Hexius review

Hexius is a puzzle game with shape/color matching and smart layout chaining. There are explosions, time slowing, and multipliers of awesomeness! This game app is brought to you by Phasic Labs Ltd on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for $0.99 and free with the Lite version.

Hexius is a simple matching game that suddenly takes a change. You pick the same matching hexagons and any hexs between the two will be darkened. When you have selected all the available matching hexs, any darkened ones will explode and score you points. They are promptly replaced and you have the chance to run across x2 multipliers or bombs. The bombs will smash up a huge area to garner massive point increases.

The whole thing is presented in lovely bright colors and well done hexagonal shapes. The explosions are all visually interesting. I did have an issue with any of the green items however. The green colored shapes have a very light green color and it makes it incredibly difficult to separate from the yellow colored ones. I really wished that it was a darker color so that it wouldn’t be so close to the yellow, but maybe it’s just because I’m colorblind.

There are several ways to play this game. You have the Time Attack mode, where you fight against the time to gather the highest score possible. In Level Challenge, you try to advance as many levels as possible by destroying the entire screen of hexs . Finally, Strategy mode, where there is no time restraint but you have a limited amount of moves you can use to try to gather the highest score. Strategy mode is my favorite, but mostly because it takes a long time to tell which hex is green and which one is yellow.

The game play is excellent. The bomb hexes are a joy to set off in a large chain and the multipliers are satisfying like crazy. This is a great game with a great simple system but if I had anything to mention, it would be for the Openfeint login. I tried several times, but each time would result in a white screen that locked the screen, forcing me to exit the app. This issue is mentioned on the AppStore and Phasic Labs is working on fixing it, so hopefully that will no longer be an issue after version 1.3.0 at the time of this review.

Hexius is still a great game so definitely pick it up if you are a puzzle gamer with a craving for a unique game style. The graphics are really well done and the challenge of the gameplay can help you lose track of time and get really engaged to the tactical puzzle explosions. Great game overall, just really wish for a color-blind mode or just a darkening of the green color and I’ll play this even more.

Here is a video demo of the Hexius app on the iPhone

AppSafari Rating: 5/5

AppSafari review of Hexius was written by Joseph Ho on August 27th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Featured, Games, Puzzler. Page viewed 7893 times, 3 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.