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

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.

Oddmar is a good platformer, once you get used to the controls. Great level design.

i might give it a shot! it looks great. is it difficult?

Not terribly so, yet. I’m only 5 stages in. The jumping is gesture based seems very forgiving at this point though. And plentiful check points.

Gurk III is almost completely satisfying my need for more lowlander in my life. It's pretty funny how that and pocket planes (a cheap, stupid way to teach yourself geography trivia, imo) have completely distracted me from FFXV Pocket Edition, which is a buggy fucking mess and I should leave a shitty review for, now I think about it.

Minesweeper Classic. Still good.

i finished a 50-game run in Cinco Paus AND finally escaped a character in imbroglio. also i think I have rsi now

Pocket run pool. Not great, but the high stakes mode is satisfying.

I am LOVING 868-Hack. It costs $5 but it's very smart and complex but the rounds are short enough where you can like play it for a few minutes at a time. A+ very recommend.

868-HACK is sooooo good. it's funny that we're all kind of trained to balk at a $5 iphone game, but i've spent more time playing it than the typical $60 AAA game. Even more true with Cinco Paus. i have no way to track the hours but i'd guess i've played at least 100 hours by now

What are other games like this that are kinda simple but require an almost chess-like level of thoughtfulness and strategy? like playing a round of this is so much more fulfilling than like Temple Run or even Drop7

i wish i knew of more! really the only ones that engage me on that level are the brough games - they've accounted for >90% of my iphone gaming over the last couple years, easily. i also appreciate that this dude has a blog, he speaks candidly about his process, the financial lack of success, the pressures he feels, the things he's struggling with in game design: http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/

I am 100% fine with paying up front money for a game that's not engineered to, like con me into spending more or isn't very challenging. I'd prefer it, even.

i have no way to track the hours but i'd guess i've played at least 100 hours by now

http://osxdaily.com/2017/06/15/see-how-much-time-ios-apps-used/

^cursed link

i always forget that you can track it now, at least for the most recent 1-day and 7-day periods. i've played cinco paus around 3 hours in the last 7 days, and i've been consistently playing it at least that much since it was released in christmas 2017, so i'd guess my 100-hour estimate is about right.

What are other games like this that are kinda simple but require an almost chess-like level of thoughtfulness and strategy?
Parks Seasons

It starts simple and you can't skip the easy levels. However, the bigger grids which require 2 trees per row, column, and colored section are super fun and logical.

Just started but Card Quest seems fun.

…Holedown

I went home last weekend to see my niblings, and they are always keen to play games on my phone - Monument Valley was a big hit, except you can only give it or its sequel to one of them at a time. Anyway, the App Store had a special on gentle puzzle games so I got:

_Prism: this looks lovely and 3-d, but it's a pretty cover for a game of moving switches to get points to line up - it's not very long, it looks lovely, but the hit detection of the non-massive iPhone is not quite up to the bits where you're trying to get three fingers on the screen at once.

Push - tap the buttons on the screen in the right order, sometimes using other switches to rotate or switch the 3-d surfaces that the buttons are on - it all looks very clean, and the buttons seem weirdly tactile - it's a good game if you've got 10 minutes and would like to feel smart for solving something.

_-_ - get all the horizontal lines roughly in the centre, sometimes when you pull up on this line, those lines move up or down by other coefficients... I haven't played enough with it to see if there's much more to it than that.

LVL - you move solid shapes of colour on the sides of a cube, trying to completely block out the light in each of the three faces. Each cube is effectively (again, as far as I got) three separate games where you're working both opposite faces, but you can't overlap the shapes on any given side - there's some "okay that has to go here so I have to move this there first" even once you figure out what each side has to be.

Vignettes - this is good but a little fiddly - you can rotate an over-saturated object around in the centre of the screen - sometimes when the silhouette matches another object there'll be a slight tug and it changes - so you might turn a bowl so that the white circle of the inside entirely faces you, but when you turn it some more, it's now a lightbulb viewed from the top. The problem is that this is both fiddly and temperamental.

Flower - this is the PS3 game! You fly around being a petal and flying through other flowers to gather more petals and it's really really really not very high tension. It looks lovely though.

.projekt - literally no-one involved in this game doesn't have at least two 'k's in their name. It's a simple 3-d builder, you place/remove blocks in a 5x5x5 grid to match silhouettes on two axes. After a while you get a point for the minimum vs the maximum number of blocks, and past another while there's a picross version - 80 stages, the time passes well.

Rubek - I know there's a canonical version of this type of puzzler around - you roll a cube around a cell-y surface, sometimes you have to pick up something on one face and then deposit it elsewhere.

Slayaway Camp is free on ios and android this week. It's great.

Subwords is my new thing to do after the crossword puzzle. Might not last long, though, unless I get within striking distance of the leaderboards on classic mode

So like... a bunch of my older games don't work on the current iOS, as happens every year.
But since they killed iTunes app backup/management, if i delete it off the phone, it's gone forever unless I can redownload it from the App Store, right?
I have a ton of these games I've just been deleting over the last few years that I carried from phone to phone. Alas, Gravity Hook, looks like you're gone forever.

Endless Archery for Desert Golfing fans.

Picked this up recently and am enjoying it:

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/13/13262994/really-bad-chess-zach-gage-iphone-ipad

I just want to say I'm very disappointed Trainyard never got updated to work with later iOS versions.

Donut County isn't doing much for me but Florence is good.

pocket city is a good handheld version of sim city 2000

hard disagree on that one

pocket city made me angry

pocket city was ehhhhhh

(I did break my brain playing too much sim city 2000 as a kid so ymmv)

dowd mentioned Night of the Full Moon on another thread recently so I gave it a shot. it's really fun! what is the genre...CCG/rogue/rpg, sort of? it's $1, although you can pay more to unlock additional character classes. it's one of the rare games that has voice acting that is actually good, especially on iOS. it actually even made me LOL, the first time a game has done that in forever (a pumpkin head enemy said something like "how would you know what it feels like to be in the cutting baaaawrd?!" in a ridiculous accent - hard to explain but it was good).

I like Alphabear 2 a lot but despise the insane amount of ads. Even if you buy it there’s still the “TV Time” bonus for watching 3 ads every four hours...

New Michael Brough game P1 Select for those who like these things. (I do). Sounds like he hasn'tried (or had the time) to do anything new, but is happy with that.

Thank you! I will always check out his games

I need new rpg for iphone 11

Dungeons of Chaos look good.