Masters of the Masks is a confusing and convoluted free to play turn-based RPG where you spend stamina in order to fight guys, only to die on the fourth level because the balance is out of wack. To do so, you find materials to create masks and gear and you spin wheels and wait for a few minutes in order for crafting to complete - or you can always pay to make it faster. I didn't have much fun with it.
I'm probably going to give Beside a second look somewhere in the future if it gets massively updated or something of the sort, because I didn't enjoy my time with what's currently out there right now. Besiege is a puzzle game of sorts where you build siege engines out of many different parts in order to complete objectives, you have a large range of choices for parts and control over them and the objectives are also varied. That being said, I got quickly frustrated after getting stuck very early on with no help from the game at all.
HOOK is pretty great. It's a puzzle game with a fixed set of hand-crafted trials where you have to retract hooks scattered in a predetermined fashion. This game is very good at teaching you its mechanics as you go through and it adds new and interesting things over time. I had a great experience with it and blasted through it in a few days. I have almost nothing bad to say about it and that's always a good feeling.
I had never played a Fable game before and this looked like a good thing to try. I had heard much about these games, how they were ambitious in some ways and failed in others, and while I didn't know what I was getting into, I thought it would be some kind of third person action RPG with farting. It was more or less that, but the action RPG part didn't feel great and I also didn't feel much involved in the farting aspect of the game. I know this game is also quite old, but there's not much I can do about it, playing it only now.
This is a bad game. If you ignore the core, the mechanics around it are encrusted with layers upon layers of systems, resources, microtransactions and other purchases, unlockable content and levels, things that need to be added carefully to not spoil the broth. But then, if you look at the main game, this just adds insult to injury, as the core gameplay is clunky, unbalanced and not fun.
Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic has the potential to be a 5/5 in my book because of it's neat systems, focus on buffs/debuffs/status effects, a wide range of unlockable rewards and other challenges and a large number of skills and items to use. Sadly, poor balancing in many spots, lack of information to focus player choice and other oddities made me stop playing after finishing the first campaign and rolling a new party. It's still pretty fun, and good!
Devious Dungeon 2 is okay as an iOS platformer with RPG mechanics. It's fairly balanced, the difficulty curve goes up in a manageable way and although coins are sold, you don't really need to buy anything with real money. That's probably one of my biggest issue with the game, in a weird way, there isn't much to spend your money on in order to get an easier time with the game. But that put aside, it's a pretty fun one.
Hero Siege reminds me of a 2d top-down version of Diablo where all you do is fight wave after wave of monsters. It's a pretty enjoyable game with a few weird design decisions and a few annoying bugs here and there. I had a pretty good time with it, so if killing stuff forever to get loot to kill more stuff sounds like something appealing to you, it's probably a safe bet. Not entirely twin-stick shooter and not entirely rogue-like, there's a bit for everyone in HS.
Kingdom Rush Origins is an okay follow up to all the other KR games and it's entertaining enough as a tower defense title, albeit not saved by different towers, enemies and heroes. I suppose that's the main issue with these games; How do you keep making them and keep making them feel fresh and new? There are some things they could do, like add more tiers of tower upgrades, or tweak the hero system, or change the powers you can use, but it doesn't mean that KRO isn't fun to play. It just doesn't feel very new.
There isn't a simple recipe for idle games, but they have to follow some basic rules in order to be fun. You need to be able to go almost infinitely and it needs to scale. The things you do manually in them are often more powerful than simply idling and it needs to keep your interest so you don't stop letting it run because you're bored of it. Tap Heroes doesn't do most of these things, and it's a weird idle game that couldn't keep my interest.
Dragon Hills is an 'endless runner' type of game where you go through some hills with the titular dragon, collect cash doing so and use that cash in order to unlock upgrades that will help you do better the next time around. Clunky controls and uninteresting upgrades made this game something I didn't want to spend more time on than I had to. It's not terrible but it's also not very fun, so you can pass this one.
Characterizing itself as a RPG, I think that Desktop Dungeons is more of a puzzle game than something else. The core concept of the game is fighting through a ton of dungeons, each time with new characters of various races and classes by killing enemies, finding gear and potions, using skills and unlocking thing for your city which will help you in the following runs. In practice, most of my runs were trainwrecks, I had few options I could actually use and the game felt like a puzzle that couldn't be won except by dumb luck.
Twisty Hollow is a delightful little puzzle game, I have close to nothing bad things to say about it and I'd recommend to all iOS owners that also are puzzle fans. The goal is quite simple, you rotate three circles (one representing workers, another representing tools and the third one representing materials) in order to fulfill requests from people. For instance, someone wanting bacon will require you to match a pig, a knife, and a butcher, but as the game goes and more complex recipes come into play you might have to match a fishing rod with the bait to get fish, then the knife, fish and chef to get sushi. The game keeps on adding new mechanics so it's fun to go through the motions.
Outland is a really cool idea and a really good game as well. It's a puzzle platformer where you can switch between red and blue, while you're red, you can jump on red platforms and blue bullets can hurt you, when you're blue, you can interact with blue objects and red bullets hurt you. You also can only damage enemies of the opposite color. These simple ideas, added to a metroidvania shell with a very neat artstyle combine to form such a thing as a 'bullet hell platformer' that plays well and should be tried.
For some reason, this interesting strategy game on iOS didn't display ads properly at first, when I got it. The IAP to get rid of them was there, but I never saw any. Maybe if I had, it would've gotten a 3/5, depending on how frequent they would have been. But I still say it's an interesting game because grid-based strategy products aren't that abundant on iOS - even if the platform should suit them well - and the team building with new units you unlock after completing certain missions is a pretty good drive to keep playing.
Disregarding the risk to repeat the beginning of my TIAVH2 review, let me state that the first Van Helsing game was a pleasant surprise that came out of nowhere, a different Action RPG that had a few cool systems and all-around solid gameplay in general. Let me also state that the second game wasn't as good, bogged down with weird ideas - separate classes, almost identical systems, a dumb cliffhanger, but that I still enjoyed it when it almost came out of nowhere. I had forgotten that there would be a third one, and I wish they hadn't made it - at least, not like that. It's bad, really bad.
Bloons is a bit weird in the tower defense genre. You don't go through a specific set of maps, instead you can attempt any of them at any difficulties you've unlocked. You unlock better towers with a global level - and then you buy them during maps with cash you get from popping balloons. Some of the maps are weird and there are so many towers that it feels a bit like diluting the overall use of each types. I still had a fun time with it, but the lack of a clear progression made me stop after a while.
TERA is another free to play MMORPG like many others. There isn't much separating it from the rest of them and it feels a bit bland and boring in many ways. I've spent some time with it and didn't completely hate my time, but I also wasn't chomping at the proverbial bits to play more of it and switched to another game when the opportunity presented itself.
Leaving behind my fears of moving from opinions to hyperbole, I have to say that FFRK represents one pillar of mobile gaming that is turning this side of my review section into a runaway train of 1/5s and 2/5s. Around the Final Fantasy nostalgia core, around the microtransactions, the energy timers, the roulettes to buy stuff, the fusion and the weird impenetrable systems designed to make money might have been an okay game only if the designers hadn't chosen to make this game excessively reliant on online.
Far from me wanting to launch uPlay in order to run a steam game - and get performance issues for my trouble - Child of Light is a really good RPG that reminds me of Grandia and other games of that style - one with a time bar where you act after a certain point and can get knocked back and do the same to your enemies - mixed with a stylish 2d adventure where you fly around collecting items and solving puzzles. I'm not a big fan of poetry as the base for video game writing, but the actual game is pretty fun to play.