Hexic HD is a single-player puzzle game that comes installed on the Xbox 360's hard drive when you buy/win/obtain the $399 system (at least in its current incarnation). Unlike the other Live Arcade games being made available in the Marketplace so far, you don't need to spend any Microsoft points to get the full version as it's fully unlocked from the get-go.
Features include Xbox Live-enabled leaderboards, and game modes such as Marathon, Timed, and Survival. Ambient music ebbs and recedes in a mostly acceptable ways, though the total volume can swing quite a bit from soft to loud if you're trying to hit that late-night volume sweet spot at home.
Hexic looks like your typical puzzle game from its shiny and brightly colored panels, but the way you play it is mainly by rotating trios of hexagons around central axes in a hexagonal grid to strategically remove clusters of tiles from the board. As the official Microsoft site for the game says, you must use "bonus pieces and starflowers to boost your score and discover new ways to play. But watch out for bombs--clear them before they explode or it's game over."
The bombs with the countdown timers really are a pain as they end your game if you don�t take care of them virtually right away (especially in Marathon and Timed modes), but they can also be used to your advantage to wipe out every other tile sharing the same color on the board at the time. Survival mode, on the other hand, seems possible to continue playing into perpetuity. Odd balance there, but at least there�s something for people who want to take their own time in determining their moves.
The game has a fairly deep level of gameplay for a puzzle game; not that it�s easy or altogether necessary to plan your cascading combos ahead of time, but the more complex moves are fairly difficult to pull off (such as actually creating a black pearl from a ring of starflowers, which were also created from rings of the same-colored tiles). The radial rotation takes some getting used to after merely swapping tiles horizontally or vertically as in the most popular games in the past. In a way, it recalls the rotation of blocks in Tetris, but a different dynamic is in play here.
Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov has been toiling away at Microsoft for years to create a new hit puzzle game to challenge the likes of his original addiction-forming puzzler, but that type of break-out success will likely elude him once again. His latest MS project, Hexic, is a fun game, once you get the hang of it, but its oddly innovative nature may pose too high of a learning curve for gamers without a drive to figure it out. After playing the different modes on every difficulty level for several hours, I can say that your appreciation of the gameplay may only grow to an adequate level after about an hour or so of acclimating yourself to its idiosyncracies, when the the direction of the different rotational buttons begins to become second nature. There may not be a puzzle mode or quest to liven your next play session, but the game does have a sort of elemental appeal if you give it a chance.
With any puzzle game where you�re swapping (or, in this case, spinning) multi-colored sets on a playing field, the inevitable comparisons will be made to genre kings like Tetris, Puzzle Fighter, Puyo Puyo, and even the panel-swapping titles like Bejeweled (and Panel de Pon-derived games such as Tetris Attack and Pokemon Puzzle League/Challenge). It may not play exactly like any of its forebears, but the influences are pretty obvious in its Bejeweled-like hints when you�re stuck and its various color-clearing mechanisms. Thankfully, the gameplay is solid and free of serious defects, freeing you to ponder its exotic flavors. Just be warned that Hexic�s definitely an acquired taste.
Bottom line: the game�s fun, but it takes time to actually enjoy it. Remember to give it some time and not write it off right away if you want to sample its Zen-like goodness.
Overall Score: 8.0/10
