Dungeon Deathball

I remember picking up Dungeon Deathball because it looked like a polished minimalistic tactical turn-based roguelike. You control two characters on a small grid (roughly 4x9 tiles large), with the goal of getting the ball over the finish line. Obstructing your path are obstacles, traps, and enemies. They will kill you in one hit and take far too long to kill on your own, but they're also incredibly predictable and slow. Push them into traps, each other's attacks, or just run past them. Depending on how many turns you took, how many gems you collected, and whether you carried or threw the ball over the finish line, you'll get a score. Upgrade your players with minor stat upgrades between levels, beat 12 levels, and you win.

Honestly, while the game is indeed well-polished, it isn't ambitious enough and lacks variety. There is little customization, little metaprogress, and too little room to really do much. It feels like once you kind of figure out how to go about clearing a level, you can just repeat that idea over and over. I found less than 2 hours of fun here, and even that was the mediocre kind of fun that was just learning how the game worked.

Overall, I can't recommend it on the account of it being too short. Not that the game literally ends too soon, but you run out of fun variety far too soon. It's a fine game, but it could have used a bigger board, more units, more customization, and more of most everything. This really feels more of a minigame than an actual game.

Dragon Cliff

I saw Dragon Cliff as a potentially interesting incremental idle game. It's a game about making teams of adventurers, sending them out to kill enemies, and then upgrading them with the resources they bring back. It promises deep and complex itemization and endless character builds. The reality isn't quite that good.

There are 25 different characters, each with a basic attack and an active ability. The active abilities use the same energy pool, so you either use some situationally, never use them at all, or whatever the AI wants to do when idling. The combat is otherwise all automatic, so you just collect the resources it produces and distribute them into building up your town and making better equipment for the characters.
For a game without any flashy visuals or interactive gameplay, I would have expected more content, given that all effort went into that. And what is there is rather boring.
A notable problem is that the game was originally in Chinese. The translation leaves the effects of certain items unclear, and the UI hasn't been adjusted, making some text and UI elements overlap, hiding important information.

What Dragon Cliff does is essentially copy what mobile games have been doing for over a decade, except mobile games have gotten a whole lot better at it over that time. You could argue that those mobile games are ridden with microtransactions, and this allows you to escape them for a one-time fee. But I'd say you get more for free these days than you get after paying for this. Even if you didn't, I wouldn't say that what's here is worth the money.

Overall, feels like a copy of an old mobile game with a botched localization. There isn't that much content nor variety, and building up your characters didn't really feel fun. Of course, nothing else did either, because everything else is automated and meant to be running in the background. Overall, there are many better incremental idle games out there, whether you're looking for paid ones that don't timekeep your progress super heavily, or free ones with a mobile monetization systems, so I can't recommend this one.

Eastern Exorcist

Eastern Exorcist is a side-scrolling action RPG from China. It's... pretty standard, actually. It really just has the basic stuff you find in such a game - movement, jumping, double jumping, regular and charged attacks, a block, a parry, a dodge, and associated counter-attacks. There is also some extra focus put on a timing system, where attacking at just the right time during some actions unleashes an extra powerful attack. There's some level-up system and extra abilities you can unlock, but it doesn't seem to really change how you play.

The game felt quite bad for several reasons. The art doesn't look that good in motion, and either the translation is bad, the story is boring and not very coherent, or a bit of both. Maybe I'm biased, but it's only voiced in Chinese, and I can't take that language seriously.
On the more important gameplay side though, the combat isn't just kind of bland, it's also rather badly designed. I think there's a reason the trailer only shows 3 second clips of combat, because spamming your attacks any longer causes you to run out of stamina, unable to react to the enemy. I have nothing against games incentivizing gameplay where you can't just button mash to win, but the enemies act so rarely here, that if it weren't for your stamina running out, you could get a lot more hits in. So for a considerable duration of the fight, you're just having a staring contest with the enemy, waiting, which really makes the combat feel bad. A lot of the enemy design is also made in a way that forces you to use special attacks instead of spamming, because your normal attacks just do literally no damage. This seems like a lazy bandaid to cover up poorly designed enemies.

Overall, a game with little variety, little innovation, and unappealing execution in pretty much all aspects. There's so many better games in even just this genre, I really don't see a reason to recommend playing this.

Beecarbonize

I played Beecarbonize on a whim, because I was looking through my backlog, and it was short and free. (And I needed another review to write, because I just got a job and lost a lot of hours per day to play games.)
Apparently it's funded by the European Union in an effort to raise awareness for climate change. Seeing that well over a hundred thousand people played it, perhaps a worthwhile investment. I do like that it doesn't actually carry a strong political message, but takes quite a few creative liberties to make a more balanced and enjoyable game.

It's a strategy puzzle game where you collect money, people, and science while trying to avoid carbon emissions and climate disasters. You invest your resources as you see fit into 4 different branches of development, each with their own specialty. Get far enough in a development branch, and you win the game by solving the climate problem in one way or another. The main problem is that it's short, as could be expected from a free game, but also that it's mostly deterministic. Events are random, to a degree, and very few cards produce random cards, but for the most part, if you do the same actions, you will get the same result. This heavily hinders replayability once you've unlocked all the cards, as you can basically guess how the game will play out without actually playing it.
Perhaps hardcore mode would be more balanced and reliant on how events go, but I didn't care to try it.

Overall, worth the low price of free, and could provide some entertainment anywhere from an hour to 8 hours. I wouldn't say it's a good game, as I found little strategy behind my decisions, but it does make you think at least a bit, and other than its simplicity, it's well made.

Horizon's Gate

Horizon's Gate is a open world turn-based RPG. You build up a fleet of ships, a crew, and commence in naval trading, naval warfare, dungeon exploration, or even advancing the main storyline if you're tired of doing your own thing.
There is a lot of content and systems in the game. Different battle systems for sea and land. A system for trading, building up smaller towns. And mainly the land combat, with about 40 different classes, each with their own passive and active abilities and weapons (or magic) they specialize in.

The problem is that, despite there actually being a lot of content - the game is easily over 40 hours long - this comes from there being a lot of different systems, and these systems don't influence each other very much. Instead of one solid 50 hour game, there are three barebones 10 hour games and one almost decent 20 hour game. Basically everything that is not the land combat is quite basic, and yet the land combat is the one that they seem to let you do the least.
But even then, the classes have the problem of being very disjoint. They form a network of dependencies where you have to train a combination of earlier classes to unlock a later class. This is fine at the start, but as the game goes on and you want to play an advanced class, you have to play a complete beginner class that does something completely different than the class you're trying to get to, just so you could unlock it. Switching away from a class makes you lose all the abilities you gained from it, sort of starting from zero each time. In that sense, it's not very exciting, and the later classes, while powerful, don't really feel like a culmination of all the progress you've made, nor do they have a whole lot of abilities to use.

Honestly, it's an impressive game in the sense of how many different things you can do, but for every single part of the game, I would rather play some other game that does that thing better. They have falled into the age-old trap of trying to do too many things and succeeding in none. If you are the type of person to like open-world RPGs with an emphasis on freedom instead of any specific gameplay feature, then this could be a good game. There are definitely a lot of people who like it. But I prefer more focused experiences, so I can't really recommend it.