Builderment is a neat little free factorio-a-like on iOS where you mine resources, build things, transform things, carry things around to transform them some more and use them to research new technologies, allowing you usually to build different things, but sometimes also serve as upgrades for your existing factories. The overall gameplay loop is fun enough and I had a good time, even if the existence of a premium currency used only for strange cosmetic buildings and the need to have gold if you want to build or upgrade things makes the economy of the game quite strange, and that being on IOS, the controls are not perfect either - although they do work nicely.
Mindustry is a strange mix of tower defense and factory management where you have to build miners, builders, conveyor belts, research upgrades and collect resources while at the same time defending from enemies that attack your structures in waves using turrets and other means of defense. This game has proven too stressful for me, too unwieldy to play on the iPad, and ultimately too difficult.
The Chronos Principle is a real neat little puzzle game based on sliding a square around increasingly complex levels in order to reach a goal with the twist that levels have a number of “tries” that you get and that each previous try affects the game area while you’re trying to reach the end. Moving squares in specific positions to act as stoppers for your following tries, so you can get in different places. You’ll also have barriers that can only be traversed by your previous tries, and other puzzle elements such as these. I quite enjoyed it, even if the core idea of having multiple tries being tied to real time.
I was looking for a factorio-alike on iOS to give me my fix of belts, resource production and maths when I stumbled upon Sandship: Crafting factory. A free-to-play title where you run a huge ship going through a desert, building internal facilities to craft various items, complete missions, level up and keep at it with new content always showing up. The core mechanics are okay, but the free to play timers, boosters and other tricks ruined the experience for me, as they usually do in this kind of game.
Infinitode is a free tower defense game on iOS that boasts huge maps, a large skill tree with tons of upgrades, and a good number of tower and enemy types. I think the core idea is pretty interesting, but the monetization system kinda ruins the whole thing and makes it an extremely grindy endeavor that could’ve been better served in the game design sense if the game had been premium with tweaked balance. I had an okay time with it, but I just couldn’t see any light out of the grinding tunnel - and the progression was just so slow - that I stopped.
Dungeon Falan is a game I feel like I’ve played a dozen of times so far in my long iOS journey; You fight enemies by sliding your finger across tiles that can be swords, shields, money or potions, accumulating resources, leveling up and damaging foes along the way. You have a wide array of stats, skills and items to help you, but ultimately your foes will overwhelm you and you’ll have to start over. This is an okay one of these, which in those times of idle games is a breath of fresh air, but some of the design decisions they took were a bit weird for me.
Star Vikings Forever is a strange little game that felt like it was tiptoeing between being a puzzle game and a strategy RPG. You go through grid-based maps of enemies, traps and treasures, surmounting considerable odds by using your party’s skills and the enemies own attacks against themselves, while leveling up character, recruiting new ones and getting gear for them. I wish it had chosen what it wanted to be more definitely. As it stands, it was a bit frustrating no matter which way I would approach it.
ADventure Ages is a reskin of ADventure Communism (because apparently the red scare is still real in TYOOL 2021 and made that game perform worse than they wanted) where you buy things that make things that make things. It’s just bars filling up and clicking on buttons to make them fill up. Some fill faster, others take a few minutes. I played it way too much, because the weekly events felt kinda addictive - you could get neat rewards if you played it for almost four days straight. I’m still not a big fan of the ‘population’ mechanic that hard-caps the speed at which you can progress, but you could always pay your way out of it, so I guess that’s the point.
Exponential Idle tries something a little bit different with the idle game genre by seating its simple gameplay mechanics into a bit of lore and some heavy math stuff that I really couldn’t wrap my head around. Even with some attempts to explain everything in a tall instruction screen, I still really couldn’t figure out what was going on and just tapped everywhere. It’s a bit of a shame, because a math-based idle game could be really neat! This one just was a bit too much.
Idle Game 1 is a very minimalist, very simple idle game that takes some of the core ideas of classic incremental games and reduces them to basic interactions, removing most of the player choice you’d find into a more advanced title, but still leaving just enough to create an interesting loop where you very quickly reset your game multiple times in a row until you can reset for a bigger bonus. I didn’t stick with it until the end, but I still found it kinda neat.
VMOD is a simple little puzzle game for iOS where the goal is to activate all buttons on each level. The game goes through a bunch of new mechanics up until the end, so it never gets too boring, but after a while I’ve found that it became difficult for me to properly solve the puzzles, so I did a bit of mindless mashing in some instances. Nevertheless, it’s an okay game and I had some fun with it.
Kartrider Rush+ is a mobile racing game that reminded me of Mario Kart Tour in a good way; While being a hundred percent bogged down by microtransactions, superfluous systems and other free to play mechanics, I felt like the handling and feel of the game was pretty good here and the racing was actually fun and reminded me of ‘classic’ Mario Kart games. This is too bad, considering how everything else around the core systems seemed to be here to bring it down.
Miracle Merchant is a quite simple puzzle game about brewing potions using cards from four colored decks in order to meet the specific requirements of your stylish clients and get enough points on each turn to continue until you eventually run out of cards. To make things more difficult, you have cursed cards that remove points when you play them - but you sometimes need to - and a few more special cards effects to consider in order to maximize your potion-brewing capabilities. I had a good time with this game, feeling like the great core mechanics weren’t supplemented by enough meat around the bone.
Minimal Dungeon RPG is a strange mix between an idle game and a more classic RPG. It’s certainly incremental in it’s nature, but you’re not waiting for incredibly long periods of time, waiting for something to happen. Instead you tap on tiles in the rooms you’re visiting and you perform actions like exploring or fighting monsters that way. Where you need to wait is for your action and hit points to recover and allow you to keep tapping away. It’s a neat concept, but it got too stale too quickly and it also felt like being a free-to-play game hindered it a little.
Wilmot’s Warehouse at first felt like it was supposed to be a zen game about re-organizing items in a warehouse and trying to figure out the optimal ways to place your stock, but it just devolved quickly into a stressful mess for me. I really enjoy the minimalist style and the core idea of what the game is trying to do, but I dropped it off quickly because being under time pressure to fulfill orders just wasn’t for me.
Home Quest is an interesting idle game where you build up villages, assign jobs to your villagers, raise an army and fight invaders while discovering new technologies, upgrades and resources. That sense of discovery brought me all the way to the end of the game and while I sometimes felt that you just couldn’t do anything and needed to wait with the game closed for a while - especially in the early game - at the end I was fully enjoying all the different systems you could optimize to beat the challenges the game threw your way. So much so that I bought the gold edition to support it! You should check it out if you enjoy idle games.
Gunhouse is a very strange mix of tower defense and puzzle game about matching blocks and using special weapons and abilities to protect your house from wave after wave of strange and unique enemies. With a very interesting visual style, great music and solid mechanics, I had a good time with this game, even if the core of the puzzle system felt a bit hard to grapple with for a big chunk of my time with it and the variety of weapons and powers left me more perplexed than anything else. I finished this one, so you know it’s at least up there in my book!
Idle Life Sim is an idle game with a really interesting visual style and core game system, but nothing else going on for it. The absolute lack of player actions beside watching ads and not playing the game for long periods of time (also limited by the game if you don’t buy some expensive doodad) made me lose interest quite quickly. I must say that I’ve tried a bunch of idle games recently and this one continues the trend of not letting the player do anything while idling, which doesn’t work for me. I wish they had made something else out of that game.
Alphaputt is a small mini-putt game with a really nice sense of style, but not much else for me. The game has you putt across all 26 letters of the alphabet, each with their own theme and gimmicks, but with no great way to become better and no good sense of challenge. I went through the whole alphabet, then tried the challenge mode, but was left with no intention to keep up with the game, which is a shame, since it looks and sounds pretty good!
Inbento is a delightful puzzle game where you need to replicate a target ‘bento box’ with a few pieces in your own box. You switch, move and duplicate food items until you solve the puzzle, then move on. It’s very simple, but also very relaxing, without any stress and the core mechanics are very good. It’s one of these reviews where there is not much to say because the whole experience is well-made and self-contained in a way that makes too long a review a bit pointless. For a little premium game, I totally recommend inbento!