Note: ZHANG LIDONG, the developer and publisher, kindly provided me with a copy of this game through Curator Connect. The nature of this being made available to me for free will not influence my direct analysis of this game or the primary content of the review.
Jingor Mine is quite simply Minesweeper, the game of deducing where "mines" are hidden on a minefield grid based on exposed tiles that show a number representing the adjacent number of mines. For example if you see the number "1" on a tile, and that tile has only one adjacent, uncovered tile, you know for sure that's a mine, so don't click on it! Deduce where all the mines are and click on all the "clear" tiles, and you win the level.
The twist here is that instead of a simple, flat, 2 dimensional quadrilateral, the game surface is a cube, with each side of the cube laid out flat. You must think in three dimensions to determine if an adjacent mine could be on a different face of the cube. To assist with this, you can change how the 3D view is projected onto a 2D plane through the "Change Shape" button. This can help you spot which tiles are adjacent, because there's no true 3D rendered view of the cube available in the game. A glaring shortcoming.
It's a novel twist on an old premise, but there's some problems here that make this something I can't honestly recommend to PC gamers. For starters, this is written in Adobe Flash... and Flash is a deprecated, unsupported product. Support for Flash as a web platform ended in 2020. It's now 2022. Flash is insecure and should be avoided in all circumstances, as it's superseded by newer technologies such as HTML5. Installing and using this game may pose a security risk due to unpatched vulnerabilties in the product.
It should go without saying that Flash, designed to allow interactive multimedia to be presented through a web browser, is not the right engine to use when making a video game targetted towards the bulk of enthusiast PC gamers who make up the majority of the Steam ecosystem. We're used to Unreal, Frostbite, Id Tech, all kinds of bleeding edge engines, so something from the 1990's isn't going to cut the mustard. The game resolution is locked and can't be changed, and while there's a fullscreen mode, it's pillarboxed, and doesn't take advantage of the widescreen displays in use by gamers today. The interface is clunky... even in MineSweeper.exe, you can tag a mine with right click. Here, you have to click the "Mode" button so you can left click to place flags, then click "Mode" again to go back to clearing mines. Why did the interface for Minesweeper need to be made more deficient? It doesn't!
Overall the delivery here, and shallow depth of gameplay, work together to drop this below acceptable standards for PC. This is, after all, Minesweeper with a twist, and you can play Minesweeper for free in a web browser or through Minesweeper.exe, bundled for so many years with Windows to teach people how to use a mouse. Charging money for a copy of Minesweeper, even with some variation in it, isn't really acceptable.
I will now deviate from my fairly rigid rules about reviews, where I take on the role of a consumer and write reviews exclusively for other consumers. Because this has been provided through Curator Connect, and having curated over 2,000 games, and reviewed over 6,500 games on Steam, I have some idea about what makes a game great and where games could do better, and so I'll provide the following general suggestions:
2D is dead. Roughly 99.9% of 2D games are shovelware garbage and don't fluke out and "go viral" despite their shortcomings (examples include Hollow Knight, Slay The Spire, Super Meat Boy, Cuphead and so on). And while those games are "saved" by excellent and deep gameplay to make up for the poor technical execution, even those games would be better if they had proper graphics. 3D accelerators became mainstream back in the 1990s. Pretending they don't exist is a shortcut to failure. This game would be a lot better if it was presented in 3D, or at least augmented by a 3D cube (which is what we're really looking at, albeit in an exploded 2D plan, because of the limitations of Flash).
Also, most importantly, this isn't a PC game. It's a browser-Flash game. It might even do well if published as a browser game on the web. But where I feel this could succeed is if the interface were cleaned up and fixed, made finger-friendly, and published on mobile app stores, where it would find a more appropriate audience, and will certainly make much more money for the developer.
