Swap Sword is a little puzzle game where you swap tiles to create lines and clear them. Depending on the cleared tile, you either get some mana, hearts, keys to open doors to the next level, or money. You can also clear enemies that way, although a difference in this game is that while you can only swap identical tiles, you can move your character around in order to defeat enemies and collect gold. Once the ending door is opened, you have a set number of turns to leave before death arrives. New mechanics are slowly introduced and you get upgrades between each level. I probably could end my review here because that's all there is to Swap Sword, and that's why I was kinda bummed by it.
There is an interesting nugget of an idea at the core of Puzzle Box, a game where you place colors on a grid to complete pixel-art like pictures, then complete platforming and other puzzle-like challenges on them to get coins and progress to more levels. All of its game modes could've been tweaked to make them more fun and new mechanics should've been added to make the game not feel stale. As-is, it's not a really good game, I was intrigued by its core concepts, but quickly lost interest.
Asymmetric is a neat idea executed in a frustrating fashion. At its core, it's a simple puzzle game where you move two characters on separate fields. When you move one, the other does the opposite. This create puzzles that should be interesting in theory, but I've found it very frustrating in practice. You can fail non-stop and it can become irritating to plan ahead for each levels. Furthermore, the game even gives you the complete solution if you get too stuck, which I have used too many times. You can almost do it on every level. I didn't have a great time with Asymmetric.
Hocus is a very simple puzzle game in nature where you swipe around to move a cube on a bizzare shape, usually involving many layers of optical illusions. That's the only mechanic of the game and it's used pretty well. Moving your cube around, you get on other sides of the shape in a way that sometimes feels a bit difficult to predict and therefore can also get a bit frustrating. I didn't completely finish the game, but that's because the later levels are user-submitted, and I thought I had quite enough of it yet.
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.
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!
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!
_PRISM is a really neat little puzzle game that reminded me of The Witness in some ways; you start in a puzzle 'zone' and do some easy puzzles to learn the rules and everything, then move on to more difficult ones, rotating giant things around, trying to get to their core. It ran kinda badly on my iPad 3, but that's starting to be the norm these days; Maybe I should upgrade at some point?
I Keep Having This Dream is a delightful little game that I would keep playing to completion if my plate wasn't already full as-is with other games to look at. It's a roguelike puzzle game where you place tiles in order to get to the exit of a series of increasingly difficult levels while followed by an entity called The Nemesis. You level up and find new gear, you unlock new enemies and new events to hinder and help you and you try to get as far as you can. It's great!
The Witness is a first person puzzle game about solving puzzles on boards where you mostly draw a line from one point to another, following rules divided in themes - by physical location, mostly - that the game never explicitly tells you. You have to figure out from very simple puzzles what the logic behind it is and from that solve harder puzzles until you complete everything in an area and move on to the next mechanic. I had an interesting time with that game, it's not perfect and I'm unsure about the whole first person movement aspect of it, but it's a good puzzle experience that I would entirely recommend.
The Sequence is a neat little puzzle game on iOS where you have to bring dots from one circle to another using a sequence of mechanisms you lay down on a grid. Some of these pull or push, others will rotate things, some invert the action of mechanisms they target, others just shut them down. It's all a matter of following a proper sequence of action and figuring out where the pieces go in order to solve each puzzle. I had some frustrations with it, but overall it was a very good experience and a mighty fine puzzle game.
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)
I absolutely adored Hitman Go when it came out a while back, and now Square Enix Montréal did it again with the "GO" treatment over the Tomb Raider franchise. They did it quite well, keeping the spirit of exploration and puzzle solving alive and well while making the whole experience feel like a board game with very intricate pieces. Perhaps because of technical issues - due to old hardware? Hard to say - my experience wasn't as smooth as I would've preferred. Some small choices on the way puzzles were designed did frustrate me a little as well, but overall I really enjoyed this game.
Tomb of Tyrants is a weird mix, on one hand you have a puzzle game where matching four and more of a type of tiles produces resources for you to use in building and buying units and floors for your dungeon. On the other hand you have a dungeon building game where adventurers try to kill your tyrant and only your dungeon and creatures can stop them. I felt that both aspects of this game didn't work perfectly well together, although I had some fun with ToT. No matter how well the game worked, it was still a very interesting idea.
Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey Remastered reminds me of Bookworm Adventures, in a good way. It's a game of letters where you use a grid of tiles to make words in order to damage your opponents and find treasures. Along the way, you buy various upgrades, complete challenges and unlock new stuff. You can customize your character in many ways to fit better with your playstyle and the game gets plenty challenging and I lost many hours to it while trying to complete every objective, obtain every achievement and finish all of the elite levels. It's a really great game.
ZombieBucket is a puzzle game that suffers from a very specific frustration-related flaw; It's lack of precision. It's a bit like playing Tetris, but your blocks are controlled by physics instead of always falling the same way. "Matching three" isn't exactly revolutionary here and the addition of timer-based energy system, daily bonuses and the ability to buy and upgrade your buckets isn't exactly what improves the core gameplay for me.
I vaguely remember playing Doodle God a while back; you would mix elements like earth and fire to create more and more elements. The concept worked because there is plenty you can make using your imagination and a few basic items and the 'goal' of the game to finding all possible combinations felt okay. Now with Doodle Tanks, you have to fumble around aimlessly with tank parts, engineers and other doodads, making matches that don't make sense, basically trial-and-error-ing the whole thing.
I'm a big Puzzle Quest fan, but I can't say that I enjoy roguelikes - or the FTL model - very much. This made my relationship with Ironcast a bittersweet one; Some of its core mechanics are pretty fun, others are kinda infuriating, and there's this inevitability aspect that stresses you in time and reduces the number of actions you can do in a set game that leaves some of the fun aspects of match-3 RPGs behind.
Noodles! is a mighty fun game, I've spent a bunch of hours with it and never did its mechanics fail to amuse me. That being said, there was too much of it, I've stopped at about 40% of the game being over, and what was left to do was more of the same. Some games overstay their welcomes and without adding new mechanics or without metaphorical carrots to dangle in front of me, I had to stop before I got really bored with the same puzzles over and over.