game I had played on my browser ages ago; it was a turn-based RPG with a lot of depth, a good amount of skill effects and difficult challenges. When I saw it on the app store, I wondered if it was going to be the same as I once played. It's almost that, but not quite. Sonny on iOS is a cool RPG with enough customization and difficulty to keep you engaged. It does mostly one thing - fighting enemies - and it does it well. I didn't manage to get through it, but I've played enough to know that I liked it.
Mini Metro is a puzzle masterpiece that puts you to the task of building metro lines between various stations in order to get passengers from station A to station B, which each station differentiated by its shape. Passengers at Triangle station might want to get to Square or Circle station, and they take automatically moving subway trains to get there. Over time, more and more stations pop up and you get various items to help you keep your stations from being overcrowded. If too many people stay at the same place for too long, you lose. There are plenty of levels to try your metro building skills on and I've really enjoyed it.
Deus Ex Go is the third game from Square-Enix using the 'Go' concept of turning another franchise into a smaller puzzle game with settings and elements from the original products. While Hitman Go had more of a board game aesthetic, Lara Croft Go started going in the direction of representing more of the Lara Croft universe and Deus Ex continues to go in that direction. I had fun with this game, although on my iPad 3, it was a bit laborious to play. I got to the end of the game and while I didn't 'master' every level, I felt it was a good balance of fairness and complexity.
Swap Sword is a little puzzle game where you swap tiles to create lines and clear them. Depending on the cleared tile, you either get some mana, hearts, keys to open doors to the next level, or money. You can also clear enemies that way, although a difference in this game is that while you can only swap identical tiles, you can move your character around in order to defeat enemies and collect gold. Once the ending door is opened, you have a set number of turns to leave before death arrives. New mechanics are slowly introduced and you get upgrades between each level. I probably could end my review here because that's all there is to Swap Sword, and that's why I was kinda bummed by it.
Realm Grinder is an incredible little idle game that has only a few flaws and works really well to engage the player into playing more in order to unlock new mechanics and systems. Instead of just making numbers grow higher, this game throws together plenty of interesting ways for you to interact with it and have different 'runs' most of the time. I'm still playing it after more than three weeks, and I plan on playing it until I grow bored, if that ever happens. If my iOS reviews seem to lag behind in the future, you know what game to blame!
Asymmetric is a neat idea executed in a frustrating fashion. At its core, it's a simple puzzle game where you move two characters on separate fields. When you move one, the other does the opposite. This create puzzles that should be interesting in theory, but I've found it very frustrating in practice. You can fail non-stop and it can become irritating to plan ahead for each levels. Furthermore, the game even gives you the complete solution if you get too stuck, which I have used too many times. You can almost do it on every level. I didn't have a great time with Asymmetric.
Make More! is an idle game where you manage five factories where a grid of 3x3 workers make items for you to sell. You use that money, alongside a premium currency, to improve your factories and your workers in various ways. After maxing all of your factories and leveling them to the maximum, you restart the cycle anew from scratch, with a few bonuses - daily cash and boosts for the characters you have already acquired in a previous run. It's a neat little idle game and it does the thing I kinda like with free-to-play games; Letting the player watch ads instead of paying for some 'premium' boosts.
Fire Emblem Heroes is the second foray from Nintendo into the mobile game space, and while a free-to-play product usually interests me less than paid endeavors I had to give it a try being a big Fire Emblem fan. The end product is an interesting game that doesn't abuse its premium currency while being a fun light version of the original thing. I think that you still need a certain mindset before diving in - particularly because of the randomness of unit 'pulls' but it's still a neat strategy game.
Solitarica is a Solitaire-based RPG with some roguelike mechanics where you fight enemies by playing solitaire, casting spells, using equipment and defending yourself against their attacks in order to reach the end of a 'run', after which you get some currency you can use to unlock permanent upgrades for various decks, all with their small quirks. I tried it because it got raving praise by some people I follow and there are also no in-app purchases. It should've been a really cool game, but alas, a few design issues combined with the age - now more and more showing - of the equipment I use to game made the whole thing a frustrating slog.
Hocus is a very simple puzzle game in nature where you swipe around to move a cube on a bizzare shape, usually involving many layers of optical illusions. That's the only mechanic of the game and it's used pretty well. Moving your cube around, you get on other sides of the shape in a way that sometimes feels a bit difficult to predict and therefore can also get a bit frustrating. I didn't completely finish the game, but that's because the later levels are user-submitted, and I thought I had quite enough of it yet.
Super Mario Run isn't a great game and it doesn't have enough content to offer, what it has is that Nintendo polish and a few good ideas that should've been exploited more and in a different package. SMR is a platformer where mario always runs and when you tap, he jumps, if you hold your tap for longer, the jump is higher. You can also tap to make him flip in the air and keep altitude and tap when hitting walls to wallkick. That's pretty much everything in terms of controls. It's possible to make a good mario game out of this idea, but what they did wasn't enough.
Slash Mobs is a perfectly competent - although I've had pretty bad performance issues on my iPad which prevented me from enjoying the game - idle stage-based monster killing game very similar to Clicker Heroes and other idlers of that style. It adds a few mechanics like player equipment and skill trees to differentiate itself from its various competitors, without much success.