I remember seeing ads for this while playing other mobile games over the past year or two. I've just about sworn off these f2p games for good following my hellish 10-11 months playing WWE SuperCard. Most of them end up being painfully grind-heavy, monotonous timesinks where the only reward is an intangible (and fleeting) sense of accomplishment. If I ever return to one for a brief spell, it'll probably be something like Clash Royale, where the battles were at least fun and engaging. Otherwise, it's back to my good old PC games!

Yeah. I still dabble in Wordscapes, but fortunately I'm running out of space on my phone to download any other games. That should keep me safe for a while. ;)

I forgot to add, that not only is it over the top with the cash shop bit, it's also at least moderately ad-heavy. If it were one or the other it would be fine, but you have to watch a bare minimum 6-7 ads a day just to keep the productivity buff up, and more for various other bonuses the game is designed for you to need to progress at any half-decent pace.

I should probably give up on idles entirely, but for some reason they're my siren on the rocks.

Welp, I'm done with Alien Nations. No matter what I tried, I just couldn't beat one of those missions where you need to completely destroy your opponent. Many of the previous missions were beatable since you were only required to destroy a building or two, but here, wiping out an entire nation is a whole other ballpark. As far as I can tell, the AI is not handicapped by the game's rigid economic mechanics like the player is, so it can freely train dozens upon dozens upon DOZENS of soldiers and hunters. Once they have an army of that size, I honestly think they're unbeatable. You cannot outproduce them militarily, so it's only a matter of time before they declare war and lay waste to your cities. As I said, nothing I tried worked. I even tried luring their soldiers away and throwing saboteurs at the enemy HQ, but that building has way too many hit points. I'm sure there might be some strategy out there for beating this mission, but I've already given up on this game. It's difficult for all the wrong reasons, and unlike those insane reviewers on the game's store page, I cannot overlook its plethora of obvious flaws.

Oxenfree

I guess I just don't enjoy Point and Click/only story games.

Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus. Addictive at first until you get sick and tired of masses of story, stupid 'runes rooms' with decisions that make no sense and most of the time will hurt you anyway. Long-winded, dull and repetitive.

God's Trigger. Fun top-down shooter with the most infuriating 'make one mistake and replay the whole section over and over again' mechanic I have seen since Dark Souls 2.

Grimm. Quite funny at first and with reasonable graphics but, Jesus Christ, this is the most samey game I have ever played in my life. It's literally the exact same thing from section to section for dozens of levels.

Killer 7.Only gives me stupid console buttons to press so that even in the tutorial I have no idea what I'm doing.

Last Knight. How I love replaying the same section console-newbie style over and over again. Pity, charming game with nice graphics.

Slime Rancher

It's a lot of fun, but it runs too poorly on my laptop. It's the kind of game I don't think you can really enjoy unless it's butter smooth on high graphics. That is, with enclosures full of smooth slimes hopping about cheerfully, as opposed to jagged slimes moving around jerkily at sub 20fps.
I'll keep it in my backlog for when I have a decent gaming rig again.

Actually there is some variation in season 2. Some levels are more like platformers, some are more puzzle-like (a bit..). And it's not about making everything "dark" in all levels (but variations of that).
But it's definitely not a game to binge-play. One episode once in a while is pretty fun though, because of the silly humour.

Thunderscape, dropped in 4th level out of 21 (or 22, hear there is secret level of some sort but can't find details).

I wanted to play some first person RPG, or "blobblers" as some people describe it.
I played my share of mediocre or underrated games, flawed to various degrees RPGs (like Wizards&Warriors which was amazing, beat it recently solo - 1 character with a lot of fun) but that still not prepared me to deal with that game.

Game looks like mud - various degrees of grey and brown. That wouldn't be a problem if the corridors and maps weren't so indifferent - you wander around for long time and get lost all the time.
Game is clunky - there were times when enemies were facing me, yet combat could not be initiated until we dance around for a while (meanwhile a new bunch of enemies respawns and its coming at your position). Sometimes they start combat through the walls, maybe they were stuck inside? Or some holes in the wall? I dunno.

Speaking about the map - it's nearly useless. There are some buttons to set various things but it does not solve main issue - it's hard to read anything. I played various RPGs where maps was not that perfect (Thief 1/2, Ultima Underworld, Morrowind etc.) but this is terrible.
Most maps have more than one floor to explore and just like Morrowind - it does not show the player position in these points, where 2+ floors plans cross together in one point.

Funny - in a bitter way - this situation feel, It's like I have less and less patience the older I've become. Shouldn't be the opposite?

Neverwinter nights 2: Mask of the betrayer.

Quit it fairly early...I was already annoyed by the combat in the barrows, then got to Mulsantir and died several times in the fight against the red wizard and his gnolls there...meh, can't be bothered trying to win this, especially since I've read that there's tons of tough high-level combat in this game. Epic D&D is pretty lame anyway, not interested in its combat. Would have been interested in the story which supposedly is really good and Planescape Torment-like, but the unfun combat kills it for me.
Most of the Neverwinter nights 2 content really doesn't seem to be that great...the official campaign seems to be totally boring, with lots of trash combat (only played it until the bandit camp, then lost interest), Storm of Zehir has atrociously bad writing (stopped right in the first town because of that), and Mask of the betrayer didn't really captivate me either. Mabye I should give those games more of a chance, but I don't have the patience for such time investment anymore. I did have fun with Mysteries of Westgate though, which I completed and which reminded me in a good way of Baldur's Gate 2, so I guess buying NWN2 wasn't a total loss.

Ys I: Just when the story and characters were starting to grow on me, I get fed to the single most bullshit excuse of a boss I've ever had the displeasure of dying repeatedly to. Whoever came up with it has a soul blacker than his cloak.

Codename Panzers - Phase One

beat the German campaign and lost all interest for that game
there is also russian and American one but don't feel like playing it anytime soon

Running With Rifles

There is no tutorial and nothing which tells you what to do.
After taking a few points on the map some of the formerly conquered points were retaken by enemy forces and the level just didn't end, so I left it.
I really have no idea how to manage to get a map to end.
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Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon

It's a very nice game where you catch and eat insects in an old mansion and solve a mystery on the side, but and that's a very big BUT:
Firstly, the game tracks your real life day/nighttime and moon phase via IP tracking, you get asked whether you want that feature or not and can change it later, if you deactivate it, the game just chooses a time zone itself, I guess but it doesn't change much.
Every map has four versions with different insects and leader boards: Clear day, rainy day, clear night, rainy night.
In order to really finish the game and see the last levels, you have to solve all the mysteries, which in itself isn't anything new, in order to solve one of the mysteries you have to wait for it to be a rainy night and for another one you need to wait for a friggin certain moon phase (of which there are many, I think 7 or 8), which means I've gotten as far as I could now and would have to wait for a rainy night to solve the one mystery and then a few weeks in order to be able to solve the last mystery (the wings of a statuette will only open up during that particular moon phase at night) and there is no way I will do that. No way in hell!
I haven't found any cheat or hack to manipulate this and I won't change my system time, instead I just deleted it, because screw that.
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Immortal Redneck

First the good things: Performance of the Linux port is top notch, my system is 10 years old, but it ran perfectly on above medium settings.

Now the bad things: Everything else.

I was 10 hours in, have upgraded most things to about half and still barely managed to beat the first phase of the first pyramid's boss before running out of ammo and health.
And this is only the first of three pyramids...
It says that most scrolls have a positive effect, I have a very different experience. It's raining curses.
I wanted to see at least more than 30% of the game before giving up, but I've had it. I really don't want to do those levels again for days before being able to see anything else.
This game needs too much grind and is too much dependent on pure luck, I made way more progress in Rogue Legacy in that amount of time.
Also: Unlike in most other rogue-likes, it's not that you enter a room, all the enemies pop up and you have to get out alive, but here the enemies pop up one by one in intervals, usually right behind you or besides you when you're with the back on the wall fighting off the already existing hordes.
What a waste of time

Albert and Otto - not fan of setting sheeps on fire.

Disciples 3 - Reincarnation

Played about 3 hours after grabbing it on a massive discount.

As a huge, huuge fan of Disciples 2 I thought that, surely, it can't be that bad. It's not bad as it turns out, not at all, but unfortunately it just pales in comparison to D2.
D2 had a lot going for it, which for me at least was mostly its atmosphere as created by its art direction, music and fascinating lore. Unfortunately, in comparison to D2 it falls flat or completely flat on all those fronts. The art direction is still kind of there, with the city screen and several unit models at least looking awesome, but things like unit portraits, load screens and battleground backgrounds are a massive downgrade from D2. Not to mention the world itself which unfortunately can't hold a candle to the highly detailed 2D counterpart of D2. But worst of all is the music. D2's music is, in a word, haunting, whereas D3's music just comes across as generic fantasy tunes. Eg.
Menu theme from Disciples 2 and from Disciples 3.

Mechanics wise the biggest difference (among several others) is that they made the combat more complex with hex grids, which I'm not sure was a good idea. One problem at least is that the AI is pretty stupid compared to something like HoMM3's hex denizens.
I also really don't like that the campaign hero is fixed. In D2 you could pick any one of 3 to fit your playstyle, and I simply don't like the weak hero they gave me for the empire campaign. He probably gets strong, but starting off being weaker than a squire is a bit weird.

I think I'll have more fun replaying D2 again instead. Or perhaps check out HoMM5/6 for a 3D fantasy TBS

New thread for 2020: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_quit_in_2020