DOOM is a really interesting game, a product of a gone area brought back into this century with a flurry of new mechanics, systems and updates over the original arena-based single player first person shooters. I was looking forward to playing it and while I'm not the biggest FPS fan in the world, it didn't disappoint me. I'm really happy that DOOM exists and it does exactly what some other games - Serious Sam, Bulletstorm - have tried to do in recent years, but better. I feel that this game is going to be on everyone's mind for a good while.
Slash Mobs is a perfectly competent - although I've had pretty bad performance issues on my iPad which prevented me from enjoying the game - idle stage-based monster killing game very similar to Clicker Heroes and other idlers of that style. It adds a few mechanics like player equipment and skill trees to differentiate itself from its various competitors, without much success.
2016 wasn't that great, but there were a bunch of real cool videogames that came out this year and this is my column where I write about my top ten in a few lines and try to convey what I enjoyed about them and why I think they're important games. I'm lucky enough to be able to play almost anything that I want - bar buyer's remorse preventing me from getting too many games at once - but you'll notice a small 3DS skew on this list. Man did the 3DS have a good run...
Survive in space is a mess on many levels. It's core gameplay isn't too bad but gets hamstrung by weird decisions, it's side systems of progression and upgrades are confusing at best and the game has some UI and tone issues. It seemed neat at first glance, but after playing it for a while, I realized I wasn't having any fun with it and had to stop. I'm still looking in my quest for good arcade space shooters with RPG elements, but Reign of Bullets was much better.
Tap Smiths is just boring; It's a game where you make items by tapping alternatively left and right on your screen and then after a while your day is over and you go sell these items and make some money with which you buy upgrades for your hammer, anvil and other tools. Then you rinse and repeat, with no apparent changes in the things you are making, how much you are making, and how much money you get at the end. That's why I've found Tap Smiths boring, there's no challenge, no progression and no real goal.
Hexcell is a puzzle game where you have a big grid of hexagonal shapes with numbers in them telling you how many adjacent pieces are part of the solution. You then need - in a minesweeper fashion - to discover every right and wrong cell of the map in order to win. As the levels go on, they add new mechanics and I didn't really enjoy them, since it tries to turn the game into a weird picross, but then again I've beaten the whole game since it's fairly good and I love puzzlers.
voi is a pure little puzzle game on iOS where you move black shapes in order to create a target image. Overlapping black creates white and layering these shapes on top of each other will finally result in your goal. It's a real neat little game even if I just pretty much described it in its entirety. I went through all it's puzzles and I wholeheartedly recommend it to puzzle fans.
Plantera is a neat, although simple idle game where there is much less automation than in other games of that genre. You plant different kind of fruits and vegetables, wait a bit, then collect them to get money, which is used to plant more stuff, expand your garden, buy animals and upgrades and repeat, seemingly forever. I had some fun with it, even if the UI was a bit difficult to use at times and if ultimately I lost interest when I had unlocked all kinds of things you could buy and figured out it would be value upgrades from now on. Unlocking new mechanics and doodads in idle games is a fun thing and slapping a new game + system is always a good way to have the player go through the whole thing a few more times, but Plantera didn't have any of that.
Wizard Swipe is an iOS game where you have to 'swipe' the screen to throw spells at waves of advancing enemies to protect your castle, using more powerful spells on cooldowns and upgrades to survive better. It started pretty okay, but the difficulty curve quickly ramped up to a point where I would have needed to grind too much in order to get further. It's too bad, since the game has a nice blend of challenges and upgrades so I wish I could've stomached to play some more.
The last time I had played World of Warcraft was when the last expansion came out. I found that the systems it added to the game (garrisons, more tough enemies in the world for you to get special resources and loot from, more story-driven quest lines) was a step in an interesting direction. With this new edition of yet another grinding session, WoW tried to keep piling up more of the same on top of a core game that was filleted down to the thinnest it can get before becoming more of a button mashing contest than a proper MMORPG.
I have not much to say about LOUD on Planet X, it wasn't a game I enjoyed at all, so I didn't play it more than what I felt was necessary to get a grasp on it. It is a music-based tower-defense game where you tap to the beat of the music to attack aliens, using special items and more powerful moves when appropriate. The main issue I had with it is that I disliked every single track of music they had, which is really bad for a music-based game. So that really soured me to the whole thing. I also was a bit confused about the timing of taps, sometimes it followed beats, sometimes I felt like I was just tapping willy-nilly, still hitting the mark. Maybe this game will be more suited to your musical tastes, but it sure wasn't to mine.
Grim Dawn was released a little while ago, but before it came Titan Quest, an action RPG that I've spent countless hours playing, both the normal game and expansion that came after that. In some ways, it was better than other ARPGs, some ways that even stand true today, regardless of the progress in the genre. I was delighted to hear that some bizarre version of THQ was re-releasing it, with updates. Engine changes, of course, but balance changes on items, skills and enemies as well! TQAE definitely feels like the old game that it is, but I would rather play it than many other available ARPGs.
Egg Inc. is an incremental clicker-like game where you press a button to hatch chickens that lay eggs that you then sell for money to buy upgrades to hatch more chickens and lay better eggs faster, to get more money so you can upgrade your eggs and then prestige to get even better eggs. It's a really neat idle game - even if it's idle component isn't free by default - and I sunk a ton of hours into it, and even a few bucks! It's a cool game.
I had waited until Starbound officially came out to look at it - after all, I'm not a big fan of early access products and to have to restart because progress gets erased, things like that. The wait for this Terraria-meets-space game has been a bit long, but the final product is interesting. I can't say that I enjoy it as much as I did Terraria - and it is no secret that I saw pretty much everything in Starbound through this comparison. Maybe if I had infinite time and patience, I would've given more hours to Starbound, but as it is, I think I'm done with it.
Reigns is one of these weird choose your own adventure type of game mixed with some kingdom management on iOS with a little of a rogue-like flair where you make decisions by swiping a card left or right, affecting your kingdom in four categories, with the immediate goal of not having any meter go too high or too low. There is an overarching story that expends as you find new cards and unlock more characters, and while I haven't got there, I presume that there is an ending to reach at some point. I had some good time with it, but ultimately grew bored.
Crucible Mode is the first DLC for Grim Dawn, a game I have enjoyed very much. A battle arena for this ARPG where you could - according to all documentation I've seen on it - start with a fresh level one character? That sounded like a good idea! That being said, I was sorely bummed by it, even if I gave it the time to try and see if there was any enjoyment to get out of it. Sadly, there wasn't much. Bad design decisions made the core concept fall flat for me.
Human Resource Machine is a great puzzler on iOS from the World of Goo and Little Inferno people. In theory, it's a game where you put commands in a box to take inputs and produce outputs defined by the game in order to solve puzzles. In practice, I find that it's more or less a game where you code in assembly language and while that might not be the cup of tea of everyone, I really enjoyed it!
I had barely played the original Metroid 2 on gameboy because, for some reason, the audio and graphics scared me when I was a kid, so this remake seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to see what's up with this game. While it's an interesting project, there are some choices that I didn't enjoy, and in general I can't say that I've been hooked by AM2R. Some stuff in it feel like it would never be in a 'real' metroid game, and some stuff was just plain too frustrating.
Unmatch is a puzzler on iOS where you need to move hexagons around so there are no matches between them. These matches occur when sides of the same colors are adjacent, so you swap them around until no hexagon is matched with any other. The game adds a few more mechanics over its long level list, but the core idea always remain the same. I've completed it - although not perfecting every level - and I really enjoyed it!
Even after about fifteen years in computer science, I'm not really sure what 'hacking' entails. Hollywood hacking is one thing, opening some file with an hex editor and changing values here and there is also a form of hacking, is Hacknet showing a form of hacking that exists? Are there port-scanning tools that you can run on remote IP addresses to break security and then get root access in remote computers? No matter, my curiosity aside, Hacknet is really neat, I'm not sure if it's 100% accurate, but it does use some unix shell commands, makes you do hacking missions with an interesting storyline and makes you feel really happy when you type that final command to finish a hack while looking at a timer counting down.