I couldn’t get very far in Diablo Immortal because I don’t have any mobile devices with sufficient storage space to download all the required stuff, and that’s all right. While a mobile version of a popular action RPG franchise is certainly something that could be fine and not something I would be opposed to in principle, I still am staunchly opposed to free to play games that blur the design line between playing for fun, playing as a replacement to paying money and playing as a vehicle to extract money from players. You’ll understand that Diablo Immortal is one of these games.
Technopoly has an interesting idea - building around structures on an island, improving resource production until you have enough to build bridges to different islands, rinse and repeat, with a fine art style and some interesting flavor. Sadly, you need to pay real money or watch ads to do pretty much everything. The most egregious offender is about the bridges you build between islands, which get doled out at a glacial pace if you don’t want to pay premium currencies. That’s all.
Rise & Shine is a puzzle platformer with a tone issue and interesting but poorly framed mechanics. Playing a young boy named Rise, you go through an invasion by evil video game grunts by wielding the mythical gun Shine, shooting your way through difficult enemies, massive bosses and somewhat ill-conceived puzzle sections. I really couldn’t get into it and dropped the game fairly quickly, which is a shame, because there are good ideas in there!
Melvor Idle is an idle game on multiple platforms that I will revisit in the future because I do happen to have bought the PC version on steam. Contrary to that one, the iOS version is free and comes with a bunch of restrictions and in-app purchases that certainly soured my experience a whole lot. Ultimately it is because of confusing UX and progression that I dropped it. It is fine to have a ton of systems in your games - or a ton of different skills that do mostly the same thing, but affecting different stats - but making it all come together is really important, and - for now - Melvor Idle didn’t do that at all for me.
Time Idle RPG seemed like a neat idle game with a lot of ideas based around literally using time to do actions such as gathering resources, crafting and fighting enemies. Sadly with too many numbers and too many mechanics surfaced immediately so I was quickly overwhelmed and stopped.
Idle Crafting is a depressingly badly balanced idle game with a nifty style and a cute premise. What if you destroyed blocks in order to gather materials that you then use to craft tools to make you better at destroying blocks? In theory, that’s fine and fun. In practice this game is an ad-fest with blocks getting so difficult to destroy that you need to leave the game and come back later to upgrade your character and automatically-attacking pet friends. What I want from idle games are reasons to stay there and play, not reasons to put them down extremely quickly, and Idle Crafting gives me plenty from the second category.
TASTEE: Lethal Tactics profoundly disappointed me. From strange technical issues to an overly complicated introduction, what really did me in was the core gameplay that absolutely made no sense to me. In this strategy game, you move units around while planning your actions in order to complete missions and ‘play’ your turns at your own pace. In theory, this is really cool - and the game’s tutorial made the whole process seem really interesting with the many ways you could watch turns play out before picking the right one. In practice, the actual game uses fog of war in a very aggressive way that turns any odds of having fun into a trial-and-error slog.
Mario Kart Tour continues the series of my disappointment with Nintendo mobile offerings of late; Great production values mired by subpar gameplay and insufferable microtransaction-laden mechanics everywhere. I gave it a shot to see what the game was like, but when I got hit by a requirement for me to replay some of the previous levels, I decided it was enough. I didn’t have a great time with the game itself, so everything around it just felt like adding insult to injury.
Pokémon Masters is another mobile gacha offering from Nintendo and it just disappointed me, much like Dr Mario World (and Mario Kart World as well). In it you go through missions and fight with some iconic pokémon trainers from all over the lore. To do so, you recruit them in your party, upgrade their skills, complete missions and mash through a lot of dialogue. This game has a ton of production values, but ultimately still results in a product that feels shallow, unbalanced and exploitative.
I was pretty excited to try Dr Mario World, Nintendo’s mobile entry in the Dr Mario franchise, even tho the core mechanics were pretty different from the usual game. I really tried getting into it, but ultimately couldn’t, I found it to be a really bad free to play game with gameplay that didn’t make sense at all for me. I lost enough times on early levels that I ran out of stamina and had to stop playing almost immediately. Still, it’s a cute little Dr Mario themed product if you can get into it and they clearly put some effort into interesting character design.
Magic the Gathering: Puzzle Quest is an interesting concept; You use MtG cards to defeat enemies but instead of tapping lands to get mana in order to cast spells, you match gems on a board to get mana that goes to the use of your cards. Mana costs are now colorless and you can swap which card you’re going to play next. Instead of having a bunch of creatures on the board, you can stack identical monsters together - and there’s a limit of 3 types - and you’ll attack your opponent each turn with your available summons. The core concept is pretty cool, but it’s just a free to play mobile game with terrible monetization that made me hate it almost instantly.
Questland embodies most of what I find is wrong with mobile games today; Good production values, interesting core systems - sometimes, but ultimately a bunch of timers, resources to buy and spend for incremental upgrades that almost don’t matter and a gameplay experience that involves a lot of busywork for not much fun. I tried to get into Questland and see if there was anything in there, but it didn’t take me too long to stop trying.
I don’t usually do this (console game reviews), but I feel like I have something to say about TSA:NMH, a game that I was anticipating greatly. A game that meant so much to me as a Suda51 fan that I had bought the special deluxe collector edition from europe and I planned on buying the normal edition to have it at launch as well. I knew this wasn’t going to be No More Heroes 3, but controlling Travis Touchdown as you went through a bunch of different game worlds seemed like a cool proposition. Ultimately, TSA is a deeply disappointing title, both gameplay and story-wise and playing it frustrates me to no end. This review can’t be spoiler free, so beware.
Idle Empires is a run of the mill idle game with an interesting (?) story conceit and a grin sense of humor. Although it has a few ideas here and there to break the monotony of idle gameplay, there wasn’t enough for me to stay engaged with it more than a few hours. The game’s reliance on very costly upgrades paths with few immediate effects and the general starting curve of revenue generation combined with the ticking revolution clock made this a weird mix for me.
Exception is a puzzle game based around programming where you control a fleet of robots and must accomplish certain objectives like defeating all enemies or moving a robot to a certain point. The type of puzzle programming in question here is all about setting triggers and actions in order to react to the condition of the level. I had a very limited time with it because I felt that the puzzles had a very small solution set (unlike programming) and I had to look at many answers on the internet and even then I couldn't figure out -why- they worked. A few interesting ideas bogged down by the lack of support and kinda bizarre engrish text, then.
The Guides is an iOS puzzler that I haven't spent much time with. It was just too difficult and frustrating to use at times. While I appreciate the straightforwardness of the game's presentation and type of puzzle, I didn't have fun at all with it. Build around a series of logic puzzles, Vignettes has you try and decipher layer upon layer of mysteries in a series of screens that have only a vague link between them; Not letting you appreciate each mechanic of the puzzle long enough before moving on to something else.
Swipe Casters is barely a game; it is an okay core mechanic slapped around in-app purchases, weird systems and one-note gameplay. The idea to trace glyphs in order to deal damage to enemies is fine, but when that's all there is to it, when all the game does is pile on more difficulty on the glyph tracing and when the upgrades feel pointless and not fun, it feels more like a tech demo than an actual game. I tried to have fun with it, but I left sorely disappointed.
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.
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.
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.