Hands on with mobile Minesweeper
Tip-toeing across an ever tempting virtual no man's land
Minesweeper capitalizes on the popularity of the free Windows game, bringing it to mobile with a fresh look and tweaked gameplay.
If you've never had the pleasure, at its most basic the game has you marking the location of mines on a rectangular field. Tapping a square on the minefield activates it, which either detonates a hidden mine or clears the empty space. Numbered squares inform you of how many mines are in the vicinity. A '1,' for example, tells you that there's one mine situated in the eight spaces surrounding that single square.
Reading the numerals and using deductive logic enables you to figure out which spaces are empty and which house a mine.
The game differs on mobile thanks to a new isometric perspective. You control a character that moves about the minefield via the directional pad. Accessing squares means moving your avatar on the board. When you've reasoned that a square contains a mine, the left soft key lets you plant a flag. You can also hit the 'OK' key to open a space if you're confident it's free of mines.
The controls currently feel a bit awkward, mainly because of the isometric view. There is no absolute up, down, left, and right since the field sits at an angle. As such, pressing up doesn't always move your character up on the board. This, along with having to move an avatar on the board instead of just clicking with a mouse, gives the game a far more slower pace.
Two modes are offered: a single-player Career and Free Play option. Career presents you with a series of minefields to work through. Stages are timed, so you need to work quickly and efficiently. Clear one location and you open another – simple enough. Each field takes on a theme related to its locale; for instance, you'll compete in a Tokyo-based level and travel to Texas and London, amongst others. Finishing a stage also rewards you with money that can be spent on special items, such as armour to protect against a mine blast or a detector that warns you of any embedded explosives.
Free Play, meanwhile, enables you to play through any of the levels you've unlocked in Career, which is exactly what we did in our demonstration. In addition to solo Free Play, the game supports hotseat multiplayer for two. Each minesweeper takes a turn and passes the handset over, until a winner is crowned. Online matches would be preferable, but at least there's some multiplayer functionality.
As long the controls receive some fine tuning, Minesweeper has the potential to dominate our free time. On PC it still proves a distraction from writing when we're at our desks, so having it on mobile could introduce serious productivity-sapping issues when it launches in the US this spring.
