Review: Mine Sweeper
Score:
80%
You know the game, it's a perennial, it's always challenging and a great time-waster (in the good sense). Mine Sweeper, in this implementation, offers a choice of three grid sizes, an intuitive interface, sound effects, atmospheric graphics and... a ticking clock - can you beat your best time? Not bad value for a quid, I reckon!
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At its core, Mine Sweeper stays faithful to the game you all know and love (from the days of Windows 3.1). There are three grid sizes (9x9, 16x16 and 16x30), each of which are filled with a smattering of randomly positioned mines. As usual, you only get told how many mines are next to each square, so it becomes a rather excellent logic game working out where the mines might be, by deduction.
From the excellent Wikipedia page:
"The game is played by revealing squares of the grid, typically by clicking them with a mouse. If a square containing a mine is revealed, the player loses the game. Otherwise, a digit is revealed in the square, indicating the number of adjacent squares (typically, out of the possible eight) that contain mines. In typical implementations, if this number is zero then the square appears blank, and the surrounding squares are automatically also revealed. By using logic, the player can in many instances use this information to deduce that certain other squares are mine-free, in which case they may be safely revealed, or mine-filled, in which they can be marked as such (which, in typical implementations, is effected by right-clicking the square and indicated by a flag graphic).
There are various subtleties here. One is the time counter itself, adding a certain pressure and stress level. Next, there's a '?' mode, where you can flag a square as possibly containing a mine, as an aide de memoire to help your future logic. (Whether placing a flag or a '?', the mechanism is the same - you tap the bottom of screen icon and then the grid position, a system that you quite quickly get used to.) When there are no mines near your chosen square, the surrounding squares are 'auto-cleared', always a helpful time saver in this genre.
Next, the whole grid can be scrolled around, to enable you to get to squares on a larger grid that aren't visible at the start. This is a sensible design decision by the developers as it means the square sizes can be kept quite large and 'finger-friendly'.
Game navigation is faultless, the sound effects are tastefully restrained (with a suitable explosion at the end if you fail) and this is almost a perfect implementation of the game. And written in Qt, as you perhaps might have guessed, so it's effectively Symbian^3/Anna-only, plus a handful of S60 5th Edition phones which have nice large internal disks.
Mine Sweeper, as a game in general, is one of a class of games which offer infinite gameplay. Never mind platform, puzzle and adventure games which can be solved once and then never quite enjoyed as much afterwards, 'random' set up games like this offer a logic challenge which is always subtly different - so you can come back to the title week after week. Add in the 'can I beat my previous high score?' effect and Mine Sweeper is a definite keeper on modern Symbian smartphones.
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 24 July 2011
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at