Troisix review - "A colourful if slightly vague puzzler"

Mobile puzzlers are a varied bunch, but there's one attribute that most if not all of the best examples share.

They all have strong, easy-to-grasp core mechanics.

Troisix is a colourful, enjoyable link-forming puzzler in its own right, but it falls down with a lingering sense of vagueness.

You have a hexagonal grid and a bunch of a hexagon-shaped playing pieces to slot into it. Those pieces aren't of uniform colour, but have variously coloured segments.

When slotting them in, you must ensure that each of these coloured sides touches a like-coloured side, with at least two matching sides required for starters.

So far so straight forward. Troisix plays with this system from the off, with challenges that involve filling the grid or getting rid of all your pieces within a strict time limit.

Even here, though, Troisix gets a bit woolly. In the levels where you need to keep going until you've filled the grid, it doesn't feel like there's a great deal of strategy to play, as you can't really see which tiles are going to appear in reserve several moves ahead.

You can back up if things don't pan out perfectly, but this feels like a fudge to get around an imperfect system.

Things get even woollier with the introduction of Troisix's main gimmick - an 'ogre'. This blobby parasite swirls around one of the hexagons, and seems to flit around according to its own whims.

I never really managed to get a clear understanding on this blobby nemesis or how exactly it transmits itself around. Perhaps I simply missed something obvious, but I started the game afresh on a new device and still came up a little stumped.

The very fact that I went through this process suggests to me that the mechanic hasn't been made clear enough - or perhaps isn't defined enough in the first place.

Whatever the truth of it, Troisix suffers from an infestation of randomness and vagueness that the better mobile puzzlers simply don't. It's fun, but doesn't have that razor-sharp focus that we yearn for.