Minestrife

Cool concept, cool modes, good achievement implementation. Bad execution. Press is on mouse button release not click, so you get awkward presses everywhere and end up miss-clicking if you try to go to fast. Same issue with Chording, for some reason the dev decided to not let you control input for this, the default input is simultaneous left+right click, again on key release, still feels bad. No clue what the compass, red nugget, and question mark do, and you cant lock the window in place so you accidentally drag it a lot. Finally the game starts to lag the more flags I put down, not sure what's causing this, AMD Ryzen 5800X, GTX 2080 should be able to run minesweeper lol. Game just feels awful to play. The concept seems really cool, so I would consider coming back to it for the rest if these issues are fixed.

[b]edit:[/b] the game got patched quite a bit, so rewrote the review and turned it into a recommendation. [b]minestrife[/b] is a souped-up version of the original minesweeper. figure out where the mines are based on number clues, right click to mark as dangerous or potentially dangerous, left click to reveal. there's a timer (can't hide it) and a bomb counter, as expected, plus the following [b]quality of life improvements[/b]: rebindable controls, zoom in/out and right click to move bigger levels around, hotkeys to open the 4 corners, unlimited hints (pressing it over a square reveals its contents, bomb or nothing), and there's a compass, pointing to unrevealed and unflagged tiles, which can be handy on bigger boards. [b]multi-mine tiles[/b] are also a thing. you can mark them with flag hotkeys, keep the mouse button pressed to mark more than one mine per tile, or use the mouse wheel while pressing right click to select the desired number. there's also a variety of difficulty levels, [b]endless survival mode[/b] where time is of the essence (rows keep disappearing at the bottom, you lose health if there are any unmarked bombs when it happens), and you can [b]customize your own board[/b] as well. size, mine density, mines per tiles, health, survival or not, donut or not (these wrap around, very confusing), etc. [b]board size can be whatever, but display is capped at 100x50 for performance reasons.[/b] zoom and pan to see the rest, arrows on the sides show if there's more level in any direction. only music, no sound effects, the volume slider comes up by holding the audio button, and the game can be made full screen(ish) or resized to whatever size you prefer. I still don't think the price is justified for improving basic minesweeper, which is offered for free with an operating system and all over the internet, but [b]after some extensive patching everything seems to work well[/b], it also runs on win7, despite the win10 requirement on the store page, so might be worth checking out on sale if you're into sweeping mines.

This game is not designed for speed plays by any means thanks to the extremely awkward controls (LMB+RMB chording with no other options, as well as release revealing the tile your mouse is currently on), as well as no balancing against 50/50's. How on God's green Earth do you f++k up Minesweeper THIS bad???

A fun little Minesweeper version with some extra modes available. Pros are that it's lightweight plus has multimine and 'clear the falling line' modes. Cons are a faulty screen rescaling, obtuse multimine flagging with mouse controls, and [strike]a lack of middle click ('smart select') The dev probably thought it wouldn't work with the multimine mode since flags are arbitrary. [/strike] almost a year later I've found out chording is left+right click. At only a buck during sales I'd say it's a nice step up over the minesweeper that used to come with your computer