Besides being a grab at people's desire for more Kingdom Hearts, KHXU isn't much in terms of a game. It's full of free to play mechanics that I dislike - mainly fusing stuff and getting random items in exchange for the premium currency - but I've gotta say that the kingdom hearts feel is there. With some retooling this could've been a 'real' game that I would've cared about as an entry in the KH franchise, but besides being a grab for fan attention, it's a bit disappointing.
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.
Tomb of Tyrants is a weird mix, on one hand you have a puzzle game where matching four and more of a type of tiles produces resources for you to use in building and buying units and floors for your dungeon. On the other hand you have a dungeon building game where adventurers try to kill your tyrant and only your dungeon and creatures can stop them. I felt that both aspects of this game didn't work perfectly well together, although I had some fun with ToT. No matter how well the game worked, it was still a very interesting idea.
Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey Remastered reminds me of Bookworm Adventures, in a good way. It's a game of letters where you use a grid of tiles to make words in order to damage your opponents and find treasures. Along the way, you buy various upgrades, complete challenges and unlock new stuff. You can customize your character in many ways to fit better with your playstyle and the game gets plenty challenging and I lost many hours to it while trying to complete every objective, obtain every achievement and finish all of the elite levels. It's a really great game.
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.
Ori And The Blind Forest is a neat little metroidvania with a really nice visual style. Some of its systems are quite interesting and I had a good time playing it, even if it ultimately ended in frustration towards the way this game checkpoints your progress. With RPG mechanics, exploration and some good skill-based platforming, this could have been an amazing game, but it sadly just came up short to that.
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.
Terraria meets exploring island on your ship with your crew, fighting enemy pirates, finding treasures and dying of scurvy, Pixel Piracy is an odd one. I definitely think it's an interesting game, but some of its mechanics are a bit on the cumbersome side, some of its systems are bugged in ways that hurt the player way too much, and it's progression leaves a bit to be desired. That being said, I still had a great time with it and managed to overlook its few flaws.
Grimrock 2 is a well made RPG with roots in a past for which I have no nostalgia. The arcane mechanics it uses, combined with spotty systems that feel weird and unpolished - all of that mixed with the relative difficulty - prevented me from getting super invested in it. I had an okay time and a few of the things I did were fun, but overall I wasn't sad to move on.
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.
Undertale is amazing. It's a funny, whimsical, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes disturbing turn-based RPG with a flair that I cannot help but compare with Earthbound in some ways. The strength of its plot, the complex story you can experience multiple times, the depth of it's mechanics (pretty cool wario-ware battle system) and the humor make this a game you won't want to skip if you're a fan of any of these things.
I'm a big Puzzle Quest fan, but I can't say that I enjoy roguelikes - or the FTL model - very much. This made my relationship with Ironcast a bittersweet one; Some of its core mechanics are pretty fun, others are kinda infuriating, and there's this inevitability aspect that stresses you in time and reduces the number of actions you can do in a set game that leaves some of the fun aspects of match-3 RPGs behind.
Trulon is a classic turn-based RPG where you fight using cards that represent your different moves. You go along through a story, fighting enemies and collecting cards to build your deck, you equip various pieces of gear and complete quests. You walk around on a world map. It's neat and well-built, it also uses the strengths of iOS devices in the form of the card-based battle system. That being said, it felt way too slow for me, and that slowness turned into boredom.
You Must Build A Boat is a perfect iOS game, it's build from the ground up to work on touch devices, it has no in-app purchases, no timers and no ads, it could be a bigger product on a portable console without much changes. The #1 block-sliding upgrade-buying boat-building game of 2015 was a blast and with only a few blemishes to an otherwise amazing title, I've only had fun with it and probably would've kept playing if the New Game+ carrot had been more enticing.
Valkyria Chronicles is a weird mix between a turn-based strategy game and a third person shooter set in fictional Europe during a parallel world World War. With plenty of content, neat style and somewhat deep systems, it could've been a great game for me, sadly it doesn't go over "good" since the mix of strategy and shooting created a bunch of frustrating messes that I didn't enjoy slogging through at all.
Masters of the Masks is a confusing and convoluted free to play turn-based RPG where you spend stamina in order to fight guys, only to die on the fourth level because the balance is out of wack. To do so, you find materials to create masks and gear and you spin wheels and wait for a few minutes in order for crafting to complete - or you can always pay to make it faster. I didn't have much fun with it.
This is a bad game. If you ignore the core, the mechanics around it are encrusted with layers upon layers of systems, resources, microtransactions and other purchases, unlockable content and levels, things that need to be added carefully to not spoil the broth. But then, if you look at the main game, this just adds insult to injury, as the core gameplay is clunky, unbalanced and not fun.
Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic has the potential to be a 5/5 in my book because of it's neat systems, focus on buffs/debuffs/status effects, a wide range of unlockable rewards and other challenges and a large number of skills and items to use. Sadly, poor balancing in many spots, lack of information to focus player choice and other oddities made me stop playing after finishing the first campaign and rolling a new party. It's still pretty fun, and good!