Game Review – Hexothermic
For those of you who haven’t heard much of the phenomenon that is Xbox Community Games (and probably live in a cave), Community Games are games created by the public using XNA (Microsoft’s free game developing language) and submitted for peer review with the hope of being available for download on the 360 (for a small fee).
As with all things where the community is involved there’s alot of rubbish kicking around but the peer review process is designed to hopefully weed out alot of this and leave you with the cream of the crop. Thankfully it would seem it’s working (at least in part) with games such as Hexothermic by Epic Pasta (a 2 man team from the UK) getting through the process.
Ok, on to the review! Hexothermic is a puzzle game at heart and surprisingly simple for the amount of fun it can offer. When the game is loaded up you are presented with a hexagonal grid of atoms in various “states”. States are shown by a difference in colour, size and speed of animation and go from putple to red (with various colours inbetween). The aim of the game is to clear the grid of all atoms but giving each atom extra electrons. Each time you give an atom an electron it changes state and moves closer to the red end of colours and finally explodes, firing out electrons to it’s surrounding atoms changing each of their states. With this in mind you can set up chain reactions to help clear the grid in less moves and achieve a bigger bonus.
That may all sound rather complicated but trust me, once you’ve had a quick go you’ll find it as easy as falling into a canal after getting drunk in Amsterdam. That being said, there are some complications. you do have a limited number of electrons so use them carefully.
Right, most reviews give scores but here at Console Cuties we prefer to play things a little differently so we’ll give a roundup and let you make up your own minds.
The best things about this game is the music, simplicity of gameplay and cost (200 points). The graphics could still use a little work but the developers tell me they are working on these so expect a free update heading to all those people who have already purchased it.
If this is the standard of game we can expect from Community games we can;t wait until people get more familiar with XNA and can’t wait for the next installment from Epic Pasta!
