Switch&Drop starts by asking you to agree to a EULA, this is always a good sign. Otherwise you just can't play the game. S&D is a game where you drop blocks by sliding lines of colored puzzle pieces and the goal is to match three or more to break them and activate special bonuses. It would probably be fine if it didn't have in-app purchases, energy timers and best values. This might sound a bit reductionist - I'll admit I haven't played that game for very long - but putting your worst foot forward isn't a way to make me care.
Mujo is a matching game where you match 3 tiles in order to do stuff - mostly damage to enemies, but you can also use them to level your heroes and collect treasures as well - and you can also 'combine' matched tiles in order for them to do even more effects. Tiles aren't destroyed automatically if 3 touch and breaking them brings the stack down. You can also raise the stack of tiles if you don't have any moves. An interesting fact about Mujo is the lact of 'lose' condition, you can play most levels forever and never lose. A fact that is rendered pretty moot by the battles that take forever and render the game boring to play after a short number of levels.
Hero Emblems is one of the best iOS games I've played in a long time. There are no IAPs and the game feels like a complete package with tons of content to go through, fun core mechanics and enough challenge and character customization to not feel bored of it. You play a party of four characters - mage, healer, paladin and fighter - and you match emblems to attack, defend or heal yourself. It's a classic formula turned into an amazing little game.
Shadowmatic is a neat concept - you rotate objects in order to cast specific shadows that aren't obvious at first but should become more apparent as you move stuff around. To increase the difficulty after a while, the game throws multiple pieces and now you have to move them relative to each other as well. In practice I find that fumbling around rotating pieces of weird shapes in order to arrive at an unknown goal is quite frustrating and the hint system should be more straightforward.
I don't have any bad thing to say about Evolve:Hunter Quest. I feel it's the right kind of free to play match three game with sufficiently deep gameplay systems, enough variety to make the player want to continue playing and most importantly, no energy system. This might sound silly, but if this game had an energy system (where attempting maps was throttled by such) the experience would have been completely different. As it is, it feels fair and balanced and losing a level isn't a terrible thing - because you would've lost energy for no gain - and I have no real opinion on it's tie-in with the Evolve shooter on PC. Besides setting, it doesn't provide much to this game.
Puzzle Forge 2 is a pretty neat little puzzle game where the goal is to make gear for customers going to your forge. To do so, you place rocks on a grid and then you place molds next to two rocks to craft parts that you need to combine to create weapons, armors and more. Combining rocks makes better materials and the game adds a bit of complexity with gems (and the combining thereof) and magic that you use to power-up the gear you're making. You lose the game when you can't complete customer requests too many times or when the board fills up - the latter happens more often than the former.
Where's my Water! is a physics based puzzle game where you have to move water from one point to a drain connected to the shower of an alligator. It's a fun little game that progressively adds new mechanics and concepts and piles on replayability by having you collect things and fill ducks with water as well. I had a good time with it and I suppose it could be considered as a classic of sorts, resembling in spots with many other puzzle games.
Super Time Force Ultra could have been amazing instead of just great if it knew what it wanted to be and focused on one aspect of the game. As it is, it's kind of a mess to play, quite bad with the keyboard and only made a little bit better by the use of a controller - something I try to do as little as possible with PC games - and while there are a few design decisions here and there that I find just weird, I had a great time with it and I think it's a charming game most people should try.
Escape Goat 2 is a delightful puzzle platformer where you play a goat for some reason, and you complete various puzzle rooms with different themes and mechanics in a few themed worlds. To do so, you have headbutt attacks, a double jump and a little mouse companion that you can use to do tricks. I've enjoyed my time with the game although I've found the controls a bit hard to get around, especially in the later puzzles when you're required to do many things in quick succession in order to succeed.
Words for Evil is a game where you make words out of tiles to attack enemies and use abilities. My experience with it was quite poor as the controls didn't work properly and some of the core ideas don't work really well for me. Besides that, the character system and the items you can get, the skill and their upgrades and the mechanics the game tosses here and there to help you try and beat it are a good effort and I had some fun with WoE.
Hack'n'Slash is a really strange mix - on the surface, it might look like a zelda game - with bombs, boomerangs and hearts - but it's actually a programming puzzle game where the hacking refers to actually modifying the source code - programmed in LUA - of the game. At first you can only edit the public values of game objects - like if a door is open or closed - but as the game goes, you get many powers which allow you to completely crash the world if you so desire. The hacking aspect of the game is amazing, the moving around and slashing, not as much.
Framed as really solid gameplay, but that's pretty much it, which is a bit problematic because it felt original and I had a good time playing it, but I was just puzzled as to the lack of meat around the bone, albeit how solid the bone really was. You play the game by moving frames of a comic around and it influences the actions that take place. I have to say that the silhouettes of characters work well until they add eyes to them - they just look weird - and the jazzy music fits the tone of the game quite well. It's got charm.
Super Glyph Quest is one of the best iOS games I've played in a long time, it's not perfect, but it's simply a game. It's not a marketplace, it's not an opportunity, it's not a best deal, it's a game. You match glyphs on a grid to cast spells on your enemies, you get experience, materials and items to allow yourself to survive tougher challenges. Rinse and repeat for a good chunk of time. With glyphs to mix and match to create various spells and a bunch of enemies, it's a really cool little game.
The Bot Squad is half a puzzle game, half a black hole for your money, it's gameplay mechanics well thought in order to minimize your enjoyment of the game if you're not ready to annoy someone on facebook or to give them cash. It's something that looks like a puzzle game but quickly turns into something else, a primordial paste of energy timers, premium currencies, best values and robots.
This is a match-three game where you have to spend money in order to get anywhere. A few good ideas here and there, but I grow bored of these things. It's also very frustrating in the maps where you can't do anything and the only way to save yourself is to spend some money on items to break tiles or resurrect your troops.
LLTQ is a choose-your-own-adventure kind of game. It's framed as a princess simulator - where you play a 14 year old kid that is going to become queen after a year passes - and each week you make a few choices to raise certain stats, manage your mood and try to evade dangers that could result in a game over - there are few second chances in this game - but it does certain things right in a way that makes it fun instead of frustrating.
Skullduggery is a fast-paced puzzle game using the advantages of iOS games to help itself rather than work against it. You play it by stretching the brain of a skull in order to propel it around. Think how you stretch the catapult in angry birds, but with more squishy flesh instead. You do so to collect money and defeat enemies, navigate labyrinths while a wall moves to crush you and collect power-ups in order to defeat bosses and get all the objectives in a level.
Puzzle Bandits, simply put, is a Puzzle&Dragons clone. You match things to make combos and then you attack your enemies or heal and after a fixed number of turns, your enemies attack you. You can fuse heroes together to raise their levels, you can buy random heroes for real money and they are really strong. While P&D had me going for at least an hour before I stopped, PB didnt last more than ten minutes because of some extreme difficulty
Rules! is a good representation of what the best iOS games are; clearly made for the medium, simple core mechanics and controls that fit perfectly with the platform and no extra charges for dubious artificial gameplay boosts. Of course, the quick, almost minigame genre isn't the only thing you can do on iOS devices, but Rules! pulls it off quite well and is an interesting little game.
It's very hard to find a flaw in The Swapper because what it does, it does very well. It does very little, in some sense, but as a puzzle-platformer, I loved it. It felt like one of those games where you could add enemies and a health bar and you would have a full-on metroidvania but instead you have nice puzzles playing around with creating clones and warping to them with an interesting story and simple controls.