Celeste is an amazing platformer that is both very difficult and also very forgiving, boasting an amazing assist mode that allows players to make the game easier for themselves if it is too tough. Set on a mountain comprised of a few different locales, you jump and air-dash around various mechanics, collecting strawberries and finding secrets that unlock much harder levels. I had a great time going through the campaign, and might try to clear up everything else that I missed. If you haven’t played Celeste, I recommend it wholeheartedly.
SNKRX is a neat game where you control a snake made of different heroes that automatically attack enemies in multiple waves of increasing difficulty and complexity. The only mechanics you have during gameplay is to make your snake turn left or right, but otherwise the complexity lies in the hiring of heroes to compose your party, upgrading them and choosing power-ups after you’ve completed a few rounds. I had a good time with this game even if the difficulty felt a bit random at times, so I recommend it!
Raft is an interesting twist on the survival/exploration/crafting genre by putting the focus on oceanic exploration. Stuck on a small raft with not much but a plastic hook and your wits, you gather resources, fight enemies, explore islands, solve puzzles and progress through a storyline that guides your across the sea in a gameplay that clashes often between how chill it can be, how involved it can be and how repetitively frustrating it can be. Deciding to build an immense raft-tower, I had a good time with the game, playing with a good friend the whole way.
Bleentoro is a strange, yet interesting puzzle game inspired by Factorio playable on iOS. In each level you need to create factories in order to meet specific objectives, usually related to creating a certain number of a specific resource under a certain time. Starting simple enough with a bunch of new mechanics getting added as you progress through the levels, poor controls and confusing inconsistencies prevented me to fully wrap my head around the game, even if I did have a good time with it.
I didn’t have that great of a time with the original Yooka-Laylee; A somewhat uninspired Banjo-Kazooie spiritual successor that failed to grab me. This sequel ditches 3D platforming for Donkey Kong-adjacent 2D adventures with a few really neat twists. I really had a good time with The Impossible Lair, even if the game has some weird quirks in spots. My time was so good that I beat the game and spent the effort to collect every little hidden thing. That might not sound like much, but I don’t beat all games I play, so I feel this is worth something!
Builderment is a neat little free factorio-a-like on iOS where you mine resources, build things, transform things, carry things around to transform them some more and use them to research new technologies, allowing you usually to build different things, but sometimes also serve as upgrades for your existing factories. The overall gameplay loop is fun enough and I had a good time, even if the existence of a premium currency used only for strange cosmetic buildings and the need to have gold if you want to build or upgrade things makes the economy of the game quite strange, and that being on IOS, the controls are not perfect either - although they do work nicely.
I’m a big EDF fan; Fighting hordes of bugs and monsters in corny scenarios with increasingly ridiculous weaponry and machinery is something that is fun with friends and I’ve played my fair shake of all the entries in that franchise, usually in local co-op. I was cautiously optimistic when World Brothers was announced, because it looked like it would shake up the EDF formula, at least a little and go in a different direction. On the other hand, EDF spin-offs (Iron Rain comes to mind) are often weird on both their tone and mechanics. After having completely played through EDF:WB, I feel like it was a good attempt, bogged down by stereotypes (if not borderline racism) and some weird design decisions about the progression systems.
Mindustry is a strange mix of tower defense and factory management where you have to build miners, builders, conveyor belts, research upgrades and collect resources while at the same time defending from enemies that attack your structures in waves using turrets and other means of defense. This game has proven too stressful for me, too unwieldy to play on the iPad, and ultimately too difficult.
Satisfactory is a first person simulation game where you land on a remote planet and must discover new technologies, build bases and fend off against the wildlife. I would easily describe this as “like factorio, but in 3D”, but it is a bit reductive. Satisfactory has a lot of charm, a really neat style and good ideas, but I feel like being in three dimensions hurts it in a few ways and that most parts of the game have elements that clearly overwhelmed me. It’s still really good! I’m not sure I’ll keep up with its development, but I’ll certainly recommend it!
The Chronos Principle is a real neat little puzzle game based on sliding a square around increasingly complex levels in order to reach a goal with the twist that levels have a number of “tries” that you get and that each previous try affects the game area while you’re trying to reach the end. Moving squares in specific positions to act as stoppers for your following tries, so you can get in different places. You’ll also have barriers that can only be traversed by your previous tries, and other puzzle elements such as these. I quite enjoyed it, even if the core idea of having multiple tries being tied to real time.
War For The Overworld is the spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper; a game where you manage a fantasy dungeon by summoning creatures, directing their work, building rooms and fighting enemies to - usually - destroy the core of their dungeon. I had a bit of fun at the beginning of the game, but that evaporated as I went through the campaign, and I lost interest. I wouldn’t say that WFTO is a bad game, but it’s not exactly what I wanted.
I was looking for a factorio-alike on iOS to give me my fix of belts, resource production and maths when I stumbled upon Sandship: Crafting factory. A free-to-play title where you run a huge ship going through a desert, building internal facilities to craft various items, complete missions, level up and keep at it with new content always showing up. The core mechanics are okay, but the free to play timers, boosters and other tricks ruined the experience for me, as they usually do in this kind of game.
Disco Elysium is an incredible story and world crammed into a very interesting RPG held back by some frustrating and obscure mechanics. Taking the role of an amnesiac detective with a lot of internal thoughts on everything, you try to solve a murder case over a period of multiple days in a small fictional village in a fictional universe with enough parallels to our own world to make it truly fascinating. I managed to get to the end of the game almost by forcing myself to play through it because at some point I just felt I was stuck on everything and spent so much time wandering around aimlessly that my fun with the game was sucked away. It is nonetheless an incredible thing.
Infinitode is a free tower defense game on iOS that boasts huge maps, a large skill tree with tons of upgrades, and a good number of tower and enemy types. I think the core idea is pretty interesting, but the monetization system kinda ruins the whole thing and makes it an extremely grindy endeavor that could’ve been better served in the game design sense if the game had been premium with tweaked balance. I had an okay time with it, but I just couldn’t see any light out of the grinding tunnel - and the progression was just so slow - that I stopped.
Loop Hero is a really neat roguelike that has you automatically loop around a track, fighting monsters, collecting gear and items and placing cards around the map to create forests, villages, deserts and rivers, all in order to help - and sometimes hinder - your hero get strong enough to defeat the boss of the level. With a really interesting art style, good music and some nice progression elements, I really enjoyed what I played of Loop Hero even if my interest for the game fell off near the end and I couldn’t get past the last bumps in difficulty.
Dungeon Falan is a game I feel like I’ve played a dozen of times so far in my long iOS journey; You fight enemies by sliding your finger across tiles that can be swords, shields, money or potions, accumulating resources, leveling up and damaging foes along the way. You have a wide array of stats, skills and items to help you, but ultimately your foes will overwhelm you and you’ll have to start over. This is an okay one of these, which in those times of idle games is a breath of fresh air, but some of the design decisions they took were a bit weird for me.
Stellaris is an amazing 4X space strategy game that has you lead a civilization of space explorers across the galaxy, colonizing planets, building them up, researching technologies, making choices and ultimately grow to be a powerhouse in some fashion. I had a terrific time with it and I could see myself playing it more or less forever like a Civilization title. I even bought some DLC for it because it opened up neat possibilities that weren’t in the base game - something I do fairly rarely.
Star Vikings Forever is a strange little game that felt like it was tiptoeing between being a puzzle game and a strategy RPG. You go through grid-based maps of enemies, traps and treasures, surmounting considerable odds by using your party’s skills and the enemies own attacks against themselves, while leveling up character, recruiting new ones and getting gear for them. I wish it had chosen what it wanted to be more definitely. As it stands, it was a bit frustrating no matter which way I would approach it.
Torchlight 3 didn’t grab me at all like Torchlight 2 did. I tried to enjoy it, I gave it time, but it ultimately felt like a pretty bland by-the-numbers action rpg experience that I probably won’t play again, which is a damned shame. It doesn’t really do anything new or different, and what slight deviations from the genre it does do not bring anything really fun to the genre. I still went through the game once, but couldn’t even do that a second time.
ADventure Ages is a reskin of ADventure Communism (because apparently the red scare is still real in TYOOL 2021 and made that game perform worse than they wanted) where you buy things that make things that make things. It’s just bars filling up and clicking on buttons to make them fill up. Some fill faster, others take a few minutes. I played it way too much, because the weekly events felt kinda addictive - you could get neat rewards if you played it for almost four days straight. I’m still not a big fan of the ‘population’ mechanic that hard-caps the speed at which you can progress, but you could always pay your way out of it, so I guess that’s the point.