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15 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 11.2 hrs on record (10.6 hrs at review time)
Posted: 12 Sep, 2016 @ 5:57pm

I feel bad not recommending this game, but it really cranked the difficulty past the point of being fun for me.

Many levels have "bottlenecks" where there are only one or two moves you can deduce as being risk-free, and these sections feel deliberately, artificially hard. The signal-to-noise ratio is such that you feel like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.

I feel no shame in stating that I had to consult a guide (which had so many pictures that it frequently crashed the Steam browser) just to know which column or blue hex I should focus on to deduce my next move - there's no option to save your progress and resume later, and real-world obligations meant that being stuck for tens of minutes on a single move would mean the difference between finishing the level or starting over from the beginning the next day.

Even then, it took me 11 hours(!) to complete Hexcells Plus, versus just 2 hours for Hexcells. And that says it all, really. I had fun, overall, with Hexcells Plus, but it felt too tedious too often for me to recommend it in good conscience.
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4 Comments
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Perfice 6 Oct, 2016 @ 5:59pm 
Yeah I thought some parts you literally had to guess. I'm going through trying to beat every level without guessing and at max 1 mistake for the perfect achievement. I spend sometimes 30 minutes or more on one puzzle which sucks with no save option.
constantcompile 6 Oct, 2016 @ 5:44pm 
Yeah, I mentioned in my review that I feel no shame about having to consult a guide for some of the bottlenecks. Needing to look for a needle in a haystack combined with the lack of a save and quit option sometimes necessitated using a guide.
Perfice 6 Oct, 2016 @ 11:24am 
I've actually read up on on forums about it that say there is no point in the game where you have to guess. Then I tried some of the more difficult levels and took my time to figure them out without guessing. It looks like it's correct you don't have to guess at all, the clues to figure out the puzzles are just very subtle and far more difficult than the original Hexcells.
Perfice 5 Oct, 2016 @ 11:16am 
I have to agree. I'm 3 hours in and I'm almost finished but I feel like they made it too dependent on random guessing. On almost every level there is too many moves where (maybe it was just me) but I looked at a set of hexes from all sides and just could not figure out which one was the blue hex. Eventually it just came to me finishing the level and memorizing where some of the blue hexes are just so I have enough to go off of the next time to finish the level on perfect.

On the first one there was a few I had to guess on but once I got them wrong I looked around and saw what I missed that would have shown which hex was correct. On this one I feel like on just about every level there isn't enough information to go off of and it just turns into a memory game. Especially with the new inclusion of ? hexes... Why do I have to guess on a puzzle game? Aren't puzzle games suppose to give you the information to solve them without guessing?