Minefield Hex: Minesweeper for Beginners
Written: Oct 04 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: decent interface, good learning curve, achievements, 99 cents, OpenFeint integration
Cons: easier than minesweeper, very luck based on harder levels, gets old after a while
The Bottom Line: A pretty neat game for the right price.
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| kjell1979's Full Review: Minefield Hex for iPhone |
I'm a big fan of minesweeper. My dad used to play that game all the time when it first appeared on windows installations over a decade ago. I eventually got into it and it took me years before getting bored with it. Still, I return to playing it every once in a while. So when I saw Minefield Hex free on the iTunes apps store recently, I decided to pick it up and give it a try. It's no longer free, but the promotion was kind of nice.
Gameplay
Minefield Hex is your typical Minesweeper variant. The basic idea is you pick tiles and if it has a mine, the game is over. If it doesn't it shows a number of how many mines are around that tile. If there are zero mines, it opens up all the adjacent tiles for you. The biggest difference is Minefield Hex uses hexagonal tiles instead of the square ones used in Minesweeper. What this means is instead of 8 possible tiles that could have mines, you have 6. In practice, this makes the game much easier given the same concentration of mines.
The goal of Minefield Hex is to clear the minefield in the fastest time possible. It records your best times for each type of board. The boards have 4 different sizes, small, medium, large, and huge. The mine concentration ranges from easy to medium to hard. Each of the 12 concentrations has a different achievement attached to it worth a set amount of points. So once you complete a minefield no matter how long it takes you get the achievement.
Minefield Hex has OpenFeint integration. This enables online chat, leader boards, and announcements to be communicated while playing the game. It's like a stripped down Xbox Live Silver account without the hardware integration. It's a nice feature to have.
Overall this game is a decent puzzle game, but it lacks the difficulty and strategy you'd get with minesweeper. The problem is there are only six possible adjacent mine locations which makes more concentrated minefields more of a guessing game due to the limited information. This makes for a more frustrating experience because you're really taking guesses as to where the mines are as opposed to minesweeper where it isn't as much of a problem.
Controls
The controls are rather simple. The touch screen allows you to select tiles and reveals the value underneath. There's a toggle switch that allows you to mark unselected tiles with flags to signify there are mines there. This is useful in that it prevents you from accidentally selecting the tile by a slip of the finger as well as planning out how many mines are left. The controls are fairly responsive, though the setup of a toggle switch for the flag doesn't lend you to rip off some fast times. The controls, specifically when using the flag toggle can take a while to get used to. I haven't yet completely gotten the hang of it yet.
Graphics
The graphics are pretty decent. The tiles are clearly marked in blue and they're big enough such that if you have fat fingers like me you can select tiles easily without missing one too often. There isn't much in the way of presentation. The screen turns to this weird orange color when you select a mine and the numbers are all colored differently so you can get a good feel for where the adjacent mines are at a glance. Overall the graphics are good. They do not do anything special, but it's not needed in a game like this.
Sound
There isn't much in the way of sound. You get clicking noises and no speech. When you select a mine, there's a weird explosion noise that spooks me. There's no music to speak of, which would have been a nice addition too. Overall the audio experience is really sub-par.
Replay Value
Sadly, there isn't much replay value with this game. Beating your best time is what drives the replay value. Sadly, the controls get in the way of that really being a satisfying experience. There are also achievements that make it worth striving for, but on the hardest levels, it's more an exercise of luck than actual skill. There's a lot of 50/50 tile choosing when you have so many mines condensed into a small area.
Overall, unless you're looking for a good Minesweeper variant, this game isn't really worth your time. The price is no longer free, but even if still was, wouldn't you want to spend your time playing a more enjoyable game?
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
kjell1979
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Location: Oxford, Mass
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