Mighty Dungeons bills itself as a cross between old-school board games like Hero Quest and Warhammer Quests and videogames like Diablo and Dungeon Master, but the truth is that it's a fairly straightforward roguelike. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and as roguelikes go it's certainly gussied up in its Friday finest, but I think it's important to establish what we're really looking at here: a top-down dungeon crawler with simple, repetitive gameplay.
Gamer nostalgia: a force to be reckoned with. It's encouraged ports, remakes, and replays of an untold number of games we simply refuse to forget. It's brought pixelated graphics back into mainstream acceptance over a decade after they became dated. And now gamer nostalgia has become its own gameplay mechanic, thanks to Evoland.
In what is a sentence that I'm about to have taken wildly out of context from this point onwards, the "match-3" sub-genre shares a key similarity with the works of William Shakespeare. That being: it's at the focal point of people's obsession with "reinvention." In the same way you'd be hard pressed to go watch a performance of Hamlet today without hearing about the bold choice to set it in a dystopian future or the wild west, each new jewel, orb, or color-matching release comes complete with a twist.
After an impressive roster of fun and critically acclaimed adventure games like Deponia and Edna & Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes, Daedalic Entertainment has gone off the grid into dark and uncharted territory for the developer's first non-adventure game: a gritty turn-based fantasy RPG. In Blackguards, you are not the hero. In fact, if you even want to succeed in the game, you'll need to constantly tread on the path of evil, and balance the lives of others in your hands as they stand between you and your ultimate goal.
Behold Studios already took us on one great geeky trip down memory lane, and the developers are getting ready to do it again. Knights of Pen & Paper: +1 Edition will recreate and expand upon the mobile homage to traditional RPGs and eight-bit graphics for a wider range of platforms thanks to publisher Paradox Interactive. And if you understand what the "+1" means without further explanation, you're probably perfect for this game.
Divine warriors fighting the good fight against an endless horde of demons is a fairly typical subject for video games, but I can't think of many examples involving dice games. And yet that's exactly what Hell Quest is: a dice game against the demonic hordes. The weird thing is it's a surprisingly cool dice game against demonic hordes, even despite luck playing a bit too big a part in success.
If you've been searching for the next great action-adventure game to play on your mobile device, then look no further, because Magicka is here. Taking everything that made the PC Magicka titles so great and refining them further, the best way that I can describe Magicka: Wizards of the Square Tablet is that it plays like a mobile touchscreen version of games like Castle Crashers; and yes, it's as amazing as it sounds.
With Nimble Quest, NimbleBit had nothing to prove, but a lot to gain. Earlier releases Pocket Frogs, Tiny Tower, and Pocket Planes had cemented the indie trio as masters of time management, and a studio to watch. That their next title would be a quality release was almost a foregone conclusion. And yet, from the earliest leaks to the most recent footage, this game stuck out as the biggest departure yet from the company's tried-and-true compulsion loop. A chance to show that NimbleBit wasn't a one-genre wonder. A chance I'm very glad they took.