Rebel Inc is the spiritual successor to Plague Inc, a game about infecting the whole world with a deadly virus. In this version of the strategy genre, you have to manage a region of the world in turmoil after a war and get to 100% stability in order to win. To do so, you have a wide range of upgrades you can buy and tactics to deploy, especially when insurgents decide to come into play and require you to act militarily as well. I had an okay time with this game but ultimately found it was too much of a numeric mess with so much data that I just couldn’t process it all and had to make uninformed decisions, which never feels great.
Knighthood is a mobile RPG with a great look, fairly simple but engaging mechanics and way too many layers of micro-transactions, currencies and other cruft layered on it. You play a ‘Rage Knight’ fighting your way through a land of monsters, collecting gear, leveling up, summoning powerful heroes and trying to keep track of all the activities you can do. I had a nice time with it (never hit a wall where I needed to spend currency) and would’ve played more, but ultimately lost interest.
Idle Crafting is a depressingly badly balanced idle game with a nifty style and a cute premise. What if you destroyed blocks in order to gather materials that you then use to craft tools to make you better at destroying blocks? In theory, that’s fine and fun. In practice this game is an ad-fest with blocks getting so difficult to destroy that you need to leave the game and come back later to upgrade your character and automatically-attacking pet friends. What I want from idle games are reasons to stay there and play, not reasons to put them down extremely quickly, and Idle Crafting gives me plenty from the second category.
Deep Town is a pretty interesting little idle game where you dig, create items with the resources you find, fight some underground enemies and collect upgrades to create new stuff to keep the whole process going. I found many systems and core tenants of the game to be fun and engaging, but sadly the whole affair is packaged in a free-to-play model that means it sacrifices much of what could make it great in order to sell you premium resources, turning it into a disappointing wait-fest.
Arknights is an interesting take on the mobile gacha game where the gameplay is a tower defense instead of being an idle RPG or a slight tactics game. I had an okay time with it, but didn’t stick with the game long enough to see the depth of what it could offer. I was repelled almost immediately by the whole ‘free mobile game’ feeling that permeates everything about it. The endless menus, seemingly infinite number of different currencies to buy, grind and use to upgrade vague stats and skills. It’s too bad, because tower defense games are one of my favorite genres, and this could’ve been neat!
Glitchskier is a simple iOS arcade shooter oozing with aesthetics. While the gameplay is perfectly fine, I found it a bit too shallow to give it that much more time. What I really liked about this game was everything surrounding the core gameplay loop of shooting around and collecting powerups, but I still had a good time. I kinda wish there was more to it, some kind of secret metagame or story, but oh well!
I’ve never been the biggest Elder Scrolls fan but some stuff stuck with me with the other versions of these games; The sense of exploration, character building and the story. The combat always felt a bit too random for me, so I went with the ranged options - or just trying to diplomacy my way out of most situations. Elder Scroll Blades on mobile devices is the distilled essence of walking along linear maps to try and accomplish cookie cutter quests while doing a ton of combat. Not my cup of tea, even if as far as mobile first person games go, this wasn’t terrible.
Spaceplan is a strange but interesting story-based idle game that uses idle gameplay only as a story conduit where you are in a spaceship and need to figure out what happened to the universe by using the power of potatoes. Starting with small solar panels and ending with massive canons shooting energy-creating drones down at planets, I found the actual act of playing the game took too long and that it wasn’t super fun idle mechanics. Otherwise I was pretty curious where the story could go so that kept me going, but ultimately the ending also left me unsatisfied.
Almost A Hero is half an idle game, half a free RPG that combines mechanics from idlers with a surprising amount of depth; I wasn’t sure what I was getting into - since mobiles RPGs are pretty hit-or-miss for me, but this one was great! I probably would’ve stuck with it for way longer if I didn’t want to go down my list of iOS games to play. With a ton of things to unlock, a very generous currency progression and some interesting game mechanics that unlock themselves after a long while, Almost A Hero is real neat.
Mario Kart Tour continues the series of my disappointment with Nintendo mobile offerings of late; Great production values mired by subpar gameplay and insufferable microtransaction-laden mechanics everywhere. I gave it a shot to see what the game was like, but when I got hit by a requirement for me to replay some of the previous levels, I decided it was enough. I didn’t have a great time with the game itself, so everything around it just felt like adding insult to injury.
Donut County is some sort of reverse Katamari Damacy where instead of trying to build a large ball out of stuff, you’re mainly trying to use an increasingly bigger hole in order to grab everything in each level, solving puzzles along the way. I had a great time with it and loved its style and charm. Some of the gimmicks were a bit annoying, but ultimately nothing prevented me from completing the game.
Pokémon Masters is another mobile gacha offering from Nintendo and it just disappointed me, much like Dr Mario World (and Mario Kart World as well). In it you go through missions and fight with some iconic pokémon trainers from all over the lore. To do so, you recruit them in your party, upgrade their skills, complete missions and mash through a lot of dialogue. This game has a ton of production values, but ultimately still results in a product that feels shallow, unbalanced and exploitative.
Pokemon Rumble Rush is a neat little action RPG where you explore different islands with different sets of Pokemon in order to meet the requirements to get to the next fight and win it in a set time. Your critter mostly moves on its own, but you can dodge and attack by tapping the screen and you get special moves and gear that you can upgrade after a while. I had a good time with it, although it was pretty grindy after a while and I didn’t have much time or patience for that. The upgrade system was a bit meaningless as well, but it’s probably because I couldn’t get too much of the grind.
I was pretty excited to try Dr Mario World, Nintendo’s mobile entry in the Dr Mario franchise, even tho the core mechanics were pretty different from the usual game. I really tried getting into it, but ultimately couldn’t, I found it to be a really bad free to play game with gameplay that didn’t make sense at all for me. I lost enough times on early levels that I ran out of stamina and had to stop playing almost immediately. Still, it’s a cute little Dr Mario themed product if you can get into it and they clearly put some effort into interesting character design.
I had a good time with the first Nonstop Knight game, a little automatic dungeon crawler where you’d fight a bunch of enemies in a diablo-like fashion, collecting money and experience, gear and new skills, pets and other trinkets to get stronger and clear more and more dangerous challenges. I decided to give the new one a shot and I’m kinda unhappy with the things they changed, making it a more aggressively micro-transactionned adventure where ultimately, playing more won’t give you any progress and that feels real bad.
Magic the Gathering: Puzzle Quest is an interesting concept; You use MtG cards to defeat enemies but instead of tapping lands to get mana in order to cast spells, you match gems on a board to get mana that goes to the use of your cards. Mana costs are now colorless and you can swap which card you’re going to play next. Instead of having a bunch of creatures on the board, you can stack identical monsters together - and there’s a limit of 3 types - and you’ll attack your opponent each turn with your available summons. The core concept is pretty cool, but it’s just a free to play mobile game with terrible monetization that made me hate it almost instantly.
Holedown is a neat little arcade game on iOS where you throw balls to break blocks and reach the core of various celestial bodies. Balls rebound on blocks and destroy them by progressively hitting them. You have a limited number of shots and you get more balls per shot - up to a maximum - by bouncing around. Each time you make a shot, the level shifts upwards and if it ever reaches the top, you lose. If you feel like if you’ve heard of games like this one before, you’re right, however, this one is solely premium and doesn’t have any microtransactions. I had a few frustrations with it, but otherwise enjoyed this one.
I had played a few of the The Room games on iOS, but not all of them. They’re all very similar, but well-crafted puzzle games where you explore a location and uncover secrets by pushing, pulling, sliding and otherwise interacting in different ways with your environment. Old Sins has the character explore a dollhouse sitting in the attic of an old mansion in order to unlock nine seals in nine different rooms. I had a good time with it even if sometimes I just -had- to use hints in order to figure out what to do next. At least the game doesn’t sell these hints as in-app purchases and is otherwise very generous with letting you do what you want.
Questland embodies most of what I find is wrong with mobile games today; Good production values, interesting core systems - sometimes, but ultimately a bunch of timers, resources to buy and spend for incremental upgrades that almost don’t matter and a gameplay experience that involves a lot of busywork for not much fun. I tried to get into Questland and see if there was anything in there, but it didn’t take me too long to stop trying.
Postknight is an idle game where you fight across sidescrolling 2D maps as a young Postknight - a knight that delivers mail - by killing a bunch of mosters. The game is pretty simple, although maybe not idle enough and the barrier of free-to-play limits gets pretty rough after a while, but I enjoyed the bit that I’ve played. It’s not my favorite idle game of all time, however.