If you’re a fan, there’s nothing here that’s going to shake the foundation of puzzle games in the future but if you’re looking for a quick puzzler to kill some time, Magic Flute does what it sets out to do. If you’re not a fan of sliding puzzles and find them the bane of all that is good in the world, stay far, far away.

Advance Wars fans looking for a fix could do much worse, as could anyone else looking for a game that balances the simple and the cerebral.

As bad as the user interface is—and it is completely horrible—I still can’t hate too much on XenoShyft. Much like those old VASSAL modules of mine, once you get over the learning curve and figure out how the UI works, it’s manageable and the game underneath isn’t hurt by it.

As negative as I’ve been about it, Arcane Magic isn’t far from being a pretty good game. Its card mechanics are an interesting idea, but there’s just nothing of substance underneath it.

The mechanics are occasionally a loose fit for the theme, but Rebuild 3 atmosphere and gameplay create compelling narratives of growth, progress and hope.

A strong sense of mystery, puzzles which are either inoffensively brief or intriguingly maddening, a considerate user interface, and a promise of future updates add up to a generally pleasing experience.

An approachable beer-and-pretzels wargame like this one needs to have an inviting user experience that makes it more rewarding to play in short sessions and less of a management chore.

Where Lara Croft GO surprised me was in improving on the Hitman GO formula I loved in a few crucial ways, without losing anything I liked about it other than the tabletop-style presentation and the Ave Maria.

It’s the very essence of what indie gaming is all about: this is no game made by committee, but one man’s utterly original and compelling vision brought to life.

Cyber Hacker is definitely worth a try if you’re into (fake) cyber security or lite-sim games, or if you just want the barista at your local coffee joint to think you’re toppling “the corps” on your tablet over a nice espresso.

Loot & Legends works hard to stay just on the right side of inoffensive. Both the battles and the deck-building offer enough options to give your mind something to chew on, but not so much as to cause anyone to choke.

Like its predecessor, this is a complex game with a lot of interesting ideas — but possibly a few ideas too many.

For all its pretension about history, Spirit of War is a disappointingly generic experience that could be set in any time period. Even on an App Store that’s chronically short of hex-based tactical games, it’s not particularly noteworthy.

Still, Sproggiwood is a clever, fast-paced RPG disguised by a tawdry facade. Is it particularly deep? No. Is there too much grind to it? Yes.

But Kindo is literally the only strategy game I’ve played which seems to me worth playing in a grocery store queue, and it delights me as an artifact which reflects its environment so insightfully.

Don’t Starve is unlike anything I’ve played before and I can’t stop myself from playing it. It’s frustrating as hell at times–finally getting farms built and then getting eating by roving hounds comes to mind–but I can’t turn it off.

It can be convincingly argued that Rodeo are the Blizzard of mobile gaming at this point — their commitment to polish and detail is like no other mobile-focused game dev studio going.

The app certainly doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay, and actually enhances it by making it easy to play and beautiful to look at.

Her Story is a unique experience. You’ve never played anything like this before, and might never get the chance to play anything like it again.

A breeze to control, exciting to play and to excessively replay, laden with tactical playgrounds.

The game has got a couple of UI glitches, a tendency to crash, and a prodigious appetite for battery power. More abstract concerns arise from the basic limitations of the genre — these micro-session games are too far diluted from the formulas of Dungeon Keeper and Sim Tower to have any real bite to them.

Infection is one of the good ones, a board game port that will live on my iPad for a long time, and one that has me excited to see what other board games HexWar might be bringing to the platform.

Buy it, gift it, skirmish it, campaign it; whatever happens, just enjoy it. Spacecom is nothing more than it needs to be, and it very much is.

You Must Build A Boat is such a rare combination of frenetic speed and methodical planning that its closest relative might be Dark Souls.

It’s a marvelous structure, easily allowing players to learn the game’s basics and discover whether the interface suits them better than it did me.

Atlantic Fleet retains the endlessly playable turn-based combat of its predecessor, but now it’s been fitted with a thoughtfully designed open-ended strategy game superstructure.

It’s basically grinding for 8+ hours with nothing to really show for it and, unlike its forebear, doesn’t even have the humor to hold your interest all the way through

MicRogue is a game where, even if you fail seven times in a row, chances are you’ll have failed each time on the eighth or ninth stages. Even when you’re losing it doesn’t feel like you’ve lost much at all.