GamesRadar+ Verdict
Pros
- +
Escalating
- +
rewarding strategy
- +
Trippy
- +
hypnotic music
- +
Comes free with the hard drive
Cons
- -
No multiplayer
- -
True mastery is very difficult
- -
The inevitable Hexic nightmares
Why you can trust GamesRadar+
When the man who created Tetris comes up with a new idea, it's worth hearing. When that idea turns out to be a puzzle game that rivals his claim to fame, well, that's worth even more. Ironic, then, that the incredibly valuable Hexic HD is yours free.
The game that came preloaded on your Xbox 360 hard drive as a thank-you from Microsoft looks simple enough: a field of multicolored, jewel-toned hexagons, each rotatable with two of its neighbors. Shuffle them around until three colors match, and poof, all three disappear. But the more you play, the more Hexic reveals and rewards. Soon you're creating more complicated shapes, defusing game-threatening bombs, wiping out entire swathes of jewels in one clever combo, incorporating new colors of hexagons and earning special pieces like silver stars and black pearls. With those special pieces come novel ways of rotating the other jewels they border, and suddenly high-scoring opportunities - including ones for disaster - lurk everywhere on the board. It sure looked easy at the start.
More info
Genre | Family |
Description | Utterly addictive and unusually deep, Hexic HD sits proudly alongside puzzle classics like Tetris and Lumines. |
Platform | "Xbox 360" |
US censor rating | "Everyone" |
UK censor rating | "" |
Release date | 1 January 1970 (US), 1 January 1970 (UK) |
In a year of brutal layoffs and closures, Helldivers 2 gave its studio the "financial stability to keep going" and "keep making the games that we want"
"New regions" are coming in The Witcher 4, though the map size will be "more or less the same" as the last RPG in the series
Filming on One Piece season 2 has reportedly wrapped, which gives us our best clue yet as to when it'll land on Netflix