Even with such a name, The “Amazing” Alex isn’t an amazing game. Maybe clever at first, coalescing thoughts about The Amazing Machine of old, but soon a sour disappointment with puzzles based on luck and gratuitous trial-and-error with a broken interface and lack of depth will replace any fondness you might hold for the game.
Yet another port of a console game, Trials works pretty well on the PC. It’s a bit awkward at first to use a random key as the thrust button and then use the arrow keys to tilt the bike, but after a while I got as good with it than I did with the console version.It still has the same issues, but it’s still a blast if you like that almost puzzle-ish arcade feel.
Guacamelee is an interesting metroidvania with a world-switching mechanic and a large swath of memes sprinkled around. I quite enjoyed it, even if it continued (with Vadis Story last week) a trend of PC games almost requiring controllers to play ‘properly’. After progressing through almost all the game, I was stopped by one fight that frustrated me to no end.
Containment: The Zombie Puzzler is a little action-puzzle game where you have to swap differently suited citizens around zombies to kill them. Instead of matching 3, you have to box them in, and then the zombies die and new citizens march in and you get power-up sometimes. I can't say it grabbed me.
Starborn Anarkist is a little dual-stick shooter where you complete challenges and defeat tons of enemies/bosses to unlock new gear to make your ship designs stronger to keep doing the same thing. You upgrade temporarily your offence/defence/speed during play sessions in some weird way.
State of Decay is a vast and complex game full of systems and things to do. I feel like the game is too open and maybe a bit too complex, leaving you with a short list of actions you can take and a ton of systems to observe and care about as some kind of real-time clock decays the world around you - I think?
Monaco: What's yours is mine is a stealth game with a neat style and very French NPCs. I really don't enjoy most stealth games except when I feel like I have the tools at my disposition to be better than the guards or traps placed in them. I won't mind stealth if I have everything I need to pull 100% perfect sequences without endless trial-and-error. Sadly for me, MWYIM didn't feel like it gave me everything I required.
Risk of Rain has great core gameplay mechanics. It's a platformer/roguelike where you pick a character then need to find teleporters to get back to your ship without dying. There are tons of items you can randomly find during your journey, each class has different abilities, there are tons of unlockables / challenges, the game is pretty difficult but rewarding and I really love its style. It has, however, a fatal design flaw.
Device-6 is a puzzle game that prefers style over substance; While it is very interesting visually to have some kind of novel where the orientation of the words change and you scroll through the story like you were a character moving in a book, actually playing it never felt 'fun' for me, the puzzles were more alike to busywork than brain teasers. Also, even if it has no impact on the gameplay argument, I didn't find the story particularity interesting, therefore that failed to grab me and prevented me from deleting it.
Hearthstone : Heroes of Warcraft is a card game where you need to lower the opponent's life to 0. To do so, you have a deck of cards (split between class cards from one of the nine World of Warcraft classes (wait, nine?) and creature cards) and a special hero power unique to each class. The game will be free to play and is currently in beta, but as the core mechanics probably won't change, I feel like it's fair to give it a look right now.
Steampunk Tower is a perfectly competent tower defense game. Instead of building towers, you place turrets into a big tower standing in the middle of the battlefield. Enemies attack you from left and right and you can move turrets around to upgrade them or to reload ammo. Enemies are weak against some type of turrets but strong against other, forcing you to build a wide array of defenses, you can upgrade them between fights, using oh-so-precious dollars. It wasn't the best tower defense game I've played, but I enjoyed it.
Giant Boulder of Death suffers from the 'too free' game problem; It's free, but it's also full of pop-out ads and suspicious redirection to the facebook app. It's too bad, because the game itself is fun, you roll a boulder down a hill, crushing everything, doing so, you accomplish missions, get gold and gems (premium currency, check!) and upgrade your boulder in some capacity.
A weird mix of Real Time Strategy, light turn-based strategy elements, 3rd person shooter and political management story driven game, Divinity: Dragon Commander excels at some parts of it. The talking about storytelling are excellent and you really want to know what's coming next, but the other parts of gameplay felt lacking for me.
It's in Early Access, it's in Beta, call it what you will. The version of Mercenary Kings you can play right now is still loads of fun and seems feature complete enough for me to relate what I've experienced during my playtime with it. At it's core, MK is a mash-up of Borderlands, Metal Slug and Monster Hunter. The shooting is of the 2d sidescrolling variety, you have a ton of gun parts to customize your weapon with and you can capture enemies and killed monsters drop materials. It's not perfect, but it's not officially out yet.
Infinity Blade is pretty much a medieval/sci-fi version of Punch-Out. Depending of your equipped weapon, you have different options of blocking, dodging or parrying. Between fights, you gather materials, gold bags and other items, you get experience and can level up, gaining skill points to place between health, shields, attack and magic, your gear also gains experience until it levels up and grants you more skill points. You can slot gems in certain equipment pieces, you can brew potions, upgrade your mastered gear, and much more. Even with all that, there's plenty I don't like in this game.
SolForge is a trading card game that would be tough to make in real life. A bit like Scrolls, it uses counters (you increase and decrease stats permanently quite often in this game, compared to Magic: The Gathering where creatures don't keep their life totals dynamic every turn) and a grid-like playing field. There's an interesting level-up system where cards you play can come back as leveled-up versions of themselves after a few turn, making you pick the cards you want to evolve over the ones that are useful right then. Ultimately, I find it light in content and without reasons to play it before future updates.
The Secret World is a MMORPG that does somethings differently from the usual model and while overall I feel like it's intriguing and I want to see more of what there is to see in there, some basic parts of the content are frustrating, too difficult, badly designed and seem purposeless. Avoiding these parts of the game is possible, but the overall experience remains diminished.
CastleStorm is a weird mix of Angry Birds and strategy RPG elements. The goal of most levels is the same; to destroy the enemy's castle. To do so, you fire projectiles, spawn units, use magic and try to complete special objectives to gain more money and more stars. The game has some fine ideas but it's a bit unsure of what it wants to be and so it doesn't do anything particularly well.
Beat Sneak Bandit is a rhythm stealth game where you need to tap the screen following a beat to move around environments filled with various devices and traps. The goal of each level is to get a clock with a red flag on top of it, but getting a bunch of optional clocks unlocks additional challenging levels and getting everything in each stage is the biggest difficulty.
Card Hunter is a browser-based board game with CCG and RPG elements. You control a part of three little figurines and work your way through a campaign of battles, defeating monsters, getting loot and experience and doing it all over again. I loved it enough to keep playing for a good while, but frustrating battles, low speed of character progression and strange business models make me doubt I'll play it much longer.