I have nothing against ports of ports of games, but GameBoy Advance-area platformers are weird things to port on PC. SRRDC is one of those games, added more or less as-is to the world of personal computers. It's okay for what it is, but I didn't spend more time on it than I had to. Some weird art choices, some weird systems here and there and precise platforming using the keyboard don't collide well in this weird belly-dancing metroidvania.
Although this game has some RPG elements, Zombieville USA 2 has clunky controls and a weird sense of uncertainty added to mechanics as simple as buying new weapons. It's a game where you kill zombies using guns in order to get money to buy better guns and perks that will help you defeat more tougher zombies. The game controls with a virtual joystick that mostly works and I had some fun with it before being frustrated with certain systems and uninstalling it.
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.
While I gave a 4/5 to Hotline Miami and enjoyed the puzzle-esque ultra-violent psycho trip, the second game didn't catch my attention as much and I found it much more difficult and frustrating than the first one. It is still the same shooter/puzzle, pitting you against horde of enemies and you always need to kill them all to proceed. With a weird story and a large cast of character this game could've been pretty amazing and I really tried to like it, but it just didn't compare.
Area 777 is a slot machine 'rpg' where you fight aliens by spinning reels to match symbols and attack them. You're also trying to get more cash to continue playing and to get experience to level up and unlock new type of reels, new machines and new power-ups. I didn't have a terrible time with the game but the huge full-screen ads that popped out all the time, combined with unrefined RPG mechanics and the unpredictability of chance games made me uninstall it after I had seen one too many advertisement for some product I didn't care at all about.
Much like the iOS game I've reviewed a while back - and much like Cookie Clicker and Anti-Idle in a sense - Clicker Heroes is an Idle game where you mostly click a few times and then let the game run for a while before clicking a few other times and waiting. Most of these games have some kind of progression where at some point you reset your game in order to get bonuses for the next run that will allow you to go even farther. There are not real goals in such games, but they're nice time wasters - and are much more appropriate on PC than on mobile devices. Clicker Heroes is pretty neat, although since games like this live and die by how frequently they're updated, I can't say that it has my attention as much as it once did.
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.
Fearless Fantasy is a neat concept - a turn-based RPG with some novel way to attack/defend, but poor execution, low amount of content and weird mechanics quickly turned me off from the game. It's not that the ideas are bad, but they're poorly explained, alongside the relatively low potential for character customization - something that I always look for in role playing games.
Volgarr the Viking reminds me of Ghouls And Ghosts, it reminds me of old platforming games with brutal difficulty, few options for the player and very precise mechanics. I'm giving it a 3/5 mainly because it's not for me; It's too difficult and the lack of difficulty options - that might have diluted the game's core essence - made it impossible for me to get anywhere past the second 'stage' of the game. It's well made and I'm certain there is an audience that wants exactly that kind of game, but that audience isn't me.
Metal Slug Defense is not entirely hot garbage, but there is better to be found in the realm of defense games where you get resources constantly and build units to push towards an enemy base that you destroy. Two things that annoyed me right up top? Full-screen ads on the mission select screen and full-screen ads right after you've completed a mission. No matter how fun or charming a game can be, having a video ad for some other game block your device is awful.
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.
Earn to die 2 is a little "endless runner" type of game where you drive a car around with simple and usable controls for iOS - a bit like Trials with tilting and things like that - and run over zombies, boxes, exploding barrels and make money doing so. You then use that money to upgrade your car in order to progress a little bit further and make more money, in order to - you guessed it - do the same thing, almost forever. There are a few flaws with ETD2, but I mostly had fun with it before it became repetitive and pointless.
Maybe if Terra Battle was a game you'd pay money for and you didn't have to gamble to get new characters, maybe if there were no stamina system, maybe if it didn't use the timed drag-your-characters-around method of control in puzzle games, maybe if it didn't do all these things, I would've liked it better. TB is a RPG where you move your characters around a battlefield to "pincer" enemies in order to attack them. You have a wide cast of skills and abilities that trigger and alter the grid and there is also a wide range of characters to collect. Ultimately, I didn't like it much.
Outcast Odyssey isn't a terrible game even if there is a respawn timer, even if you have to be online, even if it's weirdly balanced and even if the core battle system is a bit flawed. I had fun with it at the beginning, but it deteriorated quickly. OO is a game where you explore maps, fight enemies and fuse cards together to become stronger and potentially fight stronger enemies while they slowly lower your HP until then you have to pay for potions or wait until you get healthy again.
I'm not too sure why I played Hatoful Boyfriend, I'm not a big fan of visual novels and dating-themed ones aren't my cup of tea either. It must have been something about the pigeons, I thought. There was something weird about this game - dating sim where your peers are all birds - and it lead me to think that there would be more than meets the eye. Sadly for me, I couldn't dig deep enough within the game to ever find out if there was more than that.
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.
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.