Hex Two is a challenging puzzle game that has the player clearing a board of hexagons by jumping between them. The game has plenty of content and some neat accessibility features, but does devolve into a mess of trial and error.
Pros:
Amount of content. Despite the game’s minimalistic appearance, it is actually quite a challenging puzzle game. There are only 80 levels, but those 80 can last hours, especially the bonus levels (which are much, much harder than the regular ones). Throughout the game, a number of different hex types are introduced that make the puzzles more intricate, even overwhelming at times. The puzzles progressively get more difficult by including more of these hex types. Even so, I found myself getting stumped on some of the earlier puzzles, so there is definitely no shortage of content in that regard.
Accessibility features. Hex Two provides a couple features that greatly help in the accessibility department. One of which is a color assist feature, for those that have trouble telling apart the different colors. This feature adds symbols onto the hexagons to tell them apart, rather than just differentiating them via color. I am not colorblind, but I found this feature to be incredibly helpful regardless. Another helpful feature being the option to enable a grid, so as to easily see how the different hexagons line up with each other. So not only are these features useful to the average player, they also serve to make the game more accessible. That is definitely something I respect
Cons:
Overwhelming variety of hex types. While I may have praised the game’s challenging puzzles, it can actually be quite overwhelming at times. The game introduces so many different hex types (a total of 19 across the game’s 80 levels) that it feels like trial and error becomes a necessity. After a certain point, it is simply not feasible to try to plan out how to play through each puzzle, rather, it is much more effective to just randomly click through until a workable pattern is discovered. I am not the biggest fan of how the game devolved into this, but with the variety of tile mechanics, it was bound to happen.
Limited clicking speed. A rather minor complaint, but I found it a bit annoying how the game limited how fast I could play it, especially since I was constantly starting puzzles over from the beginning. After figuring out a possible solution, I would work my way down a pattern, trying different moves later on down the pattern to see if they worked out. As such, I would constantly be restarting and going through the same pattern over and over up until a certain point, but the act of jumping from tile to tile slows down how fast I can do so. A jump must be completed before another can be done and there is no queuing them up. I wish this behavior was configurable (in the form of a checkbox for “instantaneous jumps”) so that I could play the game as fast as I wanted.
The game may devolve into a mess of trial and error later on, but it is still a decent puzzle game overall. The difficult nature of the puzzles results in a lot of playtime and the accessibility features are nice to have as well. I do recommend the game, but do not let the minimalistic look fool you, the game is very challenging.
You can buy Hex Two on Steam here.
I was provided a free review copy of the game in order to write this review. Read more about how I do my game reviews here.
cublikefoot 