Thread for iOS games 2017-2023: shame, loathing and recommendations

heavens to betsy I'm playing BLOCKY FARM

hahaha

i finally tried out Reigns (or at least the sequel, which just came out and is supposed to be pretty much the same as the first). it's decent fun, but every other time i open the app, it completely forgets that i've ever played before and puts me back at the very beginning. there's no option to manually save or load a saved game. sometimes, i open the app and it instantly remembers everything that i've done and i'm back in the game. and then other times, a few seconds after opening the app it offers me the option to load my saved game from some cloud, somewhere. so it's fun, sometimes, when it works. i fucking hate apple right now. using their products reminds me of being a windows user back in 2002

/iOS problems

somehow i got back into clicker heroes, wtf is wrong with me

game idea: clicker heroes, but sometimes when you try to play it all your progress is reset

Life, Kid

uh, did Civ 6 just get released ON IPAD? dang.

i finally tried out Reigns (or at least the sequel, which just came out and is supposed to be pretty much the same as the first). it's decent fun, but every other time i open the app, it completely forgets that i've ever played before and puts me back at the very beginning. there's no option to manually save or load a saved game

I've only played the first one but never experienced this. Might be early days bugginess. But I don't really think of the game as something where you're loading a saved game. The content you unlock by playing seems more like a board game expansion than making progress, per se.

Yeah - that’s a better way of putting it. I’m not trying to “beat” it so much as just see everything that can be unlocked. But I keep getting forced to start back at the beginning with nothing unlocked, like a punishing roguelike.

I should probably just wait iOS gets another dozen updates and try again. One terrible night, about a month ago, I updated both my MacBook and iPhone to the latest OS, and ever since then everything has been awful.

i have been playing the digitized version of the card game 'sentinels of the multiverse', playing all of the hero decks myself, and i must say it is an alarmingly well-constructed skinner box

new michael brough rogue-like cinco paus in the app store. haven’t played it yet but imbroglio, 868-HACK and corrypt were flawless masterpieces so it’s an instant buy.

pic.twitter.com/tXKlQR0jkd

— Michael Brough (@smestorp) September 16, 2017

I’m digging that this game is purposefully in Portuguese, no English! Better than some fake language because I can make out some words, just not enough. This is how I imagine learning magic, tantalizing but beyond my immediate comprehension.

— Douglas Wilson (@doougle) December 25, 2017

Sproggiwood is sorta old by now but it’s been worth every penny so far

i am purchasing cinco paus right now, will report back later. but i'm sure it's great. i really loved both 864-HACK and Imbroglio

It's annoying the shit out of me right now but hopefully I'll get through it

age of rivals

cinco paus is annoying but more-ish. they let thing is to get through as many cycles as possible imo. i like the mystery.

find out what the paus do in the first zone. aim to get extras in tu second maybe third depending on health. race through four and five.

i’m shit at it and don’t fully understand the powers. fully understand at all.

I loved Imbroglio - would you go for Cinco Paus next, or is it 868 HACK better?

I really like cinco paus (it’s actually a love/hate kind of thing but I keep playing it, so that’s something) but 864-HACK is my favorite of his games.

rusty lake paradise came out this month. it's a step down from RL roots, which was the most ambitious and best game in the series. but if you like surreality and easy puzzles it's good enough.

Yeah, I agree - there was a free game in between, Cube Escape: The Cave, so going back to a larger game has been nice for me.

age of rivals is v good. mordy, have you tried the ios through the ages?

on the subject of czech games digital ports, galaxy truckers is tons of fun. a great conversion would've been enough but they put together a v good campaign mode too. highly recommended

it's called Through the Ages? i haven't. i'll check it out.

what's the general consensus of civ revolution 2? i know the release reviews were full of complaints, but it seems to have been updated to fill in some gaps and fix some bugs?

I’m never going to finish the tutorial of Through the Ages. Game seems fun, but here are so many things to remember.

the original board game version of Through the Ages is one of the bet i've ever played, and czech games generally does a really good job of translating them to iOS

I’ve played a lot of Civ Rev 2. I like it bc a game only takes a couple of hours. No serious bugs iirc

I hear it's more of a port of Civ Rev 1 than a new game.

gradually making progress through cinco paus - currently at a feeble looking best of 32 em 3 jogos.

i'm still playing as well. my best score was 55 em 4 jogos, but i got really lucky that time. i've only reached the third jogo a handful of times, and most of the time my attempts tend to end in the first couple zonas of the second jogo. the things that are probably most frustrating to new players - it's in portuguese, and all of the wands are imbued with 0 to 5 random abilities chosen from a pool of 50 possible abilities - are non-issues after playing for a couple hours. there are still a handful of abilities that are confusing to me, but now i can generally understand almost all of the others and try to use them with at least some strategic intent. i admire his commitment to the portuguese idea. it almost certainly decreased the sales for the game, and i would guess that quite a few people bought it on brough-reputation and then ditched it during the frustrating first hours of gameplay. but it is interesting to be forced to gradually learn what these abilities do through repetition and observation.

what's ALSO interesting (sorry for length) is that it's not really 50 abilities, but rather...back of the envelope calculation...50x49x48x47x46 = 254,251,200 possible ability wands! each wand has 5 abilities slots, and many of the abilities interact with each other (for example, one ability can cause an explosion at the end, another that can travel through walls, and you can have a wand with both abilities that will travel through walls and then explode). this leads to surprising discoveries. there's one ability that duplicates monsters, and it really sucks when you discover that misfortune in a tense moment. but that same ability can also be used to duplicate treasure chests and keys and the like, so once you know it's imbued onto a wand, you can use it to your advantage. etc etc, x 250 million possibilities.

my main beef with the game is that it is so committed to it's randomness that you end up getting screwed far too often with bad wands. there are some runthroughs that would be seemingly impossible given the crappy wands you're given, and the cold laws of probability mean that you could wind up with a "you're fucked!" scenario on one of the very first times you play the game, which must be demoralizing. with 868-HACK (my fav brough game i've played) it seemed like you would occasionally run into difficult scenarios like that, but with enough skill and experience it was possible to persevere. HACK was a bit more balanced that way, i think. The amped up randomness of CInco Paus introduces scenarios that are virtually impossible, but on the flipside it also leads to much more variability and even more replayability.

8.2

enjoyed that, thanks karl. agreed on the randomness sometimes just sticking it to you (tho the fact it seems to stick it to me v early in the second jogos suggests i may just need to learn a bit more).

brough order of favourites:
imbroglio
corrypt
868-HACK
cinco paus
zaga 33 (which bears some relation to cinco paus - randomised effects)

destroy, that bad geometry wars rip.

but those top three can switch v easily. i keep find myself coming back to cinco paus despite its frustrations. it’s aesthetic - both the portuguese and the feel - are really appealing.

i still haven't played corrypt *ducks*

(tho the fact it seems to stick it to me v early in the second jogos suggests i may just need to learn a bit more).

this is also where i typically lose. i hate to suggest improvements to a brough game because i'm sure he's considered all this, but i think it would help if the requirement to get a powerup (the "gema" pickups) were reduced from 5 to 3 or even 2. i've only gotten 5 gemas ONCE, in all this time playing. getting through to the higher jogos seems like it would be easier if you had power-up to help, but by the time i lose i typically have only collected a couple only a couple gemas, if any.

i still haven't played corrypt *ducks*

that sounds cool! and unexpected (to me) because none of his other games i've played really have much of a narrative or story at all

yes, much more of a static dungeon + puzzles game. good, tough and laugh-out-loud when you solve them puzzles. then solving the puzzles takes you into a different dimension and you think “i shouldn’t have been so quick to feel triumphant, what have i done”

you need to break the game to beat it. idk i may be overdoing it (certainly gameplay isn’t better than the others) but i love the way it breaks form to tell story.

509 em 25 jogos

i may have accomplished nothing else in months but

Having also rage quit Fire Emblem Heroes on the basis of the initial downloads, I've drifted back to it and am gradually getting into the insane intricacy of it all. They're really pro-active with providing new content (almost to a dizzying degree at first) and although there are timed releases of energy, it's pretty much impossible to run it out when there's so much of it and refills are so easy to come by. Which means it's dangerously easy to never stop playing, ever.

Cinco Paus looks great...I'll definitely give that a try.

thomp, whoa. i've gotten up to 88 em 6 jogos and thought i had hit my limit. how did you do it, generally? i guess it's because as you keep going and gaining special abilities the game actually gets easier and easier?

i struggle to do 10 most of the time -- current one is 168 in 8

the enemies keep gaining abilities too, and the long game of that i think is probably its own source of randomness (though i was only up to, what, six enemy abilities when i was done) -- there were certainly points where i felt 'ahead' though. otoh i just started a new game and i'm pretty sure the portuguese for the new chicken ability says 'eats corpses in order to heal,' which is both metal and concerning.

i should admit i started letting myself look at viva fringe's ability list a few hours in -- https://vivafringe.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/cinco-paus-wand-ability-list/ -- and learning that four of the abilities were tied to hitting specific sides of the field really helped. the implication of this is that you can test for recharge, heal, powered-up attack even when you've got rid of the enemies, and you can test for 'turns corners' at the same time on most maps.

it helps to remember you don't have to kill anything -- perfectly valid to look at a level and just peace out. this is easier with some of the artifacts -- swapping places, particularly.

that first look at the level is pretty important, try and think a couple steps ahead and see if you have some wonky combo that will take everything out with minimal damage, even if it means a couple of shitty turns or taking a damage at the beginning. also stopping to think how to best use resources when you've dealt with the enemies. abuse recharge and identify if you have them.

and learning that four of the abilities were tied to hitting specific sides of the field really helped.

i had no idea! every once in a while i would use a wand and it would seem to fizzle out unexpectedly and i could never understand why! i will check out that link for sure.

Final Fantasy XV has a Pocket Edition coming out this Friday. Huh.

Not about iOS or even mobile games per se, but this article about publishers as key signals in an overcrowded market full of garbage makes a good, if obvious, point

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-03-05-boutique-publishers-are-the-future-of-indie-games-market

509 em 25 jogos

i didn't see this from earlier! i was getting ready to flaunt my 192 em 8 jogos :-|

Evoland 2 is pretty good. I’m even used to the touchscreen controls. Too much dialogue though.

Cartoon Network Match Land (itself a reskinned version for the developer's first game) is another Match-3 RPG, super polished and addictive. Definitely an iterative addition to the Marvel Puzzle Quest/Puzzle and Dragons genre, and way way better than the last time around CN tried this, I think with an Adventure Time game.

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle rules

glad to hear that's good, it looks fun

It's not super deep or anything but it's free and pretty charming

It is good fun and also reminds me of Hitman Go (in the tradition of Lara Croft Go), which is very turn based and bloodless.