5/10 A puzzle/board game where you need to connect 2 sides of the board before the opponent does - except that the board is donut-shaped and tiles can get connected across border edges like the original 1980s PacMan game.
Good:
- the concept is interesting. It's also quite satisfying to see (once you understand it) how you can shift the view of the field and see that indeed, in this donut world the view doesn't influence the actual position
- music is okay
So-so:
- the tutorial is doing a fairly good job explaining the concept. There are 3 tutorials actually, each going deeper. They are relatively easy follow
- the problem with the main concept though is that it challenges not as much your logic but your visual perception. The main difficulty is in seeing which tiles are actually connected across the edges. In this, a human has a huge disadvantage vs the AI. I tried playing vs the AI about a dozen times on the 5x5 field. In some cases I won easily. In a few the AI won and I couldn't track the line since it was crossing the edges 2-3 times, sometimes even through the corners. I see other negative reviews complaining about the AI cheating or the game being bugged - that's exactly it. A human eye is good at seeing flat fills. But connecting mentally those jumps across the edges is just too unusual a task for the brain. So, I guess this is a subtle thing where this game fails. It challenges a wrong thing. People like when games are easy to understand but hard to master. Like, it's easy to see chess pieces on the board but it's hard to master to think many turns ahead. But here it's hard to understand even the basic element - are tiles connected across edges or not. Yes, there are semi-transparent "helper" hexes showing that but it still stops being helpful once there are many colored hexes on the board already or the board is larger (e.g. 9x9). I suppose one can improve play by constantly moving the view around. But it's not something a player would want to do. Because one would have to do this before every turn, and it's just too cumbersome. Maybe if the board were 3D? And the whole thing looked like a sphere? Then it would be natural to rotate it. But this flat projection just doesn't fee natural
Bad:
- well, awful UI, obviously. Huge fonts (default Arial font of Unity, with default white dialogs). Font is huge, and the size of text actually varies across different buttons and labels. This makes an impression that the dev is lazy or even disrespects players :) On the other hand, it's a free game. Was it designed for phones? I mean, the huge buttons...
Nice idea but I'm not sure it can be saved. Maybe a "Hex game on a spherical field"? Not sure the hex tiles would connect properly there.. Giving a thumbs up since there is no neutral vote available.
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