I don't know if there was something I was doing wrong with Fiz when I played it but the game didn't explain much to me. Although I had a poor time with it, Fiz is well done, devoid of microtransactions with a bunch of systems to exploit and some sense of discovery and a ton of content, I thought at first that I would play through the whole thing, but got annoyed after a short while and stopped.
I had heard good things about EMPIRE: The Deck Building Strategy Game and decided to check it out! In my head, a strategy deck building game would have you start a campaign with very little cards and as you win fights you'd add more cards to your inventory until you beat the story. That idea sounded interesting in my idea; sadly for me my expectations weren't met. I was wrong about what this game was going to be, and what I got instead was too frustrating to keep me interested.
I'm on a bad streak of iPad games nowadays, okay, Devil's Attorney was great, but the games I've been trying out recently... They're not very good. Take Doom & Destiny for instance, I'm kinda baffled how a game full of RPG maker assets could land on iOS. Can you even use RPG Maker to make iOS games? Probably not, but this game feels like it. Also it's pretty immature and dumb, like Unepic was. I probably would've cared much more about it if it played the story straight.
Far from me to remind people of the review I wrote of the original PC version of Cook, Serve, Delicious but CSD was one of the contestants from my game of the year last year, it was a fun, fast paced wario-ware in spirit game where you made foods and accomplished chores in a restaurant in a micro-game fashion. I was pleased to try the iPad version - maybe it would've fixed the few things I didn't like about the original - oh, how wrong was I.
Not unlike Gun Runner - some game I've made - Escape From Doom is an endless runner with first person shooter elements, however, poor controls ruin the whole experience and no amount of little perks and unlockables will make me want to play any more of it.
Gunner Z is a sad state of affairs. The core gameplay (on-rails shooter) could be fine on its own, but it's bogged down by so much microtransactions and hooks to try and make you spend money that everything in this game is terrible. I had some fun with it, but it wasn't worth my time.
A bit like King Cashing, Tower of Fortune is a game based on slot machines. You explore maps by spinning slots, you fight enemies that way, you collect loot, forge items and interact with the tavern by pressing a 'SPIN' button. The comparison stops there, though. While King Cashing was a fun RPG, this game is a brutal roguelike and dying means having to start all over (except if you bought a thing that saves your equipment when you die) and the game kinda feels unfair at times.
Puzzle and Dragons is insanely successful, it seems. I've decided to try it out as soon as it went live on the Canadian app store, and my god, it is a load of nonsense. The core mechanic of the game (moving gems on a board) manages to be mostly luck-based and somehow less refined than old match-3 games and/or Tetris Attack and/or puzzle quest managed to do years ago. The monster collection part is also completely nonsensical and random but at the same time, vital to progress through the game.
I didn't "get" 868-Hack, a popular videogame where you datajack into the cell cubes to decrypt pointfiles while cyberdodging viruses and shooting them with your datagun. This feels like a roguelike, this feels like a small thing with no rhyme or reason. I can't say I've enjoyed 868-Hack much because I've failed miserably to progress past the first few screens and some mechanics are still incomprehensible to me.
Hammerwatch has many flaws, it gets boring and repetitive after a while, it's brutally difficult and worse of all, it's not randomly generated. I thought this was going to be a roguelike, based loosely on Gauntlet with deeper RPG elements. I was wrong on the roguelike part, this is more of a hack-and-slash with a tendency for traps and ridiculously high number of enemies.
Here is a nice paragraph. Plants vs Zombies 2 is an incredibly polished, well-made game that builds upon its predecessor with new zombies, new plants, new level types, a map-based progression system that allows you to unlock upgrades in the order you want, power-ups and boosts to help you defeat difficult challenges, endless maps to try and tackle and the same addictive gameplay that made PvZ so good. All of this, and more, if you're willing to stomach tons of f2p Junk.
Dig! is a bad remake of Qix. There's some slightly interesting stuff around the main game (upgrades, hats, collectibles, museum upgrades and things like that) but while you're moving around trying to dodge things and get treasures, the game feels too busy and most of the things you're against are unexplained.
When RIFT came out, it was an MMO like World of Warcraft; You bought a box for 60$, you paid 15$ a month to play and everything was open to you without the need to spend more money. The game was fairly grind-heavy but had a few good things going for it compared to WoW. Fast-forward three years, the game is free-to-play and the things that were good and special back in the days are afterthoughts now.
UnEpic is a Metroidvania with some interesting gameplay concepts brought down by an uninteresting story and immature characters, but mostly disappointing because of some key systems that I didn't enjoy playing around even though it felt like a Castlevania game by moments.
Marvel Heroes is a weird mix between archaic action RPG systems and MMORPG sensibilities that blend from mission to mission until you're funneled in a straight line to daily repetitive quests that aren't very fun and might even require you to pay money to play them.
BattleStone is an action-rpg type of game where you move a character around to accomplish quests that often are simply to kill things using swiping motions and special powers that fill up over time. You can rack up combos by keeping away from the enemies's attacks and get gold that way. That being said, a bad camera and aggressive free to play design makes it difficult to get into.
I used to play a game in high school called Motherload. You had a little ship with a drill and you could drill down the earth to find treasures, but it was dangerous. You had to be careful about bumping into the walls and floor, you were overheating constantly and running out of oil was a death sentence.
I don't mind fighting games on the iPad, Infinity Blade proved to me that it's doable and you can have complex, fun fighting systems even with the limited control options. I wondered what kind of game Injustice would be on the iPad, being sure that it couldn't be a port of the hit console mortal kombat-like fighter. I was mostly right, it's not.
Shufflepuck Cantina is a weird game, on one hand you have an interesting air hockey game with power-ups, special moves, and prizes to be won, on the other hand you have a deep achievement system, shops, different NPCs with stories and moves to master, quests and some gambling here and there.
Besides most Mario Kart games and TrackMania, I don't play racing games. Maybe it's because, like sports games, they emulate reality on a level that I don't find fun, maybe it's because I'm terrible at them, maybe it's because my gaming time isn't something I can just share between every game in existence, having tried NFS:MW, I think there is pretty good stuff in today's driving games, even tho I can't help but feel like they're missing part of their potential audience.