Hectic Hexic

Every piece of hardware you buy usually comes bloated with random programs, and most of that junk is left to rot in a corner. The Xbox 360 is no exception, although the bloatware is considerably less...bloaty.

Ever feel the repetitiveness of Skyrim and Battlefield 3 starting to set in? Me neither, (it doesn't exist :P) But anyways, I felt like playing something new, but being too lazy to reach over to open a different video game case. I leafed through my games library. Every Xbox comes standard with a few starter games, but mine only came with Hexic HD, which was only played when the Xbox box was opened 3 years ago.

Courtesy of IGN

So, feeling what could only be nostalgia, I gave into playing Hexic again...

Apparently leaderboards are supposed to be competitive...unfortunately since an actual game-on-disk is usually bought bundled with Xbox's those are what's played, leaving Hexic gathering dust in the Xbox live arcade library. Proof of this comes with the fact that only four of 30 of the people on my friends list have any score whatsoever on the Hexic leaderboards, requiring absolutely no effort at all to beat them. So, there goes a replay value.

My main problem with Hexic, other than the lack of competitiveness, lies within its repetitiveness. In case YOU are one of those people (and believe me, there's LOTS) who's never even realized that your Xbox came with a free game on the hard drive, Hexic is basically a reskin-copy of bejewelled, and in case you've never played that either, it basically boils down to "Match the colors to make triangles of the same colors."

Over. And. Over.

Despite having three game modes, I'm not really feeling the differences presented with each different mode. It's all just a bunch of circley-rotatey things, and it doesn't stray far from that at all. It's definitely a good concept, it just needs to be made more...exciting. Occasionally, bombs will  pop up, requiring the player to use it in a combo within the set number of moves displayed on the bombs. Those who just want to see the explosion will be greatly disappointed; a greater amount of excitement can be found just by kicking Styrofoam. The detonation from the bomb just leaves a small hole where it was, sadly without anything resembling an explosion.

I feel that the developers were trying to go for simplicity, but games like this should stay with platforms such as Androids and Iphones; this kind of game shouldn't be what the powerful hardware on the Xbox be used for.

Besides...

Why play with triangles...

When you have Skyrim?