Compared to Magic 2015 I looked at a few weeks ago, PTCGO is way better. I had a few technical issues here and there with the game but otherwise it feels like you can do pretty much anything you could do in a real game of the actual card game. Some might argue that the Pokemon cards are simpler - there is no 'instant' in PTCG, everything is played during your turn - but that's just the nature of the rules of one game versus another. It had been a while since I had looked at this and was surprised to see that there are now the equivalent of enchantments - such as giving +30 max HP to a pokemon.
What do you get if you mix Batman, Assassin's Creed and Lord of the Rings? You get ME:SoM. It is incredibly reductive to call it only a by-product of these three things, but since one of the first thing you do is eagle-dive down a tower and then activate your bat/ghost vision to see the bad guys and then you are fighting the uruks from the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien, it's hard not to compare ME:SoM to the sum of its parts. That being said, there are a few very interesting systems in there, notably the nemesis system.
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
TMQFEL is a free to play action rpg with asynchronous multiplayer tower defense and base building mechanics. Although the tone of the game - trying to be humorous - is grating for no reason, I really enjoyed my time with it and would recommend it if you enjoy both base building and loot-driven action rpg dungeon delving.
What is the main goal of a digital version of a card game? The goal of adding metagaming around the core experience, being either with a story, with cards to collect, achievements to get or quests to complete, is of course the main draw to these remakes of games such as MtG. That being said, the main goal of a digital TCG is to portray as closely as possible the original game and to follow its rules the best it can. MtG2015 is terrible in many ways at doing so, especially since I've been playing MtG for the past 15 years and I was at least expecting basic moves to work.
Heroes of the Storm isn't live yet, it's currently in a technical alpha and you can play with all heroes for free and some game modes aren't really locked down, but I like it. It's a strange twist on the LOMA genre made popular by DOTA and League of Legends, but it takes some stuff away, adds new ideas with a cast of characters many will recognize, each with their unique playstyles and a fun talent system to boot.
SpyMaster is an okay iOS game, it's a few things away from being a great iOS game, but it falls into the same traps and issues that I have with most games on that platform. SM is a board game where you move agents in Europe to establish spy rings, collect intel, raid factory and evade Gestapo Inspektors. Each action takes a number of turns and your agents get tired after a while and need to rest, it's a nice balance of risks and rewards. Sadly, there is a premium currency used for most practical things and timers in most places too.
I helped Grim Dawn back when I was at university, that was a few years ago, then I gave some more money to their kickstarter, because why not. I know the version I'm playing right now isn't final, but there are still a few issues I would like to address in what's playable. These things might be fixed by the time the game goes gold and I still plan to take another look at it when that'll happen, but right now, GD bores me, playing Grim Dawn made me install Titan Quest and play that instead.
Gemini Strike is a top-down arcade style bullet hell shooter with RPG elements that is way too hard for its own good. Almost everything can only be bought with premium currency that you accumulate too slowly and the options you have with the regular currency are pretty limited. But the spikes of terrible difficulty near the very beginning of the game are what turned me off it and I was sad not to be able to see more of its contents.
Royal Quest makes me nostalgic for another age, when I was in high school, when MMOs were a bit different than what they are now, when microtransactions didn't really exist - but then again, at that age, I didn't have much money to pay monthly bills for MMOs. In any case, RQ makes me nostalgic for Ragnarok Online in particular, it's not a huge coincidence since it's a complete rip-off of the old game. Even the main capital looks the same, player shops littering the way to enter town and all.
Tiny Dice Dungeon isn't as bad as last week's game, but I found it an annoying game to play. No matter the fatigue system, it's one of the core mechanics that just turned me off the game. I know that the main theme here is risk versus reward, but the risk is too sharp, the potential reward is not worth the consequences except if you are extremely lucky.
Runers is a rogue like twin stick shooter of sorts where you play some kind of spellcaster armed with runes that you can combine to make more powerful spells, it's a bit difficult for my tastes but I feel like it's a pretty good game, even though I've just scratched the surface. There are a few things here and there that could be made to make it easier but otherwise the arcade feel and the enemy variety combined with a great deal of information about your own abilities made me lose a few hours in this fun title.
Spellfall makes me angry as a designer. It's a neat game, you match things to attack with elements, you get powerful tiles if you match more than three, you equip stuff, you charge up to cast magic. Spellfall is also everything that is wrong with mobile gaming nowadays, a cheap experience that seems fine for a while but quickly becomes impossible to bear.
Blackguards is a dense RPG, perhaps too much for it's own good. I love turn-based strategy games such as the Fire Emblems of the world, but I feel that these games work because your characters are already well defined and most of the time each character represents an archetype that can be used in a very limited number of ways on the battlefield. Quite the contrary here with a game that goes all over the place with too much mechanics and little that is done in order for the player to know what he should do.
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.
Path of Exile is always being updated with new stuff but the Forsaken Masters update had me try it again and more content always makes for a better game. I hadn't seen the Vaal Gems - corrupted gems that require enemy kills before you can use them - yet nor the randomly placed random dungeons, so there's a lot of stuff in there to digest for me. That being said, I'm having a blast by playing it again.
Rusted Emeth is a very average RPG with a few weird control issues and some things that could be explained better. I love the style of games where you have both a pilot and a mech, it's a bit weird when they both can deal and/or take almost the same amount of punishment, but I was curious about the game so I let it slide. A bit on the incomprehensible stats side with an uncertainty in game progression, RE didn't grab me at all.
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.
What if Nintendo went free-to-play with Pokémon? How would they sell it? Would they still put the same production values into the game? Would the game feel fair and balanced or would it feel like you need to pay money in order to have even odds? I'm not sure where Micromon fits in this whole picture, but it smells both of Pokémon rip-off and of pay-to-win systems implemented together in a bland game that I won't play anymore.
Divinity Original Sin is a pretty interesting game, although it is mired with a few annoyances and badly implemented ideas that make the experience less than ideal. It is, as they advertised, an old kind of game; turn based RPGs aren't that common anymore and the bulk of its mechanic feel like they have been designed a while ago. That being said, the combat system salvaged it for me after a while, otherwise I would have been ready to write this game off.