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Old 11-14-2008, 01:28 AM   #734
MoriartyL
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Israel
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Oh, what the heck- I'm not going to really finish this game ever. It's way too hard for that.

Art Style: Rotohex (beat Solo mode, and could do it again)
Shockingly, this is even simpler than the last two Art Style games. There aren't any levels until you beat the game. (The levels are too brutally tough to present at the start.) You go in, you start playing from the beginning, you keep going until you win or lose. Very old-school. The gameplay is all rotating hexagons in order to make hexagons of one color, which makes it disappear. If you get a few of the specific color they're telling you to get, a new color is added in. (Oh, I should probably say this: if you're colorblind, don't even try. Sorry.)

What surprised me most is the music. It's brilliant. It's got this looping, minimalist thing going on, where each time you make the tiniest bit of progress another little bit is added into the loop. And when you get a new color, it starts over with a different simple tune without breaking the beat. So you get this escalating level of intensity, and then back to the start with a different tune.

Anyway. It took me a while to get the hang of it. It's totally abstract, in a way that reminds me of Rubik's Cubes. And yet it's actually really simple, so it's a matter of building habits, which takes time and is very rewarding. There's no tutorial, so I sort of figured out more and more rules as I went along. That was rewarding too. When I started out, the Solo mode seemed impossible. Now it seems almost easy.

The one thing that's missing, and this would have made a big difference, is motion controls. They give you the option of playing with either the pointer or the D-pad, and if you use the pointer it's confusing to remember which button is clockwise and which is counter-clockwise. I think actually twisting my wrist a tiny bit would be much more intuitive. Maybe they were worried about people hurting their hands after so much repetitive movement, but I would have liked the option. Or you know what they could have done? They could have mapped the rotating to the D-pad. That would have been more intuitive too. Look, it may seem like a nitpick. But rotating is literally all you do, the entire game. That it's not as intuitive as it should be is a problem.

Regardless, very fun and addictive. I can never get rotating hexagons out of my head now.
4/5
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