Review: Mine-Fields
Score:
40%
Version Reviewed: 1.03
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Mine-Fields is a really good example of a modern smartphone game, for all the right and wrong reasons. You'll have noticed the appallingly low score, but in truth this has little to do with the gameplay. As you'll see from the screenshots, this is Minesweeper, all dolled up, with nice digital sound effects, five skill levels (board sizes) and, unusually, three grid styles. Playing with hexagons or triangles subtly changes how you play and think and is a useful innovation.
Everything's beautifully presented, as you can see, so why on earth is it such a low scoring and 'not recommended' game?
Well, like a number of recent games ported to Symbian from other platforms, absolutely no attempt has been made whatsoever to allow for the fact that it's now running under a multi-tasking operating system on a phone. So, for example, I try and switch back to SMan, to see how much RAM Mine-Fields is using (a whopping 4MB, as I found out using some serious hacking). No joy, all the system keys are locked out. I try closing the P900 flip - normal flip operations and menus are all frozen out. With the game running full-screen, I tried calling my device. Not a thing. No ringing tone, no beeping, no visual indication that a call was coming in.
This sort of game is acceptable under a Palm OS PDA, which is single-tasking. And probably on a Pocket PC such as an iPaq. But it's completely unacceptable on a modern smartphone and all other developers of similar titles should take note. Huge numbers of new users to Symbian OS are already having problems getting their heads around multi-tasking and managing their memory. To have a newly installed game like this grab most of their RAM and not let anything else run at all, not even basic telephony, is quite appalling. Again, Game Zone Project, I'm not picking on you, Mine-Fields is symptomatic of many titles I've seen recently and this one was simply the last straw.
Phew. Glad to have got all that off my chest!
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at