Super Mario Run isn't a great game and it doesn't have enough content to offer, what it has is that Nintendo polish and a few good ideas that should've been exploited more and in a different package. SMR is a platformer where mario always runs and when you tap, he jumps, if you hold your tap for longer, the jump is higher. You can also tap to make him flip in the air and keep altitude and tap when hitting walls to wallkick. That's pretty much everything in terms of controls. It's possible to make a good mario game out of this idea, but what they did wasn't enough.
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.
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 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.
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.
Gem Hunters is one of those games. It's a puzzle RPG where you need to match tiles in order to damage enemies, which after a few turns will attack you. This one brings the subtle twist on the genre that enemies have elemental weaknesses and resistances and that you get random gear that you can upgrade from chests. Inevitably, after a while you hit a wall where you can't defeat the enemy without paying some premium currency or grinding a whole bunch, needless to say, I wasn't impressed.
Super Chibi Knight is a zelda 2 inspired game, which is interesting, but the execution is kinda lacking. The game has its charm but I really didn't have fun playing it, so I think that I gave it a fair shake, but poor controls and weird difficulty made me just stop after only a few hours.
A Firelit Room is a graphical overhaul on A Dark Room, a game I've reviewed earlier, it improves a bit on the gameplay as well and makes it a bit more bearable. While it improves on some systems, I feel that it worsens the experience in other ways. I enjoyed the idle aspect a bit more, but world exploration and overall upgrades were even slower this time around; Worse, some of the new UI changes made the game even less playable.
Looty Dungeon is a glorified Crossy Road where you move forward and try to complete quests to get coins in order to buy more characters and keep doing that forever. At least in this version, the different characters have different abilities, but the game doesn't control well, the progression curve isn't fun and I don't have much positive to add about it; Needless to say, I haven't played it much.
Maybe Doomsday Clicker is a neat game, but it ran like butts on my gen 3 iPad. It's a bit boring to review a game poorly because of performance, but if I'm allowed to buy it on my decide and if it's 'supported', it should at least run well. Doubly so for an idle game, moving the menus around shouldn't be a time-consuming effort, with each clicks taking a few seconds to register properly. It's kinda of a shame, because at the same time, some systems in DC were interesting.
Concrete Jungle is a weird little game where you're trying to build a city using cards from a deck that improve or worsen tiles on a grid. The goal of each level is to collect enough points on each column to advance the board forward, losing you lives if you can't figure out how to clear them. The addition of multiple characters with skill trees and card unlocks as you level up is nice, but I found the game too difficult and a bit too random to be enjoyable for me.
A Dark Room is half an idle game, half an RPG and both part aren't that great. You start from nothing and build up to having a bunch of people working under you, then you go explore the world with increasingly better stats and random events occur from time to time. It's an interesting game to be sure, but I stopped having fun with it when the idle elements became too slow to build up to unlocking anything new and I can't say I cared much about the narrative either.
Tap Tycoon has some trappings from Venture Capitalist - upgrading your revenue generating items will improve their speed and percentage-wise value - and being allowed to buy helpers that automatically collect stuff for you, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I did VC. The idea of old-school tapping a bunch on the screen to collect trace amounts of cash isn't that fun and in the grand scheme of things, you're better off generating passive revenue in these kind of games. There's some 'war' aspect where you send soldiers to fight for your country and some card system, but both were obtuse and confusing in their own ways.
Dash Quest is a weird game, on paper it's a straightforward RPG where all you do is dash in one direction and kill enemies by hitting them with your weapon, cast spell and use items, all in order to get gold and complete challenges in service of buying better weapons and getting more options to kill enemies and repeat the cycle anew. In practice it's a mess of gameplay modes, in-app purchases, abysmally slow progression and buggy mechanics, I didn't have much fun with it.
Puzzle Craft 2, if anything, made me uninstall it and go back to Puzzle Craft 1 instead. It's not a terrible game and it improves/adds complexity in many aspects over the original, but all of this comes at the cost of terrible free to play mechanics, less gameplay for free, various ways to nudge the player into giving the game money and an overall sense of disappointment with most systems in place. Almost every new cool thing they've added comes with a balance of desire to uninstall the game, so that's not very fun. (Also I'm sorry, my iPad ate my screenshots)
Sneaky Sneaky is probably not a bad game, but it's certainly not the game that I thought it would be; On the surface, this is a sneaking game where you move on a grid to try and go to the end of dungeons while avoiding enemy patrols, traps and other obstacles, collecting jewels and killing foes along the way. The core concept is quite interesting, but the execution is flawed as the game is played in real time. Whenever you get spotted by the enemy, the game switches to a turn-based mode that I wish was the whole game, really.
There is a really neat free to play third person action-RPG at the core of Warframe. Something that might have stuck with me for hundreds of hours in other circumstances. Almost everything was there; The mechanics were solid, the core gameplay was fun, there seemed to be enough customization/progression options and overall this grindy feel that came from the whole thing made me think this was going to be my next 'filler' game; A game that I'd play whenever I had free time with nothing else to do. Sadly, it all broke down after a while and the came couldn't keep me interested a single second more.
Devilian made me feel gross; Devilian made me feel like I had clicked on one of these stupid 'come play with us my lord' flash ads that would creep on the internet if I disabled ad-block for a few seconds; Presented as a free-to-play action mmorpg, my interest was piqued by the mix between Diablo-like gameplay and MMO systems. This game is not entirely without merit, but there are a few glaring flaws both in the way it plays and how it markets itself. I had a few good moments with it, but not much more. I'd rather play Path of Exile or Diablo 3 when the next season starts.
League of Legends developer Riot released this simple iOS game for a limited time - I don't think it's available anymore - as some kind of weird joke. I think that BPR is a neat little piece of LoL memorabilia in a way, and an okay game on its own, but it shows that this wasn't a 'real' product, released to actually make money in any way. It's a game where you run up and down while trying to bump into little creatures while using your rocket arm to grab them - and other enemies - in order to survive.