Mini-Reviews Part 2

The Codex of Alchemical Engineering - I didn't get into this game too much, but the premise is simple enough, there is a respawning area with these round "element" balls, and you place robotic arms and special elemental modifiers around this map, and program the robotic arms to act in such a way that the goal for the level is met. It's part of this sort of "programming" type of games where you plan the route completely ahead of time, and watch the results. These can arguably be traced back at least as far as "Stack-Up" for the NES. There's another game of this sort featured on Kongregate some time ago called light-Bot but featuring a robot which must be programmed to turn on every square by standing on it.

Epic War 2 - This is one of those games where you wait for the timer to allow you to, and then spawn your units to defeat the enemy, spend xp to get new units and so on. This has some nice features, a manually controlled tower you can use to fire arrows directly at units, and an upgrade system. I didn't like the upgrade system however, since it unlocks upgrades you then have to buy during gameplay on each level to enable them, instead of direct improvements. This game has a mana system similar to gemcraft, in that you can spend mana to increase the amount of mana you can hold (and thus buy more expensive things) which also increases the speed at which you get mana, so you basically spam it just about as long as you can put off buying anything, then assemble an army all at once.

Bonus:

Vector Runner - This isn't on the Facebook list afaik, but I've been playing this a bit as well. I stumbled back onto this the other day, and have been trying to get the impossible challenge. The game premise is quite simple, you are moving inexorably forward, and have to dodge objects while picking up point bonuses, invincibility powerups and "shields" (a type of extra life capped at 3.) There are some points given just for staying alive, but so few that it doesn't end up really contributing to your score. The game is done with some type of basic perspective graphics using outlines of shapes, probably the most interesting aspect of the game is the control, which seems to use a type of acceleration system for movement, which makes the handling feel kind of loose, especially at higher speeds - which is most of the time.