It's OK, I guess.

• "Minesweeper on steroids"
  
• All puzzles solvable with pure logic (no guessing)
  
• Infinite replay value due to procedurally-generated levels

This review is for the third game in the Hexcells trilogy: "Hexcells Infinite". The gameplay across the series is essentially the same (which is why the Curator links for the first two games also point here), but I'll cover the important differences between the three titles. In the interest of full disclosure, the "infinite replay value" bullet point above only applies if you have "Hexcells Infinite".

Let's just get the elephant in the room out of the way first; the parallels with Minesweeper are obvious. That said, calling this a "Minesweeper clone" is like calling a Lamborghini a "Honda Civic clone" because they're both cars. Even so, taking a Honda Civic around the block will still give you a decent idea of whether you like driving cars or not, so it's a starting point.

The Hexcells games will most appeal to people who like Minesweeper, but thought the game mechanics got a little bland and are irritated by the fact that some blind guesswork is almost always necessary on the harder boards. Here, you've got a wide variety of "cell types", but arguably more importantly: no guesswork ever.

That's not to say Hexcells isn't tough; the first game may lull you into a false sense of security, I'll admit, but by the time you're solving the latter puzzles of "Plus" or "Infinite" you'll realize that this is a Dark Souls[www.gamesradar.com] of cell-logic puzzling. I lost count of how many times I got stuck for minutes at a time, just staring at the screen looking for the next clue, finally seeing it, getting excited at the prospect of homesteading another swath of the game board...only to find that the logic train derailed after a single cell or two. But it's not just that it's hard, it's that -- it's hard to describe without playing the game, but it's a common theme in people's comments -- you can tell that the author did it on purpose. He knew you were going to be at that exact spot, thinking that exact thing, and he deliberately pulled the rug out. It's just something about the way the puzzles go: there's a devilish humor in some of the dead ends.

The first game ("Hexcells") definitely has the easiest of the "designed" levels, and introduces most of the game mechanics. It's a solid game on its own, and I would certainly recommend starting with it, but if you're only going to buy one of the three, skip it (but don't...buy the bundle).

The second game ("Hexcells Plus") features much harder "designed" levels (although they do start out pretty easy as well), and again I would certainly recommend playing it in sequence as part of the trilogy...but if you're only going to buy one, skip it (but don't...buy the bundle).

The third game ("Hexcells Infinite") has "designed" levels on par, difficulty-wise, with "Plus". If you're only going to buy one of the three, this is the no-brainer choice because in addition to the manually-designed levels, "Infinite" also has a randomized level generator (the pedants in the audience will point out that it's really just a set of 10,000,000 procedurally-generated levels, but...yeah). It's also the only one of the three to support user-created levels (the support is clearly a bolt-on in all its kludgy glory, but bless its heart it does work and kudos to the developer who went back in and added it in an update at the community's request).

The generated levels aren't nearly as hard as the lovingly-crafted "main campaign" levels, but they're difficult enough to give you a bit of a think and personally I like the fact that I can chew through them a few minutes at a time with a lot of action-packed, exciting clicks and right-clicks. I've even encountered a few that had "gotchas" that almost looked deliberate.

As a last parting shot, just in case there are any of you out there who are thinking "I liked Minesweeper's gameplay perfectly fine thank you very much...but yes, the forced guesswork was annoying", check out Simon Tatham's "mines" implementation[www.chiark.greenend.org.uk]. In my opinion it's not nearly as much fun as Hexcells (sorry Simon!) but it does scratch that specific itch.

• Bejeweled 3
  
• English Country Tune
  
• Everyday Genius: SquareLogic
  
• hexceed
  
• KAMI
  
• Patterna
  
• Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection[www.chiark.greenend.org.uk]
  
• Sigils of Elohim
  
• Strata