What IOS games have you been playing?

Steamworld Heist looks slick; I'll have to see if I can get over my hatred of all thing steampunk.

Turns out I am still playing Clash Royale. The main ladders suck and are pay-to-win. But they added a tournament mode that caps cards at medium levels to even the playing field. And they keep adding small batches of new cards every couple months, and make balance adjustments every month, to keep the meta fresh.

Really Bad Chess is free and fun. It has a fairly mediocre AI, but gives random setups of pieces. Like you might have three queens and six bishops (but always one king and sixteen pieces total). Every time you beat the AI, you go up in level, and the higher your level, the better pieces the AI gets relative to yours.

I'm not sure it qualifies as steampunk, it's more like wacky-cartoonish. I thought I would hate the art direction, but strangely I did not.
It definitely has a style of its own, not a drab-fest or knock-off. But the world itself and the story is... just wacky and thankfully very skippable.

The shooting effects are REALLY well-done, and weighty, so it is kind of uncanny and cool seeing these cartoonish robots blow each other to bits with weaponry that feels maybe even more realistic than that of Xcom. And it gets pretty tough and demanding, too. The missions are quick, tense and the levels are procedurally generated.

I am liking it more and more. My complaints are the lack of permadeath and not enough depth outside the tactical level. You lose money if you fail (at least on veteran) and gain less reputation for every blown-up bot, but I would have loved it if it went all-Xcom. It is perfect for ipad - I don;t think I'd bother with it on PC or console.

I've never understood the appeal of clicker games. You click on stuff to watch the numbers go up? Lame. However, hearing some positive stuff about Crazy Taxi Gazillionaire prompted me to download it to see what these things are all about. I downloaded it on Wednesday morning and I immediately became addicted to it. I spent WAY more time paying attention to, and thinking about, this thing than I ever should have. Luckily for me, by Thursday night, I was over it. The numbers had gotten so large that they became meaningless, which removed any fun or motivation for me to try to make those numbers even higher. It was a good two days, but time to get back to my picross app. Those 30x30 puzzles aren't going to solve themselves.

dysjunct wrote:
Really Bad Chess is free and fun. It has a fairly mediocre AI, but gives random setups of pieces. Like you might have three queens and six bishops (but always one king and sixteen pieces total). Every time you beat the AI, you go up in level, and the higher your level, the better pieces the AI gets relative to yours.

I gave up around level 65-70. Dont think I am that good at chess, could never be arsed with the rote learning and look ahead calculating. Seemed like the way the pieces are setup just lead to nonsensical positions with all the front pieces basically able to wade straight into the other side, and having nowhere to hide if you want to strategise.
Isnt Chess960 (Fischer Chess that one isnt it?) supposed to be a well regarded way to do the "random setup" idea

Waterdeep was released on Android recently. I was sitting in my car last night charging my phone (power is out from the storm) and decided to try it out on my tablet. It's a really nicely done app. I jumped straight into playing the game without going through the tutorial, as I'm familiar with the board game. Just about everything in the UI is really well done, and intuitive. Available spaces will glow subtly, when a quest becomes valid for completion it will highlight, etc.

The game itself is, well, Waterdeep, but I was really impressed with the implementation.

Darkest Dungeon dropped last week. It's awesome of course, although I played the hell out of it on OSX so my iOS forays are more curiosity.

I gave up Clash Royal finally. Fuck that business model, it is toxic.

War Wings. It ha a pay model, but you can still have a good time without paying money for elite planes. well worth the install.

Card Quest came out for Android and iOS this week and has been incredibly enjoyable. Despite the generic name there's a really fun card game/dungeon crawler with a fair bit of meat on the bones. A word of warning the "tutorials" are really more like a challenges/puzzles to get you to truly understand the mechanics involved. Not much teaching goes on in those.

I picked up Ascension and all the expansions on iOS. No regrets. A very enjoyable game.