Lost Viking is way too hard. It's a "puzzle" rpg where you slide tiles around to attack enemies, collect gold, unlock chests and do other things. It's way too hard and it's barely a puzzle. The core mechanic is that tiles appear and you slide the whole board - a bit like Threes - but with the tiles being pseudo-random and there being about six type of tiles, sometimes you just can't do anything. The game is also plagued with a bunch of progression-related issues and a few weird technical glitches here and there. But hey, at least there are no microtransactions.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Like most iOS games, there is something sad about Rhythm Thief. Born from a 3DS game about the aforementioned thief, this is a music game where you complete various mini-games in order to progress in a unimportant story comprised of three blocks of dialogue that almost have no impact on anything, something that probably was more akin to cutscenes in the original version. Why have story at all? To do so, you equip allies and fuse items and request friends like in other iOS games like Puzzle and Dragons, you collect premium currencies, hold auditions to spin the wheel on random gifts and other things of the sort that just distract you from the actual music games that are actually okay.
H:SA might be full of Halo story and characters, it might have a few good ideas here and there, but it's not a good game. I've had a frustrating experience with bad mission design, innapropriate gameplay systems and weird AI that made me stop playing way before the end of the game. I love twin stick shooters, but certain kind of challenges are left to other genres of videogames.
S&PA is a sad game, it's sad because the core concept of fighting with poker hands is interesting, but it's sad because of timers, premium currencies and 99.99$ best values. It's sad because of facebook requests, it's sad because of things you could buy to make the game too easy. At least it's sad and I'm not saying it doesn't have merit at all.
WildStar was very disappointing because I felt that it improved very little over World of Warcraft-era gameplay and systems. Yes, it did add a few things, but nothing that prevented me from being either overwhelmed by content spread across huge maps, stuck with no quests left to do or confused by some design decisions and apparently simple oversights that were had over a few systems across the game.
I've been very disappointed by MagRunner: Dark Pulse, the stuff I read about the game made it seemed like it was going to be much like portal and then at some point become scary/creepy/gory in some way shape or form, or involve monsters of some sort. After playing it for a few hours and being stuck at some puzzle at the beginning, I decided that I wasn't ready for what was to follow and didn't enjoy my time at all.
Angry Birds Epic might be a good game, it might just be. I would have gladly paid 10$ for that same product without the free to play junk, the unbalanced enemies and the random popups to try and bait you into clicking on ads. ABE might be a good game in a parallel universe, but in this one, it’s a neat idea flawed with greedy intentions.
There is not much to say about Demons vs Fairyland as it reminds me of many other tower defence games with a few things thrown in there to try and change the basic gameplay structure. I can’t say that I’m a fan of some of these things and while playing on easy, I’ve found the game too difficulty - a fact that is only exacerbated by the pay-to-win items you can buy.
Lego Marvel Super Heroes isn’t very good. The last lego game I’ve played was the first Star Wars one and that was a while ago. While I think this game has some charm with its characters and references and while I think somee of the core gameplay is quite solid, there was too much of a confusing mess when I tried playing this one and I stopped pretty quickly to go spend my time somewhere else.
Wayward Souls is too difficult for being on iOS. The quick, almost twitchy-like type of control you need for something like this action RPG is impossible to achieve with touch controls and to make matters worse, the upgrades and systems don’t really work in any way that helped me get better after each successive try.
Reaper - Tale of a Pale Swordsman isn’t a very good game, I feel like it was designed as separate things brought together in a confused result, with a good visual style and some interesting RPG mechanics here and there, I only grew frustrated and confused with it
I really enjoyed the first Half-Minute Hero game, in small bite-sized chunks of adventures, you went around fighting things, solving simple puzzles and completing challenges in less than 30 seconds (with some help from the money-grabbing time-rewinding goddess). This sequel bogs it down with long cutscenes and moves to a more linear way to frame the game instead of the level system it used before. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.
While it might look like an innocent match-3 game with RPG mechanics, Puzzling Rush is terrible, for the single reason that never ever, any mechanics are explained, leaving the player with a bunch of symbols and ‘HELP’ screens that are confusing and impossible to decipher.
Blowfish meets meteor is unfortunate. On one hand, it has a terrible control scheme for a breakout type game where taping left and right is imprecise and unpractical, on the other hand, the early level design felt so boring that I just turned it off.
Quest Lord is an old school RPG where you move in a 3d environment in first person. It’s very confusing and quirky and I lost attention pretty fast after not being sure where to go, fumbling around with a weird UI and not being sure if certain features of the game were bugs or just weird things.