Super Hexagon has been out for a little while in the Play Store, and it's just as insanely difficult now as part of the Humble Bundle 5 as it was when it was released. The retro arcade styling and accompanying soundtrack keep you sucked into this game for hours, and we're completely fine with that. For some reason we enjoy playing a game that feels impossible to get a high score on.
This is the same Super Hexagon many of us know and love, but if you haven't yet seen it stick around after the break and see what it's all about.
There are no settings to speak of here, and the controls are simple as well. The only thing you can do when launching Super Hexagon is tap to play, select your level -- the lowest level being "hard", menacingly -- and you're into the game. It's a classic "survival" arcade game, where you're controlling a small triangle in the middle of the screen and dodging the incoming barriers. The barriers come in from the outside edges of the screen, and you navigate your triangle around in circles by tapping on the bottom left or bottom right of the screen.
Barriers come in at a pretty quick pace, and in different positions, sizes and configurations to try and throw you off. It will likely take you several tries just to get over 5 seconds of gameplay, which can certainly seem discouraging. But that's the entire goal of Super Hexagon -- to be extremely difficult. Because of the simplicity of the game, you'll find yourself starting, dying and starting over again (which takes just one tap) time after time for hours on end. Even on the easiest mode you'll likely struggle to reach 30 seconds or 1 minute as a high score. There are some crazy folks out there that have gone longer, but we're not sure if they're even human.
The rotating soundtrack of a few different 8-bit arcade soundtracks keeps you in the game as well, with a quick beat that keeps you on your toes (err, fingertips?) round after round. The overall design of Super Hexagon is crazy simple, but that's certainly done on purpose and it works well for these types of games. Adding extra settings and controls would detract from the purpose of the game -- it's already difficult, don't give us any configuration options.
Super Hexagon has been available on the Play Store for some time now at $2.99 outright, but we're covering it again now that it is part of the Humble Bundle 5. Alongside Dungeon Defenders: Second Wave and a few other titles, Super Hexagon is "unlocked" if you donate over the average to the bundle. At the time of writing the average is at $6.67, which is a killer deal considering you'll receive nine complete games for the price. Over the last few days we've been reviewing each of the titles in this Humble Bundle, and we'll be covering the last few in the coming days as well.
