You Must Build A Boat is a perfect iOS game, it's build from the ground up to work on touch devices, it has no in-app purchases, no timers and no ads, it could be a bigger product on a portable console without much changes. The #1 block-sliding upgrade-buying boat-building game of 2015 was a blast and with only a few blemishes to an otherwise amazing title, I've only had fun with it and probably would've kept playing if the New Game+ carrot had been more enticing.
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.
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.
TouchTone has a much interesting framing device than the actual gameplay most of the time and the relative boredom I had while moving move rows and columns of lines in order to reflect beams on targets outbalanced my desire to see the story through. Which is a shame since it seemed at least interesting and novel, setting you as this spy going through communications in order to assess whether someone is relevant to national security or not. I'm a bit disappointed by it.
When I think of 'mining' games, much like the Motherload of old, I think about digging down to find valuables that you sell for various upgrades in order to be able to dig deeper for more valuables that can be sold for more upgrades, ad infinitum. If you're telling me that your game is a 'mining' game but with multiple levels and you need to get to the bottom of each mines in order to continue, I might find that a bit weird, but the potential is still there for a fun game. Obviously, the more you'd progress, the tougher the levels would be, so you would need upgrades. Pocket Mine 2 takes a tiny sliver of that idea and fills the rest with nonsense.
AlphaOmega is a puzzle game where you swap letters around in order to make words on a scrabble-like board. The core idea of the game is interesting, but it's full of little systems that could have been polished a bit more and some tasks could have been designed as to help the player be less frustrated rather than annoyed at how stuff works. I did have a bit of fun with it, but ultimately it's a bit too flawed for me.
ROP is a little puzzle game where you move ropes around in order to match shapes shown at the top of the screen. The difficulty comes from ropes being tied around in weird ways and you not being allowed to place two rope ends at the same place on the grid. It's not bad, even if there isn't much to say about it.
Switch&Drop starts by asking you to agree to a EULA, this is always a good sign. Otherwise you just can't play the game. S&D is a game where you drop blocks by sliding lines of colored puzzle pieces and the goal is to match three or more to break them and activate special bonuses. It would probably be fine if it didn't have in-app purchases, energy timers and best values. This might sound a bit reductionist - I'll admit I haven't played that game for very long - but putting your worst foot forward isn't a way to make me care.
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.
Hero Emblems is one of the best iOS games I've played in a long time. There are no IAPs and the game feels like a complete package with tons of content to go through, fun core mechanics and enough challenge and character customization to not feel bored of it. You play a party of four characters - mage, healer, paladin and fighter - and you match emblems to attack, defend or heal yourself. It's a classic formula turned into an amazing little game.
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.
I don't have any bad thing to say about Evolve:Hunter Quest. I feel it's the right kind of free to play match three game with sufficiently deep gameplay systems, enough variety to make the player want to continue playing and most importantly, no energy system. This might sound silly, but if this game had an energy system (where attempting maps was throttled by such) the experience would have been completely different. As it is, it feels fair and balanced and losing a level isn't a terrible thing - because you would've lost energy for no gain - and I have no real opinion on it's tie-in with the Evolve shooter on PC. Besides setting, it doesn't provide much to this game.
Puzzle Forge 2 is a pretty neat little puzzle game where the goal is to make gear for customers going to your forge. To do so, you place rocks on a grid and then you place molds next to two rocks to craft parts that you need to combine to create weapons, armors and more. Combining rocks makes better materials and the game adds a bit of complexity with gems (and the combining thereof) and magic that you use to power-up the gear you're making. You lose the game when you can't complete customer requests too many times or when the board fills up - the latter happens more often than the former.
Where's my Water! is a physics based puzzle game where you have to move water from one point to a drain connected to the shower of an alligator. It's a fun little game that progressively adds new mechanics and concepts and piles on replayability by having you collect things and fill ducks with water as well. I had a good time with it and I suppose it could be considered as a classic of sorts, resembling in spots with many other puzzle games.
Super Time Force Ultra could have been amazing instead of just great if it knew what it wanted to be and focused on one aspect of the game. As it is, it's kind of a mess to play, quite bad with the keyboard and only made a little bit better by the use of a controller - something I try to do as little as possible with PC games - and while there are a few design decisions here and there that I find just weird, I had a great time with it and I think it's a charming game most people should try.
Escape Goat 2 is a delightful puzzle platformer where you play a goat for some reason, and you complete various puzzle rooms with different themes and mechanics in a few themed worlds. To do so, you have headbutt attacks, a double jump and a little mouse companion that you can use to do tricks. I've enjoyed my time with the game although I've found the controls a bit hard to get around, especially in the later puzzles when you're required to do many things in quick succession in order to succeed.
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.
Hack'n'Slash is a really strange mix - on the surface, it might look like a zelda game - with bombs, boomerangs and hearts - but it's actually a programming puzzle game where the hacking refers to actually modifying the source code - programmed in LUA - of the game. At first you can only edit the public values of game objects - like if a door is open or closed - but as the game goes, you get many powers which allow you to completely crash the world if you so desire. The hacking aspect of the game is amazing, the moving around and slashing, not as much.